Marketing automation tools are applications that help you perform marketing activities with high levels of efficacy; the tools are designed to help you prioritize and execute marketing tasks with minimal effort and expenditure. It will free up considerable amounts of your time and enable you to deliver good personalized experiences.
You can use marketing automation tools for launching various initiatives to optimize user experience, generate leads, nurture them and identify qualified ones. That's why many companies are currently using marketing automation tools.
There are many types of marketing automation tools. We have tools, which have a wide array of features that help you perform various customer relationship, digital marketing and selling activities.
Companies also use marketing automation tools that enable them to make good use of webinars to get leads of high quality. The organizations also use the tools to get useful insights to score leads, interact effectively with target audiences and cut the time and cost required to engage customers.
There are various types of marketing automation applications that help businesses use social media effectively for promoting content to increase visitor traffic to their websites and enhance their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) profile. Organizations also use certain marketing automation tools to automate their e-mail marketing campaigns very efficaciously. As you can see, there are different types of marketing automation tools. Let us now proceed to understand the key aspects you must focus on to use marketing automation tools effectively.
Alignment of the Sales and Marketing Functions
The alignment between sales and marketing will happen on three different levels.
The first pertains to the nature and quality of leads. Is the lead a marketing qualified lead or a sales qualified lead? How promising is the lead? You need to make sure your sales and marketing teams are on the same page when it comes to defining and scoring the lead.
The next level of relationship revolves around the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the marketing department. SLA for the marketing team is not just about how many leads the team should deliver in a given quarter. It also specifies the quality of these leads. Furthermore, the SLA also determines how your sales team is going to handle the follow-up and the extent to which your sales personnel will pursue the leads provided by the marketing department. This is important because no matter how good the quality of leads supplied by the marketing team, its efforts will go down the drain if the sales team doesn’t pick them up.
The third level of relationship between the two teams is defined by the insights needed to run a campaign; salespeople who have field experience know the right triggers for a campaign, such as messages and client response, which are very useful for the marketing team. Marketers must talk to sales team members to better understand the sales process.
So, terminology, SLAs, and sales insights are three essential prerequisites for implementing a marketing automation tool. These aspects will help not only make good use of marketing automation applications but will also help set up workflows and lead qualification and scoring mechanisms.
Evolving Nature of B2B Relationships
Another key driver for the success of a marketing automation initiative is the evolving nature of B2B engagements. In a typical B2B scenario, people don't buy immediately after the first engagement. They need more time. B2B selling is more a process than a transaction. In a way, you should treat marketing and sales functions of a B2B business as the two sides of a coin because they address the needs of the same clients.
Sales teams have the luxury of engaging with people on a one-on-one basis. But when it comes to marketing, the same message must be sent to hundreds or even thousands of people. This is where marketing automation makes a huge difference. Marketing automation tools help you orchestrate campaigns and communicate at scale, with minimal effort and expenditure.
Proper Data Management
Effective use of marketing and customer data is a critical element of a good marketing automation program. This data allows you to automate the lead qualification process and deliver personalized messages. You can also leverage the data to use marketing automation tools to follow up with leads in a timely manner, track their behaviors, nurture them and perform a comprehensive ROI analysis with high efficacy.
To conclude, I’d like to say marketing automation tools have dramatically altered the B2B landscape; they help reduce marketing costs and enable companies to connect better with their customers. At SunYello, we help you make the best use of marketing automation applications. Our unrivaled marketing technology expertise coupled with a strong focus on understanding your specific needs allows you to deliver the ideal solution to automate your marketing function.
Hope you liked this post. How do you use marketing automation tools? We’d love to know.
