According to Google’s search trend tools, search traffic for the term “Marketing Automation” has risen nearly 40% since October of last year. Interest in the technology seems to be growing, and if you’re not yet an automation user you may be asking yourself “why?” What is marketing automation all about?
Marketing automation is:
Technology that allows marketing and sales departments to create, deploy, and automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities that increase revenue and maximize efficiency.
In it’s most basic form, marketing automation is a set of tools designed to streamline and simplify some of the most time consuming responsibilities of the modern marketing and sales roles. From automating the lead qualification process to creating a hub for digital campaign creation, automation is all about simplifying a business world that is growing far too complex, much too quickly.
Marketing Automation and CRM
Your CRM tool is already a central part of your business and a key element in tracking, recording, and accessing customer data and performance metrics. Integrating marketing automation with your CRM system is like updating your favourite smartphone app to suddenly have all the features you’ve been dreaming of. It’s the same familiar platform, now with the ability to track prospect activity with your campaigns and on your site, real-time sales alerts when buyers are showing purchasing behaviour, ROI reporting, and much more.
Putting Sales and Marketing on the Same Page
It’s no secret that in most organisations, integration between sales and marketing is often a little rocky. But why? As technology continues to evolve and shape the buying cycle, marketing and sales are only growing closer together, making efficient collaboration between the two more important than ever.
The misalignment between the two departments isn’t necessarily the fault of one over another. That fault lies with outdated processes and structures. When marketing and sales are working with different tools toward separate goals, it’s only natural for tensions to result. Fortunately, marketing automation can help provide a solution by improving lead quality, increasing revenue, and automating traditionally manual processes like lead assignment and follow-up.
Better Data For Smarter Decisions
It seems like everyone these days is talking about “big data,” but few business have a grasp on how to collect and utilise it. Marketing automation allows you to effortlessly embrace big data, collecting valuable data at tremendous scale and putting it to work for you by helping you make smarter marketing and sales decisions.
By providing a single platform for collecting and storing data, closed-loop reporting, and dashboarding and analytics, marketing automation platforms are the most comprehensive solution for measuring marketing and predicting consumer behaviour on a small-business budget. Assemble a more complete profile of your prospects than ever before, A/B test your marketing assets to find the techniques that work best, and truly understand the contribution sales and marketing are making to the bottom line.
To find out more about marketing automation, speak to our experts today. Call 08456 525 625 or fill in our form.