How Marketing Automation Helps Businesses To Be More Competitive In The Market?

The growth of a business depends on the personal touch and connection it fosters with its customers. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company, the companies which rely on personalization in marketing and communication attain 40% more revenue than others.

That’s where marketing comes into play with trigger-activated processes, including personalized emails, recurrent reminders, etc. But, these activities require consistent efforts, which become tedious to perform as businesses scale.

If you can resonate as an entrepreneur with the struggle to keep up with the demands of consumers, marketing automation is necessary.

A marketing automation strategy enables B2B ventures to accomplish all the marketing activities without compromising quality. Moreover, it transforms any business into a more responsive and high customer satisfaction-centric venture.

Not convinced about implementing marketing automation yet?

Keep your attention here to better understand how marketing automation improves your business!

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation software is a tool that streamlines the actions required in a marketing campaign, including social media post scheduling, welcome email delivery, etc. Due to the mechanization of the entire process, campaign creation becomes less time-consuming and hence more efficient.

This presents the scope to business owners and marketers to channel their resources towards creative campaign designing for marketing success.

On top of availing greater bandwidth for strategic decision-making, marketing automation enables small businesses to remain relevant and competitive.

What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

The slew of benefits offered by marketing automation are:

Enhanced Efficiency

Imagine this; you have employed an entire marketing team with members dedicated to posting regularly on social media channels. Contrastingly, marketing automation software takes care of the same job without fail, as per your instructions.

It goes without saying that the automation tool enables businesses to focus solely on curating and implementing campaigns. It partakes the burden of mundane and repetitive task execution to infuse higher efficiency in a company.

Reduced Overhead and Increased Sales

Lead generation is a crucial element of business growth. No matter how good a product is, you can nurture leads only through relevant marketing strategies involving sales. Since these activities require tremendous time and effort, it’s only wise to involve a marketing automation tool to increase productivity.

According to Oracle, the utilization of marketing automation tools leads to an increase in sales productivity by 14.5%. Employment of marketing software has proved beneficial in reducing overhead by 12.2%, as per the Invespcro analysis.

What’s more exciting is that the inclusion of tools enabled businesses to witness increased leads and conversions simultaneously.

Real-Time Tracking

Real-time information enables marketers to attain the insights they need for curating future campaigns. In addition, it also provides scope for initiating real-time marketing to garner higher social interaction as well as audience engagement for better brand visibility.

With the incorporation of a marketing tool, marketers can easily connect with the target audience to nurture leads and generate revenue. It also enables hassle-free setup of workflows, including welcome emails, cart abandonment notifications, and more.

Easier Data Management

With scaling ventures, the inflow of data can be overwhelming. There’s only so much you can accomplish in data management with manual processes involved.

The correct audience targeting and conversion rely heavily on the accumulated data and the precision of the information. This isn’t possible without regular upkeep and updates, which is costly in terms of money and time.

In this segment, marketing automation proves highly beneficial as it keeps track of the engaging user with the product or service. At the same time, it collects all the relevant information depending on the triggers assigned.

Marketing automation ensures 3 Ps of effective data management by:

• Maintaining parity across all platforms
• Facilitating process optimization for high accuracy, and
• Enables presentable report creation

Precise Reporting and Predictive Analysis

Accumulation and analysis of data to generate a report for the efficient marketing campaign design isn’t easy. No matter the size of your business, reporting on analytics is tricky as any error can lead to serious consequences and a drop in revenue.

However, marketing automation software rids you of the worries for a comprehensive report making for campaign design.

Whether you want to enquire about the bounce rates or need to streamline the sales funnel, the tool ensures fulfillment of all reporting requirements. It enables businesses to acquire an extensive overview of the complete marketing processes. With accurate and analytical mapping, marketers can remove the bottlenecks to facilitate smooth processes.

Streamlined Workflow

Workflow integration allows the combination of various company-centric rules to ensure the delivery of customer-centric information through marketing channels. It involves the incorporation of the following elements:

With the automation of these activities, it becomes easier to reach marketing goals through organized efforts.

Personalization of Marketing Strategy

Personalized marketing is more than the mere insertion of different user names in welcome emails. It involves imparting a unique touch to the message delivered with the right recommendation that interests the consumer. According to BCG, companies that emphasize personalization of their marketing campaigns can enhance their growth rate by 6% to 10%.

With one-to-one marketing, businesses have successfully improved their marketing efficiency, digital sales, and customer-company relationship. Marketing automation avails the users the precise analytics to create a persona for delivering customized content and augmenting marketing success.

Lesser involvement of the marketing team in manual tasks enables the workforce to emphasize personalizing content and campaign strategy for target consumers.

Convenient Lead Scoring

Rating individual interaction based on the value placed on a lead is manageable with small businesses. However, as the venture scales, lead scoring turns into a complicated process. Thankfully, with marketing automation, you can automatically push the high-value customer further down the purchase or interaction journey, involving the sales team.

Automation in marketing allows you to categorize your leads into different segments depending on the scoring model. With 68% of marketers organizing lead scoring as an effective method of increasing revenue, not only can you increase ROI but also save time.

Delivers Scalability

Scaling a venture requires upending the business model while maintaining the system’s overall efficiency. From tracking the monthly revenue to communicating with users at every stage of the buyer’s lifecycle, precise efforts require compounding with growth in the business.

Marketing automation enables businesses to leverage the power of automation to grow their ventures without roadblocks.

Provides Competitive Edge

With the shift in consumer preferences, businesses are struggling to find the precise strategy to Fastrack their growth. But, with the automation of marketing processes, B2B ventures can align and set the pace of the company’s development as they demand.

Marketing automation enables the ventures to focus on the micro customer journey to deliver an increase in customer retention. According to Bain and Company, a mere 5% increase in customer retention can yield into 95% enhancement in revenue.

With higher customer loyalty and retention through automation, businesses can gain a significant edge over their competitors.

How Should You Pick an Automation Tool for Your Business?

As lucrative as it sounds, marketing automation isn’t a magical tool to skyrocket your growth if the problem lies in the root of your model. With that being said, here’re the crucial considerations to keep in mind before opting for a marketing automation technology:

In a nutshell

Due to the multi-stage engagement process and increased demand for ongoing relationships, B2B enterprises form the crucial arena requiring efficient processes. With that in consideration, automation in marketing is extremely well-suited for integration into business strategies.

From reducing the overall operational costs to enhancing lead generation, marketing automation has the potential to transform B2B enterprises. In addition, with its robust insights reporting features, businesses can better prepare themselves for future preferences and behavior trajectories.

Simply put, with much lesser involvement of manual actions, improved performances, and enriched business strategies are just a few mechanisms away!

Author Bio:

Clara Beck is a Business Manager with 11 years of experience at Thomson Data based out of Plano, Texas. She helps SMBs and Enterprise firms take full advantage of the latest marketing tools to scale up their business. She blogs about Small businesses, Marketing, CX, Entrepreneurship, Big Data and, other technological innovations. Connect with Clara on LinkedIn and Twitter to learn how to win more leads.