Recently marketing strategies have shifted from traditional print advertising and direct mail to online campaigns, mass emails, webcasts and webinars to name a few.
Automating the marketing process, enhances cross-channel communication and lead generation, decreases the cost of acquiring new business to the organization, and provides tools for the marketing and sales teams to increase the effectiveness and productivity of marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation streamlines and automates the marketing process in order to help organizations of all sizes better respond and operate new and increasingly complex marketing activities.
Here are some key benefits to the marketing automation:
Better qualification of incoming leads and productivity
Marketing automation eliminates recurring and tedious tasks associated with campaign planning and launch, it uses demographic and behavioral data (pages visited, downloads, filled out forms) and with a lead scoring system, identifies leads that are ready and qualified for the sales team to contact. Traditionally sales would follow up with all leads that come into the system, marketing automation, eliminates unnecessary time spent on unqualified leads. Marketing automation is the command center combining the management of marketing efforts and sales across all channels from lead to close.
Reduced costs and better ROI
With better sales and marketing time efficiency, marketing automation enables organizations to nurture leads yielding more opportunities, also it provides valuable insight into marketing campaigns and systematically determines better marketing campaigns from less efficient ones, hence producing a better return on marketing programs investments.
Better Relationship management
Marketing automation provides better control of the organization, with the use of a CRM system, the marketing team can track and communicate with prospects and customers, appropriately keeping them in the sales cycle, and successfully addressing their issues and concerns.
Better marketing campaign control
One system helps control, manage, schedule, set goals, produce advertising promotions, and create sales. For example, Marketing team has improved control of web page creation, marketing person can single handedly with marketing automation create web pages for different campaigns without any IT assistance.
Beyond the Usual Marketing Initiatives
Marketing automation can help companies extend their marketing initiatives to include B2B social media. Customer conversations from social sites are incorporated into the system, and opinions are then responded to in real-time developing relationships and generating sales across a variety of channels.
For a list of the top marketing automation solutions, check out Cloudtime’s Best Marketing Automation Solutions article.