The alignment of technology and marketing is a new way to show the value of your product to your prospects, which is why automated marketing is the new foundation of marketing.
If a well-established company’s marketing team has not already turned to using an automation tool, then they would be a rare breed. According to Hubspot, about 67% of marketing leaders use a marketing automation platform. The number of companies who use this software are growing by the day because of its versatility in email marketing and content marketing.
From automating the lead qualification process to creating a hub for digital campaign creation, automation is all about simplifying in a business world that is growing far too complex, much too quickly.
What is marketing automation?
It’s impossible to email each individual prospect on your own—but automation makes email marketing possible. Marketing automation allows you to implement a digital marketing strategy without having to manually press “send” on each and every email, message, campaign, or post you create.
The right automation tools help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on schedules and customer behavior.
An automated marketing strategy can save time and resources, drive revenue and ROI while you focus on growing your business. Once your campaign rolls out, you can focus on other tasks, then analyze and tweak your marketing plan as results start coming in.
Types of marketing automation
With a seemingly endless supply of automation tools on the market, there are opportunities to make almost every aspect of your marketing strategy more efficient.
Some of the most common forms of marketing automation include:
- Email marketing automation
- Website process automation
- Social media marketing automation
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The benefits of B2B marketing automation
1. Save time
Once automations are set up, they run on their own. You only need to do continual maintenance and updating to ensure that everything is optimized.
2. Generate & nurture qualified leads
You might not have the time to personally nurture each lead your business receives, but you will certainly have more time available to you for this process if you choose to qualify your leads automatically through lead scoring. With an automated process of assessing prospects and assigning them a score based on certain qualifying actions, you can focus more of your efforts on nurturing leads and fine-tuning this process while it is running.
3. Strengthen sales & marketing partnerships
The creation of a great lead qualification process, automation of the hand-off of marketing-qualified lead (MQL) to sales-qualified lead (SQL), and the cooperation of both your marketing and sales team are all pivotal to the success of your campaigns. By automating your email marketing, your business can further bridge that gap, making the transition seamless and freeing up more resources for your team to use in converting qualified leads to customers.
4. Personalize your buyer’s journey
To keep pace with buyers, your sales reps and marketers need to adjust their strategy to adapt to changing consumer practices. Marketing automation plays a big role in this process. With automation, you can create customized journeys through segmentation, track content downloads, use lead scoring and grading systems, and collect better prospect information for smarter targeting. With this approach, you will be better prepared to provide the right content at the right time, to the right buyer.
5. Spend more effectively
In addition to helping you capture leads, nurture them further in the funnel, and analyze their behavior, the increased efficiency that results from using marketing automation software will also free up your labor costs so you can spend elsewhere, increasing your marketing ROI. Always try different platforms before you buy, and make sure the time cost necessary to organize and knowledge transfer is factored into the cost of adoption.
6. Scale easier
As a business, the last thing you want is to be behind the growth curve of your competitors. If you’re looking to grow, you need automated processes to build a scalable marketing team structure. When problems arise, they cost time and money, so it’s essential you have these automated processes in place to assist in scaling growth.
The benefits of B2B marketing automation can’t be overstated. It can save time, money, and provide for more focused content and better data-driven decision making. What’s more, automation allows for more opportunities to grow your business, strengthen internal partnerships, and make processes more efficient.
In this guide, we’ll lay out some of the ways you can go about automating your marketing efforts, so you can consider which methods your company could most benefit from and form your own powerful marketing automation strategy.
