Are You Making the Most of Your Marketing Automation Strategy?

Marketing Automation is no longer a novelty in the digital world, but instead it’s quickly becoming an integral part of our day-to-day lives. So it’s not surprising at all when the stats show that 75% of marketers currently use at least one type of Marketing Automation tools. What’s more, according to the new research published by the Digital Marketing Institute, 44% of marketing leaders believe that automation will become even more important as a skill. After checking these facts, we decided to have a more in-depth analysis of the current state of B2B Marketing Strategy in the B2B world. Let’s see together what we discovered.

Leveraging a Marketing Automation System for maximum benefits

Long story short, Marketing Automation refers to using technology to perform routine marketing-related jobs automatically, so you don't have to do them yourself. When you successfully manage to automate your marketing means, you use technology to send the right messages to your potential and current customers at the most appropriate times, so you can generate leads, convert them to sales and nurture existing clients. From our experience with integrating Marketing Automation Systems for our clients, we have seen their businesses benefiting from:

• Improved targeting of messages (70%)
• Improved user experience and relevance of communications (59%)
• Higher conversion rates (57%)
• Better quality leads (55%)
• Generating more leads (54%)
• Reduced marketing cost (37%)
• Saving time (30%)
• Shorter sales cycles (25%)

Challenges to implementing a Marketing Automation System

There are many benefits to implementing Marketing Automation to your business but it’s also true that the integration process can prove sometimes challenging. We have seen our clients mostly struggling with:

• Integrating data from different systems (56%)
• People factors / encouraging marketing and sales adoption (40%)
• Setting up tracking to prove ROI (37%)
• Understanding privacy requirements (e.g., GDPR) (30%)
• Managing Data / email list quality (28%)
• Selecting the right segments (21%)
• Managing Testing (12%)

Strategic goals of a Marketing Automation Strategy

Every good Marketing Automation Strategy starts with clearly defining your business objectives.

• Optimizing productivity (43%)
• Increasing marketing ROI (41%)
• Improving campaign management (40%)
• Improving database quality (39%)
• Acquiring more customers (39%)
• Measuring performance (37%)
• Aligning marketing and sales (24%)

Checklist for an effective Marketing Automation Strategy

Do’s

• Integrate Marketing Automation with your inbound marketing strategy
• Send highly-targeted and specific content to a narrowed audience
• Set up customer engagement campaigns to keep your current customers happy and coming back for more
• Use personalization
• Have clear calls-to-action
• Encourage sharing your content
• Make legally compliant
• Optimize for mobile

Don’ts

• Don’t just blast or broadcast general messages
• Don’t continue to email unengaged users
• Don’t use vague subject lines or preview text
• Don’t forget about accessibility
• Don’t send without testing first

Final thoughts

Marketing Automation is the ultimate productivity booster and once you start using it, you will soon wonder why you haven’t done this sooner. If you are considering implementing a Marketing Automation system in your business process but don’t know where to start or something is not clear, get in touch with us and our dedicated marketing experts will be happy to help you effectively automate your marketing means. Also, you can enroll in the ABM Digital Marketing Bootcamp  here