In its most fundamental structure, marketing automation software is intended to take time away from the most tedious workplace tasks, freeing up bandwidth for more strategic initiatives. With a powerful marketing automation software like Pardot, you can automate sales, marketing, project management, accounts receivable, and more. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits of optimizing your marketing automation processes, between generating leads, personalizing their journey, aligning sales and marketing, and more.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is a crucial component in any marketing strategy. Artificial Intelligence is giving you the analytics in real-time to find what content leads are engaging with on your website. Being able to track clicks, downloads, and website activity gives you more insight to understand what the visitors are interested in. Tracking customer behavior helps your sales team identify the pain points and needs of your prospects. In a study done by Invesp, “80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads, and 77% had an increase of conversion.” Having automated messaging, such as social media, emails, or lead magnets, will create more qualified leads for your company. Automating lead capture allows your marketing and sales team to further invest in strategy and business planning. Once the lead is engaging with your material, it’s time to start them on a customized journey.
Personalized Journey of the Customer
Let’s say you had an ad that someone clicked on and downloaded a lead magnet. The lead can now be put in a customized, automated drip campaign. Developing a library of diverse content to fit any and all of your prospects will serve as the foundation for your automation strategy. Your company saves time each time a prospect is automatically added to a drip campaign with content tailored to their area of interest. This personalized and relevant information to leads provides inherent value allowing you to stand out from the rest of the competitors. However, being able to track engagement with your content is a vital piece of the qualification process.
Accurate and Reliable Data – Reports and Dashboards
Choosing an appropriate marketing automation tool allows you to develop real-time reports in a matter of minutes. With big data you’ll be able to assess the effectiveness of past, present, or future campaigns. Your reports and dashboards, as with many tools at your disposal, will also come into play during the lead qualification process. Pardot’s automatic scoring system scores a prospect based on engagement with all of your marketing assets from email to landing pages to videos. Your sales and marketing teams will then have further insight on your prospect’s existing relationship with your organization paving way for better-informed decision-making in the nurturing process. However, your team may find that you have access to an overwhelming amount of data, and you’ll need a plan for identifying the most valuable among it all. At Corrao Group, we run reports every day to find the data we need to make improvements in our sales and marketing strategy.
Save Time and Resources
One of the most significant benefits of utilizing marketing automation is the increased bandwidth that comes with it. Imagine how much time you are spending on manually sending emails to leads or preparing posts on your social media accounts. Many different marketing automation tools allow you to have more time to spend on strategic planning to maximize return on investment. Free from the burden of many manual tasks, you’ll devote your resources to creating more engaging marketing content, working with your sales team, and building better relationships with customers. Improved relationships within your team and with your prospects is a win for all parties involved.
This explosion of AI technology over the past couple of years has allowed marketers to leave low-status, redundant tasks to AI while being able to focus on the more prominent creative marketing strategies with marketing automation. When leveraged for its full potential, automation software is not a tool just for sales and marketing. At Corrao Group, we created EZ-AR™, the first automated invoice generation and account receivable collection solution. What used to take hours upon hours of manual work, now gets done in minutes thanks to lessons learned in our experience with marketing automation.
Sales and Marketing Aligned
Disconnected sales and marketing teams plague organizations across industries, but marketing automation can bring the two teams together. Marketing automation provides help to the sales team by improving lead generation, lead scoring, and automated lead follow up for sales. The streamlined qualification and hand-off capabilities of a marketing automation tool connect the sales cycle from start to finish. Collaboration between both teams is vital to have, and the relationship of these teams should only grow closer as they work to maximize ROI at your company. Marketing automation delivers higher quality leads with more context based on the pain points and interests of each of these prospects, and all this before an initial phone call. It’s incredible what your company can do when you have both the marketing and sales team aligned, and working as one.
There are many more ways that marketing automation can efficiently and effectively improve your company’s time and revenue stream. Being able to have a powerful tool that can run different parts of your company with AI technology is becoming the norm. More and more companies are moving towards utilizing marketing automation; roughly 51% of companies are already marketing automation users with 58% of B2B companies planning on continuing to use the software or make the switch. Understandably, it can be a lot to handle, and if you would like to learn more, please feel free to contact us. Our marketing innovation combines technology and creativity in a unique experience that attracts, converts, closes, and delights.
