What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is a talking point. In some form it has been around since the 1980’s, and has been adopted by large multinationals for some time. But it is evolving and growing. It is becoming more relevant for a wider range of business sizes and types. As more and more MA solutions start to appear, it is a great time to be thinking about what might work for your organisation. With that thought it mind, I’ve put together a guide to help you understand the key features, it’s uses and why it might work for you.
A definition of Marketing Automation
From the many definitions available on the internet, I’ve chosen this one from Gleanster as it gives a clear idea of what technologies are included and what the core purpose is.
“Marketing automation software…
Exploring the benefits for small and medium businesses
Marketing Automation is one of the hottest trends in 2015, according to a recent SmartInsights survey.
However, adoption of this key technology is still in its early phase, especially amongst small businesses.
This article explains how small businesses are using a wide number of solutions as simple as keeping customer data on an excel spreadsheet, that they can see the benefit of using integrated marketing systems, just not yet. Because it is still a relatively new field, let's start with an explanation of what marketing automation is. I'll then go on to explain the overall benefits to business and the specific value that individual SMEs have expressed in our in-depth conversations and summarise with our predictions for SME adoption of automation.
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How to compare Marketing Automation vendors
Marketing Automation is now one of the most commercially important techniques for digital marketers, so you have to look to select the most cost-effective platforms. But how do you tell one supplier from the other, and how do you know which will best help you meet your objectives in the most cost-effective way?
If you are currently making the case for marketing automation, here are 10 questions you should ask any vendor before making your choice.
1. How will it help me to drive leads to my business?
We know today’s consumers look for relevant products and services as and when they need them. Frequent, fresh, high quality content on your website, blog or social media will attract visitors when the time is right for them to buy. Marketing automation software helps you to turn those visitors into leads by asking visitors to leave their contact details in…
5 all-too-common reasons that stop companies investing in Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is becoming a more widespread purchase, indeed it's one of the top-rated trends in the Smart Insights poll of 2016 digital marketing trends. However, our research suggests that many businesses still aren't using functionality like lead scoring, lead nurture and web personalisation - download it for further details and recommendations.
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So this poses the question: what is preventing companies from adopting Marketing Automation? Well, as with the adoption of any technology, there are always obstacles and believe me, I have come up against these obstacles on numerous occasions! The good news is that I have also been able to overcome them through working through the arguments. In this post I'll take a look at the most common…
Contact Management and Email Marketing rank highest for Marketing Automation buyers
Software Advice has released their 2015 research into how buyers are selecting their Marketing Automation Software and which features are important to American companies.
This year it has revealed that 98% of buyers are 'first time buyers', a rise in 8% from last years results, indicating a growing demand for small businesses to move away from manual processes as they appreciate the return on investment.
What functionality are buyers looking for in their Marketing Automation Systems?
Companies are investing in industry-specific systems as well as focusing on key functionality. Over 2/3 of respondents have prioritised their system requirements towards contact management features, along with email marketing and lead tracking capabilities.
Which industries are using Marketing Automation?
This year, the report shows that low adopters…
Using predictive analytics effectively will allow you to increase sales, but only if you have right data
Applying predictive analytics to marketing campaigns will enable businesses to increase sales and returns through visualising the campaign outcomes. Below is an introduction to Predictive Marketing and how you can begin to experiment with these ideas in your business.
Introduction
You may have heard of predictive marketing – it’s an increasingly popular topic. You may not, however, understand what it really means or how it could benefit your business.
In short: it involves using expected future events and expected future customer behaviours to create a marketing plan. It has become a lot more relevant to businesses as digital marketing campaigns have generated far more data which is analysed in far more detailed ways.
Intuitively, most marketers can see a clear value from understanding customers better and getting detailed numbers around a campaign’s expected returns before it has started.
However,…
Marketers agree Email Marketing Automation is the future, yet 4 in 10 automation programmes Fail
Email marketing is one of the top two channels for realising ROI yet email marketing budgets are declining. Alongside this, the use of Email Marketing Automation is becoming less effective - how do we know this? Econsultancy's Email Marketing Industry Census 2015, produced in partnership with Adestra has conducted research. After nine years of surveys, they bring together a wealth of information to show how email marketing has changed and the views of over 1000 in-house marketers, and experts.
How are companies using Marketing Automation?
48% of respondents with a email marketing automation rated its capabilities as 'basic' and 9% as 'non existent':
What are the barriers to effective email marketing automation?
Companies realise that MA is important yet there still appears to be many barriers or challenges to…
Research showing how Marketing Automation can support the lead-sales pipeline
Marketing automation has received a lot of attention over the past year. But you may still be sceptical, asking how can it actually grow my business’?
In this post, I want to dig into some of these benefits to explain precisely how marketing automation can help you grow your business.
In March 2014, Regalix conducted a study to identify the most common benefits of marketing automation, as told by marketers who had implemented the software.
1. Improve your lead nurturing
According to the Regalix study above, the number one benefit of marketing automation software is the ability to manage and nurture leads.
In every business, you will have a mixture of hot and cold leads. It’s common sense to have your sales team focus their efforts on the hottest leads, as they have the…
Barriers to adoption of Marketing Automation and how overcome them
In research TFM&A (2014) identified that there were 5 main benefits to marketing automation: personalisation, campaign management, triggered emails, control and insight. But with such clear benefits why are more organisations not adopting the tools that can lead to greater business success? In this blog I’ll be explaining the key barriers to adoption of marketing automation and give an action plan for marketers who want to persuade their organisations to adopt an automated approach.
Who are the non-adopters?
The barriers to adoption of marketing automation vary greatly depending on the type of company, their needs and their previous investments. In research carried out by CommsBox we identified 4 key types of non-adopter. Although by no means exclusive, they give an in-depth insight into the difficulties that companies face when making major investments in change. You might recognise elements of your own organisation here:
Trailing…
Does our business need CRM or Marketing Automation, or both?
Whilst most of us are now familiar with CRM (customer relationship management) systems, Marketing Automation is a relatively new approach. So it's often not clear how the scope of these marketing techniques and the tools used to manage them vary. In this post I'll introduce each and look to show the main difference.
At the heart of both CRM and Marketing Automation is the need to manage your customer relationships. By keeping data about our customers we are able to get to know them better over a period of time, developing better relationships, which leads to greater profitability.
Managing customer relationships
Managing customer relationships relies on our ability collect, store and manage customer data, and then and trigger business processes which lead to sales. So whether it’s a filing drawer, an excel spreadsheet, a CRM system such as Salesforce…
