In today’s competitive market, traditional marketing approaches are not sufficient to stay ahead of the curve. ‘Marketing automation’ is not a new term for marketers, but many B2B companies are still not fully aware of how it can help them take a smarter approach to grow their business. Marketing automation tools streamline and automate common marketing tasks that would normally be done manually by marketers.
Marketing automation consulting services open up new opportunities to be much more intelligent with a company’s marketing efforts so that a marketing and sales team can better engage their prospects. For B2B companies, it is essential to effectively manage the process of finding prospects and converting them into satisfied customers. A marketing automation consulting company can help you make the most of the available marketing tools, create relevant content, and maximize the impact of your marketing strategy to capture lead intelligence and improve the overall customer experience.
B2B marketers who implement marketing automation software increase their sales pipeline contribution by an average of 10%. (Forrester Research, 2014)
It will come as no surprise for you to learn that today more and more firms are jumping on the sales and marketing automation bandwagon. However, 85% of marketers who are using a marketing automation platform admit that they do feel they are not utilizing it to its full potential.
In order to have marketing automation in place that will work for your business, you need each of the three pieces of the puzzle- workflow, people, and the marketing strategy. If either of these pieces is missing, then the probability of success is greatly dropped. You can see the success that many companies have gained by utilizing marketing automation tools together with implementing the right B2B marketing strategy. Simply put, while the tools aren’t necessarily new, the way in which they are being used are evolving gradually.
Let’s run through five ways in which a marketing automation agency can help B2B businesses grow faster:
1) Better targeting
Even though it’s very important for salespeople to target prospects with the right messages at the right time, identifying and responding to each and every prospect’s sign of interest manually is certainly not possible. This is where marketing automation comes into play. It helps companies keep track of every prospect’s activity when engaging with marketing materials and take actions with better targeting.
2) Increased close rates
The biggest advantage marketers will observe by adopting marketing automation is a rise in their close rates. A marketing automation company can help businesses make good use of available tools that can perform numerous activities that would be too time-consuming for a team of people. This can lead to a significant increase in the company’s revenue.
Marketing automation helps marketers to identify leads when they are sales-ready, while minimizing the possibility of leads being turned off and enabling more meaningful conversations. This ultimately helps marketers to close more (and better) leads.
3) Aligned sales & marketing
In any organization, it is vital for both sales and marketing teams to stay connected. A marketing automation consultant can help companies automate the handover of leads from marketing to sales, by integrating a marketing automation platform with their CRM system. When a lead meets pre-defined qualification criteria (for example, filling in certain forms while viewing specific web pages, downloading specific content while referring to a white paper or a case study, etc.), the lead gets automatically assigned to a sales team. Both marketing and automation teams can then generate a comprehensive report to see the lead’s engagements with marketing resources so far.
4) Gaining insights with improved reporting
Marketing automation brings transparency into the sales funnel and marketing activities. For example, a company can analyze the speed at which its leads progress through the marketing funnel, track attribute revenue to a particular campaign, measure response rates across email campaigns, and generate deeper insights that were previously impossible.
5) Identifying “hot” prospects
A marketing automation consulting company can provide businesses the tools and intelligence required to separate “warm” leads – those that are showing signs of interest but not yet ready to get converted into sales – from the “hot” leads that present immediate sales opportunities. Based on various parameters like website pages viewed, emails opened, forms filled, job title, the size of a company, content downloaded, etc., marketing automation tools assign points to each prospect, which can be passed directly to a CRM system to identify hot to trot prospects.
To sum up
There is no doubt that marketing automation tools are utterly powerful and impactful, but it’s important to know that just using them is not a silver bullet. The effectiveness of such tools highly depends on how you use it and the marketing strategy you put behind it.
If you are not sure which marketing automation tool best suits your organization or need any assistance in creating a solid marketing strategy, feel free to get in touch with us.
