If you’re on the fence about business marketing automation, now’s the time to make a decision. Not only will you increase qualified leads by up to 451 percent, you’ll be a few steps ahead of the competition.

Although automation isn’t as advanced as its potential, every step you make toward modernising your marketing capabilities will be an investment in your future viability. Automation can be used for everything from inventory control to

crafting a unified, refined marketing campaign

.

What are some other advantages, and what are some must-have marketing automations for 2019 and beyond?

B2B marketing stats that should get your attention

Marketing automation uses a combination of technology and strategy to facilitate many routine outreach components. This includes deploying emails, performing social media engagement, and creating ad campaigns. 

Many detractors feel that automation removes the human touch and makes businesses more cold and impersonal. This couldn’t be further from the truth. 

As your company grows, providing a personalised customer experience becomes more difficult. That makes some form of automation necessary to tie together multiple touch points and promotional platforms. The right software will improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts and enhance your brand by providing better, more targeted and refined service. 

How much can marketing technology help your business? These

statistics

may surprise and inspire you. 

• 51 percent of B2B companies use some form of automation in their marketing efforts; a further 58 percent have plans to incorporate automation in the near future.
• Automation is the third most popular way to provide a personal customer experience, with 46 percent of companies that use some automation tools realizing a hefty ROI.
• The most effective marketing automation tools, AI and predictive analysis, are being used by fewer than 12 percent of companies.
• Spending for marketing automation tools is expected to increase to $25.1 billion by 2023.
• According to research, marketing automation can increase revenue growth by up to 85 percent and sales productivity by up to 69 percent.

Top 5 reasons marketing automations will benefit your business

Your marketing campaign is one of the main drivers behind building a loyal customer base. Technology can be used to streamline and direct marketing efforts across the board by:

1. Generating and segmenting leads
2. Improving lead scoring
3. Fine-tuning customer lifecycle management
4. Assisting with customer retention efforts
5. Providing quantified, measurable results

Before heading into the particular benefits of automation, we should note that you won’t have to sell a kidney to afford the kinds of software tools we’re talking about. Features driven by automation have found their way into well-known email marketing platforms like Constant Contact and inclusive

ecommerce solutions like Wix or Shopify

. The bottom line is that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have not only brought high tech to

society in general

but also to individual industries and your business in particular. It doesn’t matter the size of your company or bankroll, you CAN take advantage.

Learn more about your customers

Customer experience is king, whether it comes to branding or raising your search engine page rankings (SERPS). The bigger and more complex business becomes, the more customers crave a personal relationship with vendors and service providers. For example, data-driven analysis will allow your marketing managers and salesforce to generate targeted emails that are triggered by consumer behavior. 

This allows you the insight necessary to improve customer service and retention rates. Satisfied customers are more loyal, and they’re more likely to share favorable experiences. Word of mouth recommendations play a large part in

growing your customer base

, and it’s free advertising. 

Generate better leads

Through analytics, you can learn more about how consumers behave online and what drives them to make purchasing decisions. With this information at hand, you’ll shave the time between lead acquisition and closing. This type of targeted lead generation and refinement allows your salesforce to devote more time to building and nurturing customer relationships. 

Scale your marketing efforts

The goal of any company should be to grow their business without losing touch with their customers. Automation allows you to ramp up your efforts on demand, beyond the size of your team or geographic location. It helps support both long- and short-term growth by having the technology in place to multiply your reach up to 100 times your current client base without extra effort of expense. 

By removing human error and effort from many non-core, automated processes like social media posting, crafting and

deploying email campaigns

, and analysis/reporting, there’s more room for strategic planning and thinking. 

Create harmony between your sales and marketing teams

Revenues are generated by making sales, and marketing is a necessary component of that. However, many sales forces and marketing teams have a tumultuous relationship at best. Marketers are continually harrassed for more and higher quality leads, and marketing professionals are frustrated by how those leads are managed. 

Marketing automation changes that dynamic by strengthening the bonds between the two, giving even smaller marketing departments the ability to gather and segment more leads, weed out cold or non-productive leads, and providing sales teams something more substantial to work with. With better information and a higher number of hot leads, sales associates can become more productive, allowing them to close more often and earlier in the process. 

Save time and money

Through methods like A/B testing, you can determine the likely results of various approaches earlier in the campaign. This allows you to improve your results by testing what techniques will work and what will flatline on a relatively small sample before you’ve invested much time and energy into a failing strategy. 

Through automated reporting and

big data analytics

, you can better track expenses and monitor results. This will allow any investment in automation tools to be justified by the returns it provides in terms of increased revenues and happy customers. 

Final thoughts

Comprehensive marketing campaigns use a range of approaches. Each one of these can be improved by incorporating automation into the process. Although we haven’t begun to experience the full extent of what technology is capable of helping us achieve, beginning the move toward automated marketing now will make it easier to scale up your approach in the future.