Jay LeonardMarketing automation was a big buzzword last year. Now, here we stand in 2017, and it hasn’t gone anywhere. This just goes to show that marketing automation wasn’t some flash in the pan – it’s a sustainable technology that every forward-thinking business must consider adopting.
1. Eliminates Redundancy
When it comes to marketing automation, many businesses want to be data driven and focused on high-value actions, so they’re turning to predictive analytics. One of the more beneficial results is less manual input and time wasted on a repetitive action.
“Predictive analytics is surging in popularity among marketing leaders. It combines several components of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict which prospects are most likely to become customers,” explains Sean Zinsmeister, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Infer. “This technology eliminates a great deal of manual and redundant work from marketing and sales analytics, letting reps spend more time on high-value outreach and lowering chances that a calculation error will cost the company important deals.”
2. Better Lead Scoring and Nurturing
At the heart of successful sales and marketing is access to better leads. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t have a pool of leads worth investing in. The result is wasted time and resources.
With marketing automation, you can learn a lot more about who prospects are and what makes them tick through superior lead scoring. Then, you can improve your ability to nurture these leads and eventually push them through the conversion funnel by implementing automated rules that deliver meaningful messages at just the right intervals based on the information you’ve gathered.
3. Greater Organization
If you’re honest with yourself, things might feel a little scattered right now. Between email, social media, landing pages, advertising, content creation, SEO, and everything else that goes into your marketing efforts, it’s not always easy to feel like things are cohesive.
With marketing automation, you get the benefit of better centralization. No longer are you forced to manage dozens of dispersed tools – everything can be consolidated into a single point of control. It’s freeing and rewarding.
4. Superior Performance Measuring and Reporting
If you’re looking to improve performance measuring and reporting capabilities, then marketing automation is what you’ve been missing. With the correct tools, you can take basic reporting and turn it into a couple things: robust dashboards that deliver real-time insights and relevant takeaways that can be used to make important decisions regarding where to spend your marketing dollars.
Not only does this enhance your ability to drive results, but it also helps when it comes to reporting those results to senior level management and key decision makers.
5. Better Governance of Data
Collecting data is only half the battle. Once you collect data, where does it go and how is it used? If you’re a little bit unsure of the answers, then you aren’t alone. According to a study of B2B organizations, 42 percent find it challenging to organize, store, and protect data in accordance with compliance standards.
With automated marketing solutions, this is less of an issue. Assuming you have the right systems in place, the organization, storage, and protection of data can be streamlined to a large degree. This lets you focus on applying insights, not worrying about compliance.
Invest in Marketing Automation in 2017
If you’ve put marketing automation on the back burner over the past couple of years, now is the time to make it a priority. There are so many unique benefits and you can easily gain a competitive advantage in your industry by finding and utilizing the right tools.
What are you waiting for?
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Thank you for this article, I couldn’t agree more that marketing automation is not another buzzword, but a real game-changer in marketing. There are many tools in the market, but if I may recommend one, it would be Synerise, probably the most advanced all-in-one marketing cloud.