The impact of Marketing Automation in my business
Marketing automation is the gateway to the joint work of marketing and sales, where lead conversion lies at the core. Technology, automation of processes and the ability to have it all on a single platform offers efficiency, cost savings and better results.
We have recently had the opportunity to learn in detail what smart marketing is, what tools it uses and why we can count on a CRM such as Salesforce’s to undertake what today will be our central theme: marketing automation.
First, we have to ask ourselves how we can use these marketing techniques to grow the business. But today’s topic is different: What impact could the application of marketing automation have on my business?
The essence lies in marketing automation
Armelle Jaclot, the Global Business Manager at ISDI CRM and the person responsible for global marketing strategy, reflects the paradigm shift in marketing in recent years: “The marketer has to adjust to these new mechanisms in order not to fall behind. Today we are talking about marketing in which the customer is at the center of everything. Business communication has to be accurate and appropriate to the needs of the interlocutor. This is why automation is the best ally for marketing departments.
The marketer has to adjust to these new mechanisms in order not to fall behind.
To get the most out of this automation, as Salesforce explains , it is necessary to build a strategy in four areas, consisting of email marketing, social media marketing, mobile messaging and managing ads. For these areas, the human factor is still important in order to develop engagement with the customer, but this software posits “individual campaigns, multi-channel campaigns and 1-to-1 personalized customer journeys based on these campaigns”.
We could fill pages and pages about marketing automation but let’s summarize its features in these seven:
- Lead capture: to get to know prospects and reach. For example, through a landing page, users will be invited to enter their details (email address, postcode and job title) to receive in return a white paper or a downloadable e-book.
- Lead scoring and management: the use of data (demographics, behavior, etc.) to separate hot leads from “just browsing”. The management of this scoring allows marketing and sales to discover which customers are ready to be engaged and which ones will need nurturing of interest or engagement (nurturing).
- Lead nurturing: the lead nurturing we discussed above is achieved through follow-up emails, and the automation allows you to track engagement and offer the right content at the right time, with the objective of converting those leads.
- Campaign management: SEO, social listening, automated campaign management etc., through automation we can focus on strategy and let the CRM allow us to monitor activity more easily.
- Content management: in the same way, the management of online publications, campaign emails, etc., can be managed from a single platform. In addition, whenever we need to update an asset, we will know that it will be updated across all campaigns and media at once.
- CRM Integration: integration with the CRM allows you to continue the activation process of a potential lead from the moment the opportunity is presented on social networks, until we can leave this possible conversion in the hands of the sales department.
- Analytics and reporting: marketing automation makes it easy to capture tons of data. In addition, with good integration with a CRM, automatic reports can be generated on this data, allowing for more mature planning.
Integrating automation with a CRM
Among the advantages that Salesforce highlights of integrating a CRM with a marketing automation strategy is that of providing the sales department with the best leads; offering tailor-made messages; taking care of leads throughout the entire customer journey and discover, at the highest level of detail, which marketing campaigns are working.
Armelle Jaclot’s view is that “above all, it saves time for the Sales and Marketing teams, and therefore saves investment. In addition, it allows a better knowledge of the lead thanks to its scoring system, then contributes to better nurturing. In conclusion, companies achieve a better ROI for their actions with less effort”.
And speaking of data, there is nothing better than the figures to corroborate that marketing automation really works. The Salesforce article highlights the two most striking ones:
- Marketing automation works: this automation generates a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overheads.
- Growth of leads: using a marketing automation strategy generates a 27% higher volume of leads, a 30% higher conversion of leads and a 25% higher return on investment (ROI).
In short, marketing automation is the perfect key to business growth: many automated steps that allow experts in the marketing and sales departments to devote more effort to the overall strategy and nurturing of prospects (lead nurturing). In the same way, marketing automation platforms allow you to integrate in one place all the data of these prospects, and to make a more personalized – and automated – follow-up of each customer.
Lead nurturing and closing the loop
“At ISDI CRM, our marketing automation has allowed us to be much more agile and adapt to market needs more easily”, says Armelle Jaclot. “We now know who to target and how to target them, we know the impact of our actions, and data drives all our decisions. The sales teams feel much more supported by marketing and together we are able to improve our impact”.
According to Gleanster Research, 50% of all leads generated by a business may be qualified, but are not yet ready to complete a purchase. With marketing automation you can take care of or guide, with this lead nurturing, that half of prospects, without the need to employ a team of people to carry out the follow-up.
To go deeper into capturing those leads, there’s nothing better than personalized marketing: according to Pardot, “77% of buyers want unique and targeted content at every stage of their (product) research”. And through this whole process of interaction with the prospect, we are recording each new input of information about him, which will later serve us to further personalize that relationship with the customer.
At ISDI CRM we offer specialized courses to obtain the necessary Marketing Cloud certifications: Conquer the inbox from the Marketing Cloud!
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