Marketing Automation

The modern B2B buying landscape has changed the role of marketing. Rather than being content to simply focus on cutting costs, marketing’s main concern must now be active revenue generation through effective lead management. This revenue performance measurement approach has called for a holistic new model of marketing automation to more seamlessly integrate the inter-related functions of marketing and sales teams. This is critical in today’s hyper competitive environment where prospects interact with the sales team much later in the purchase process than ever before. As a prospect progresses through the marketing and sales funnel, he/she is doing her own research, accessing a wide variety of content online about your company and competitors.

Marketing automation helps ease the conversion points that generate the most revenues along the sales process from inquiry to closing. By running campaigns automatically rather than manually, marketing departments can complete more campaigns with less people and produce more qualified leads. Marketing automation shortens response times and gives marketing teams better campaign performance metrics and options for improving future campaigns. Marketing automation additionally provides sales people more qualified leads, with more information on each lead.

Marketing automation is the use of software applications designed to make automated repetitive tasks easier to manage and measure across a company’s sales and marketing departments. In the hyper competitive modern business environment, this is crucial because prospects interact with sales teams much later in the purchasing process than ever before. During the B2B purchase process, prospective companies pour over sales and marketing research, accessing a wide variety of online content about your company and competitors. It is therefore critical for a company to keep in touch with prospects in ways that are appropriate and in alignment with their buyer personas, which is the function of marketing automation.

There are several players that provide marketing automation software that helps take your demand generation and pipeline management capabilities to the next level. The companies included in the March 2011 Gartner MarketScope for CRM Lead Management report are  Aprimo, Eloqua, Leads360, LoopFuse, Manticore Technology, Marketbright, Marketo, Microsoft (Microsoft Dynamics CRM), Neolane, Oracle (Siebel Marketing), Pardot, SAP (SAP CRM), Silverpop, TreeHouse Interactive and Unica. These players run a wide spectrum, with some serving small businesses while others address the needs of very large corporations.

Several companies have used marketing automation systems to optimize their marketing programs.

  • Acteva is one example of such a company. An online event registration service, Acteva achieved $2 million in incremental gross revenue, 100% annual growth and 350% ROI in areas they utilized marketing automation.
  • Vindicia, an on-demand billing solution company, utilized marketing automation to launch a successful webinar series that enhanced their lead quality while reducing overall cost per lead. Vindicia uses marketing automation to focus on the most appropriate prospect with the best content at the right time. This has enabled them to have more meaningful conversations with prospects, leading to higher sales conversion rates.
  • On-demand, real-time technology solution provider IDology benefitted from marketing automation by being able to create personalized landing pages and automatically segment leads. Automation provided IDology the opportunity to focus better on strategic activities. Automated email campaigns, list segmentation abilities and web activity tracking doubled their marketing efficiency and increased monthly conversation rates by 25%.

Modern marketing teams are now taking more responsibility for creating higher revenue generating campaigns by improving the efficiency of the sales process and maximizing the profitability of each inquiry. Marketing automation systems have provided companies more aligned marketing and sales teams, more predictable sales cycles and greater overall ROIs.