Marketing Automation is Changing the Business

Tools are here to make our daily tasks more efficient and more productive. The same can happen with marketing. Automation tools are making marketing more scalable and easily manageable. By integrating automation with the marketing process of your business, you can generate more revenue. But just like manual marketing, automation marketing also requires proper strategy, execution, and training.

With automation, you can connect with new or potential customers to attract them to what you are offering. You can also target people who have abandoned their carts. This way efficiency of your marketing efforts increases along with your business revenue. By giving a personalized touch to your approach, you can attract more customers with automation.

Conversion is the whole purpose of marketing automation. Creating qualified leads with more efficiency is the reason behind the integration of automation and the marketing process.

There are three ways marketing automation helps a business in getting qualified leads.

• By tracking the behavior and demographic information using a scoring model
• By creating personalized landing pages
• Dynamic content that changes as per the user

Timing is all that matters in lead generation. If you are not approaching your prospects at the right time with the right personalized message, it is all in vain. Automation fills this gap of sending messages at the right time to the right customer at the right moment.

There are some marketers that still think that automation does not give you qualified leads. Automation only scales your marketing efforts which leads to more form filling. You are just sending thousands of emails to people that might or might not have interest in your offering. So all that you get as a result are a scaled number of leads, not qualified leads.

If you are from the sales, you might already know about the funnel. Automation creates a bridge that helps marketing and sales to work in synchronization. A better-aligned sales and marketing will create a better result for the business.

When both start working together, the funnel process becomes easy, which generates better leads. Now both can turn these leads into current customers.

Automation always makes sure that both teams are working in harmony, being the connecting element between marketing and sales. It is like a baton in the relay race. The marketing team approaches the right prospect and converts into a qualified lead. Now a representative is assigned to that lead. Automation is the baton of information between these two.

If the sales team does not have it, it would be hard for them to serve the prospect well. This lack of information might lead to a bad customer experience.

Automation works as the solution to exchange information in real-time. Now, the sales team can approach the lead to convert it into a customer using a personalized proposal. Exchanging the information in real-time plays a significant role in this whole process. This is why automation is now a basic need of a business.

There are several features that marketing automation has to offer. Some that you need to think of are:

Lead Nurturing: You nurture your leads by sending them automated emails by offering them information related to their interest at the right time.

Personalization: Once your prospect takes interest in engagement, send them personalized emails to create a better relationship.

Campaign: A company can use different types of campaigns to nurture leads while supporting the sales process.

Integrating CRM: This is through which automation sends information between marketing and sales.

Forms and Landing Pages: This is where you capture information related to your prospect or potential customers, depending on their actions.

Lead Scoring: Calculating the result of activities done by customers help you create or improve your strategies for better results.

Managing Leads: When it is a B2B marketing, leads are redirected to a page generating “contact only” data for sales. This will push every contact or account into the CRM.

Managing Social Media: Distributing content all over social media to target bigger audiences and increase the reach of your marketing.

As of now, we are reading that marketing automation and CRM work together, but do both have the same purpose? Well, both might work together but serve different purposes.

Marketing automation serves its purpose on the top level of the funnel. It generates or engages with new or potential customers. Creating qualified prospects is why a business is using marketing automation.

On the other hand, CRM is what stores the information of prospects and sends it to sales. It sends the cleansed data to sales honoring its symbiotic relationship with marketing automation.

A good example can be tracking how a target reaches your website. After the medium by which that potential target is converted to a prospect. After these, deciding on how, when, and where to engage with your prospects. Orchestration of all these steps in the right manner will create a better example of marketing automation practice.

As a marketer, you need to follow this example to boost the efficiency of your marketing and sales team. This will result in achieving the objectives set by the marketing and sales team.