Friday, October 22, 2010

The Power of Marketing Automation

Generating quality sales leads, managing demand generation campaigns and evaluating marketing return on investment, can be highly challenging in a scenario where business strategies are increasingly complex and demanding. In order to streamline marketing and sales functions, and to elevate their effectiveness, businesses have started to adopt marketing automation solutions. These solutions help companies to effectively respond to shifting strategies and to the rapidly changing marketing landscape.

Marketing Automation for a Competitive Edge

Shrinking budgets, and demands from sales teams to produce more qualified leads, can put organizations under immense pressure. But automation solutions can enable marketing teams to improve efficiency by strengthening their promotions and campaigns with cost-effective, yet sophisticated tools. These tools simplify processes and functions, and provide end-to-end support starting from the planning stage through campaign execution and reporting.
Moreover, the ability of automation software to integrate and centralize disparate, fragmented processes across marketing and sales teams can be immensely helpful in implementing complex, multi-faceted marketing strategies more effectively.

Also marketing automation tools can help enhance the lead generation process by effectively segmenting and managing prospect databases. This in turn can facilitate more targeted lead nurturing and ease response tracking functions.

Benefits Offered by Marketing Automation Software

- Improved Performance and Productivity: Marketing automation helps organizations get rid of cumbersome manual tasks related to planning and implementation of marketing campaigns. This helps in better performance and enhances productivity.
- Customizable campaigns: Automation software allows companies to personalize campaigns to meet specific needs of the target audience, thereby making marketing messages more focused and relevant. This helps in getting better conversion rates, and shortens the sales cycle.
- Low Investment, Better ROI: Automation solutions for marketing are available at a low cost. While these solutions can help significantly cut down expenses involved in executing manual campaigns, they also bring better return on investment.
- Marketing and Sales Integration: According to the American Marketing Association, “Sales & Marketing need to be integrated in order to build customer relationships, enhance brand, capitalize on leads, improve market share and to boost revenue”. And this can be achieved only with an effective marketing automation solution.
- Better Flexibility & Scalability: With automation software, marketing teams can easily adapt to ever-changing market demands.
- Superior Intelligence: With valuable and timely lead analytics, marketing automation software enables knowledge-based planning and execution of campaigns to generate better responses and ROI.

Marketing automation software facilitates business growth by effectively managing all activities involved in marketing and sales starting from generating qualified leads to converting them into customers. By offering these multiple benefits automation solutions have contributed to the growth of several businesses and won their faith.










Monday, October 18, 2010

Is your marketing automation solution offering you a good ROI?

Why settle for less?
It has been almost a decade since ‘marketing automation’ came into existence. So if you are one who has opted for a particular marketing solution, perhaps it is time to ask yourself if your chosen automation tool has brought in:
  • an increase in revenue?
  • cost reductions?
  • enhanced CRM?

If not, then it is time to reconsider your automated marketing solutions.

A 2009 Forrester B2B Lead Management Automation Market Overview Report states that, "Tools that monitor online activity, match visitors against commercial databases, look up their firms and roles, and help sales proactively chase buyers across the Web take priority over technology that manages demand once it comes in the door…" According to the report, your automated marketing tools need many inherent built-in functions to ensure maximum revenue returns for your enterprise. So why settle for a solution that does not give you what you need - increased ROI? Why not trade up for a tool/solution that will provide you maximum ROI?
Things to remember
Efficient marketing automation software can work wonders for your enterprise. Here is a list of things you must keep in mind before choosing your marketing automation tool. Your tool should:
  • Provide real quantifiable and measurable results
  • Offer actual cost savings with cost effective lead generation, higher conversion rates with lead nurturing and enhanced sales
  • Offer real-time updates and incisive information on visitor intent and behavior
  • Get rid of multiple systems required for lead tracking
  • Facilitate different campaigns within the system like email marketing, drip marketing, etc.
  • Integrate your multiple CRM systems
  • Be flexible and scalable
  • Improve operational efficiency
  • Effectively react and respond to change
  • Help in making sales/marketing campaigns be buyer-centric
  • Customize content and automate the timing of marketing communication


Look before you leap
Even as studies show that 95% of prospects visiting your website are primarily there for some kind of research, as many as 70% of the same prospects will eventually buy from you or your competitors. Therefore, it is important to optimize the leads you get from your prospects, which can be done with an effective marketing automation tool. Upon accurate implementation, a truly robust marketing automation tool can ensure your enterprise of customer-centric ROI. It can also ensure that your marketing teams add to your revenue effectively. So it will help you to exercise caution before arbitrarily selecting an automated marketing tool.