Suppose a local business is searching for a good app development company in New York City on Google in order to develop a mobile app for its business. Your company happens to provide app development services. There is a need for your services, and your company is there to deliver. All you need is to connect to the local business that wants the app development. That’s where the role of marketing comes into play. Marketing ensures when someone is looking for the services you provide, your firm is visible to them.
The average sales cycle length in the B2B industry is 102 days. It starts from lead generation, goes through nurturing the leads, and ends with closing the sale and delighting the customer. This means that a business may have to connect with its customers numerous times.
Marketing automation focuses on managing those communications flawlessly and more coherently. It involves using marketing software and B2B business tools to automate repetitive marketing operations for enhanced workforce efficiency and improved ROI. It can lead to a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead and a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.
This post will look at how marketing automation works, helpful marketing automation tools, and how marketing automation helps businesses.
How Does Marketing Automation Work?
Marketing automation uses software, data, and strategy to create, launch, and manage a marketing campaign. It focuses on streamlining and processing repetitive marketing operations and keeps track of every action to measure marketing efforts. Most businesses think of marketing automation as an automated tool to send personalized emails to a list of clients as per the scheduled calendar. But, the advanced marketing automation business tools can do much more than that.
A good marketing automation tool can help you with the following:
- High-quality lead generation, nurturing, and scoring
- Audience segmentation and targeting
- Analytics and reporting to optimize marketing and content strategies
- Upsell and cross-sell activities
- Run a customer loyalty program to increase customer retention and more
How Do Marketing Automation Tools Work?
Each marketing automation tool has its unique set of features, but the primary focus of each tool is to create, launch, and manage an effective marketing campaign.
Create a Marketing Campaign
Marketing automation tools help marketing teams create dynamic campaigns that intelligently adapt based on a buyer’s real-time activities at every stage of the buying journey. Using integrated frameworks, your marketing team can easily create emails, social media ads, forms, and videos within minutes. There is no need to hire coding experts to create dynamic forms and interactive ads.
Launch a Marketing Campaign
Launching a marketing campaign needs time, effort, and resources. Marketing automation tools allow marketing teams to launch a campaign on multiple channels within minutes. Using marketing automation tools, you can send personalized emails, run ads, send feedback forms, and more.
Measure a Campaign
Marketing automation tools keep track of every activity. It combines analytics with data to provide useful information. It provides an organization with behavioral and firmographic data from multiple sources to help in segmentation, data-driven targeting, lead management, and more. In addition, you can use detailed marketing reports and dashboards to track and measure the efficacy of your marketing campaign. Advanced marketing tools collect real-time data that help companies create effective, dynamic market campaigns.
What are The Benefits of Marketing Automation for Your Business?
Numerous statistics have shown that marketing automation can improve the marketing ROI. So let’s find out what key benefits you will enjoy after adopting marketing automation for your B2B professional services firm.
Improve Efficiency
Marketing automation helps improve the efficiency of the entire marketing department. It takes care of the repeated processes, such as sending emails, posting on social media, and tracking clients’ interactions. It saves time for the marketing team. Thus, they can focus more on planning, creating new strategies, and finding creative ways to add value. This, in turn, helps improve the ROI as the marketing department is working effectively.
Increase Conversion Rate
Marketing automation uses real-time data for analytics that help increase the conversion rate. It collects the information from various touch points such as website visits, opened emails, and social media activity to target leads. Then, based on every interaction, marketing teams can understand the leads’ needs and deliver relatable content.
Nurturing the lead is very important, especially in the B2B industry, where leads are already educated. The more quality content you provide to your leads, the more chances of getting conversions.
Annuitas Group’s study shows that companies that use marketing automation to nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads.
Personalized Communications
Marketing automation software allows marketing teams to create personalized content through segmentation capabilities and reporting. In addition, it captures data that helps in the behavior analysis of a client.
For example, your company has run an advertising campaign on social media. The marketing automation tool can provide deep insight into your post’s many visitors, where your visitors are located, and what posts they are interacting with.
Marketing automation software enables automatic scoring, qualifying, and prioritizing of leads based on data. Then, you can channel personalized communication according to the different needs of clients.
According to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, 77% of buyers want unique, targeted content at each research stage.
Align Sales and Marketing
One of the most common challenges of any business development team is to align its sales and marketing team. Poor quality lead generation can result in low conversion rates and waste of resources. Using marketing automation software, a company can perform data-driven lead management. Lead scoring helps sales teams understand what are the quality leads. It brings the business development efforts of sales and marketing teams into alignment.
According to Gleanster Research, 50% of the leads businesses generate are qualified, but not ready to buy right now. The synchronization between marketing and sales departments helps salespeople understand clients better and provides the right information on the leads for increased conversions.
Hassle-Free Analytics
Analytics is a key part of any marketing campaign. Marketing automation software keeps track of every activity and collects real-time data. For example, which email leads are opening and clicking, what posts are performing well on social media channels, how many leads are visiting the website, how they are converting to website visits, etc. Everything is tracked automatically.
Based on that, marketing automation software creates graphs and reports that help you improve your marketing strategy. A marketing automation platform provides a single platform for dashboarding, analytics, reporting, and storing data. It is the most comprehensive way of measuring campaigns and predicting consumer behavior. It eventually helps in a better marketing team performance, and improved ROI.
How Can Company Expert Help You Scale Your B2B firm?
Company Expert is a B2B professional services firm growth consultant that helps B2B firms with a range of solutions. We help B2B financial services, technology, and professional service firms with proprietary frameworks and technology, business advisors, and a professional network of B2B businesses.
B2B firms can use our business playbooks to standardized operational procedures. We have also created a Growth Accelerator SystemTM (GAS).
Company Expert Growth Accelerator SystemTM (GAS) is an integrated set of proprietary processes, strategies, and frameworks in four key areas – Marketing, Sales, Planning, and On-Line Presence. We use these proven frameworks to inject speed, alignment, and accelerated growth into the DNA of B2B firms. You can leverage our proprietary frameworks and technology to fuel your firm’s growth.