The search for and acquisition of new customers has changed profoundly in recent years: for companies in particular, optimizing customer acquisition processes is now a must, hence the need to want to try to improve the alignment between Marketing and Sales.
The reason? To increase the efficiency of both sectors and accelerate the buying process by providing the Sales Force with greater visibility and more data on online lead activity and behavior, so that it also improves the profitability of campaigns of lead generation.
And this is precisely where Marketing Automation systems come in: thanks to their ability to be able to automate most of the key functions of the marketing process, these technologies are able to facilitate the achievement of these goals, providing important benefits to companies that decide to use them.
The Marketing Automation platform should therefore be understood as a valuable support of the marketing process, as it can enable targeted communications that “nurture” leads until they become “sales ready,” and thus “mature” and qualified enough to be passed on to the Sales Force. The use of this platform allows companies to benefit in two ways: on the one hand it goes to
improve the management of marketing programs (campaigns) and on the other hand improves the ability to measure the impact of marketing activities on sales. In fact, as he wrote
Lisa Cramer, president of the LeadLife Solutions, one of the most influential American companies in the field of selling Marketing Automation systems:
Marketing automation is the process by which companies can start taking control and managing the lead lifecycle. Marketing automation is made up of a series of functions that span the marketing automation process from inquiry to sale.
To make a long story short, a Marketing Automation platform can be particularly useful because it can combine all the key functions that a marketing team uses on a daily basis. Having clarified this point, what then specifically are the activities that a Marketing Automation system deals with?
Specifically, this platform can create and manage:
- emails
- The forms, i.e., registration forms, and landing pages
- Marketing campaigns including lead generation and lead nurturing
- lead scoring
- the reporting activity
- the unique database of leads
But what then are the benefits for a company that decides to adopt a Marketing Automation approach? Among the main benefits, the ability to:
- Increase the efficiency of marketing activities, thanks to the significant time savings achieved by automating campaigns and greater control over the results of activities
- Carry out targeted communications that “nurture” leads until they become “sales ready”
- Promote alignment between marketing and business activities to facilitate the choice of how to evaluate and rank leads
- Improve marketing initiatives by being able to convey relevant and personalized messages to prospects and leads
- Facilitate and speed up manual marketing processes with automated solutions that can be integrated into corporate CRM
- Improve the quality of leads generated
- Produce accurate reports and statistics, through the ability to measure returns on marketing investment(ROI)
According to Marketo, a leading company in the market together with Eloquently structured, Marketing Automation processes enable companies to establish and maintain meaningful, loyalty-building relationships with prospects and leads. And this is done primarily because of the strength of this system, which is to be able to generate and coordinate engaging experiences for prospects by going out and capturing their attention with ongoing, automated communications throughout the buying process.
