Introduction to marketing automation platforms: benefits and features
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 9:02 am
We want this introduction to Marketing Automation platforms to answer two fundamental questions. The first revolves around the benefits they bring to a marketing department, while the second revolves around the specific functionalities that can be found in this type of technology.
Benefits of a Marketing Automation platform
Marketing departments, especially in B2B companies, are experiencing a very important moment of transformation because their target audience is characterized by: interacting with the brand through multiple channels , both on and off line, and by being increasingly autonomous in the purchasing decision-making process (the customer has many more search, consideration and evaluation tools for different suppliers at their disposal).
Marketing is therefore adopting ceo email lists strategies aimed at “listening” to and “qualifying” leads on a large scale, optimising coordination processes with sales.
In a context like this, the main benefits that Marketing Automation platforms can bring to marketing professionals are the following:
Increasing efficiency in processes
Automating tasks related to content creation and distribution, message personalization, campaign programming and execution, and lead processing and qualification drastically reduces the time spent on these tasks. This leads to greater efficiency and productivity.
Increase in the number and quality of leads to manage
This is due to the capabilities of automating data management processes on a large scale, including sociodemographic, profile and behavioural data (page views, downloads, email openings and clicks, etc.), combined with lead qualification systems through scoring systems.
A multi-channel view of prospect behavior
Marketing automation platforms integrate multiple channels and devices, including social media and mobile, allowing for much more comprehensive and integrated prospect views.
Better alignment of sales and marketing objectives
With lead qualification features, sales managers see the quality of the leads they receive improve. The tension between quantity and quality of marketing-generated opportunities is reduced and sales department productivity is increased.
Marketing Automation Platform Features
There are some standard functionalities that define this category within the whole of MarTech. These are:
Email Marketing campaign management.
Landing page management.
Lead management (capture, nurturing and scoring).
Email Marketing campaign reports and landing page conversions.
On top of this set of functionalities, the different providers have been adding improvements that significantly increase the potential of these tools. The main ones are:
Personalization based on dynamic content management
Some platforms have developed systems in which the content in emails, landing pages and even websites can be dynamically assembled once we have identified the user who is going to interact with the support. The most common way to find this functionality is in the field of email, since dynamic content management has been part of the standards of this industry for many years. The main advantage of personalization based on dynamic content is the automation and scalability of a large number of versions in real time.
Lead Management
The most advanced platforms allow you to integrate lead capture from different sources (website visitors, landing pages and forms, paid advertising campaigns, CRM or social networks). Once we have the lead in the centralized database, the combination of their profile (sociodemographic and psychographic), behavior (based on recency, frequency) and the content they interact with (clicks on email campaigns, downloads of content, participation in surveys, etc.) will determine their score. The more data we have about the user, the more accurate the score can be and therefore the higher the quality of the lead that will receive sales.
Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Marketing Automation applied through Inbound Marketing strategies has proven to be very effective in optimizing the conversion funnel. Given this reality, a natural evolution has been to optimize processes by adapting them to complex and “large” B2B sales environments. We are talking about the adaptation of Inbound Marketing techniques to the reality of sales to large corporations in which several people are involved in the purchase decision-making process and in which the process is usually long. In these cases, the strategic objective of marketing is no longer the lead (the person interested in our product or service), but the account (the set of participants in a company in the purchase decision process). The approach has changed and so have the Marketing Automation tools, adapting data modeling and its management around the “account” instead of around the “lead”. The specificities of ABM deserve a separate treatment that we will not develop in this paper.
Integration with social networks
Many Marketing Automation platforms allow you to publish, share and track content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram). This is important because it allows you to take advantage of the diffusion capabilities of these networks and, on the other hand, to detect profiles interested in the published content. In fact, another element that can be used to score the lead is their engagement with the brand through social networks.
CRM Integrations
The basic tool of a sales department is the CRM. It is the place where records and their attributes are added, hence the importance of being able to have them integrated with Marketing Automation solutions. The objective of these integrations is none other than to automatically inform the CRM environment in the shortest possible time of the relevant information recorded in the Marketing Automation environment (for example, the change of an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) into an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead). The opposite also happens, when a salesperson updates in the CRM a piece of data obtained through an offline event (a trade fair for example), and this has to enter the automated marketing mechanism. Most Marketing Automation platforms have connectors with the CRMs of Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite and SugarCRM.
Benefits of a Marketing Automation platform
Marketing departments, especially in B2B companies, are experiencing a very important moment of transformation because their target audience is characterized by: interacting with the brand through multiple channels , both on and off line, and by being increasingly autonomous in the purchasing decision-making process (the customer has many more search, consideration and evaluation tools for different suppliers at their disposal).
Marketing is therefore adopting ceo email lists strategies aimed at “listening” to and “qualifying” leads on a large scale, optimising coordination processes with sales.
In a context like this, the main benefits that Marketing Automation platforms can bring to marketing professionals are the following:
Increasing efficiency in processes
Automating tasks related to content creation and distribution, message personalization, campaign programming and execution, and lead processing and qualification drastically reduces the time spent on these tasks. This leads to greater efficiency and productivity.
Increase in the number and quality of leads to manage
This is due to the capabilities of automating data management processes on a large scale, including sociodemographic, profile and behavioural data (page views, downloads, email openings and clicks, etc.), combined with lead qualification systems through scoring systems.
A multi-channel view of prospect behavior
Marketing automation platforms integrate multiple channels and devices, including social media and mobile, allowing for much more comprehensive and integrated prospect views.
Better alignment of sales and marketing objectives
With lead qualification features, sales managers see the quality of the leads they receive improve. The tension between quantity and quality of marketing-generated opportunities is reduced and sales department productivity is increased.
Marketing Automation Platform Features
There are some standard functionalities that define this category within the whole of MarTech. These are:
Email Marketing campaign management.
Landing page management.
Lead management (capture, nurturing and scoring).
Email Marketing campaign reports and landing page conversions.
On top of this set of functionalities, the different providers have been adding improvements that significantly increase the potential of these tools. The main ones are:
Personalization based on dynamic content management
Some platforms have developed systems in which the content in emails, landing pages and even websites can be dynamically assembled once we have identified the user who is going to interact with the support. The most common way to find this functionality is in the field of email, since dynamic content management has been part of the standards of this industry for many years. The main advantage of personalization based on dynamic content is the automation and scalability of a large number of versions in real time.
Lead Management
The most advanced platforms allow you to integrate lead capture from different sources (website visitors, landing pages and forms, paid advertising campaigns, CRM or social networks). Once we have the lead in the centralized database, the combination of their profile (sociodemographic and psychographic), behavior (based on recency, frequency) and the content they interact with (clicks on email campaigns, downloads of content, participation in surveys, etc.) will determine their score. The more data we have about the user, the more accurate the score can be and therefore the higher the quality of the lead that will receive sales.
Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Marketing Automation applied through Inbound Marketing strategies has proven to be very effective in optimizing the conversion funnel. Given this reality, a natural evolution has been to optimize processes by adapting them to complex and “large” B2B sales environments. We are talking about the adaptation of Inbound Marketing techniques to the reality of sales to large corporations in which several people are involved in the purchase decision-making process and in which the process is usually long. In these cases, the strategic objective of marketing is no longer the lead (the person interested in our product or service), but the account (the set of participants in a company in the purchase decision process). The approach has changed and so have the Marketing Automation tools, adapting data modeling and its management around the “account” instead of around the “lead”. The specificities of ABM deserve a separate treatment that we will not develop in this paper.
Integration with social networks
Many Marketing Automation platforms allow you to publish, share and track content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram). This is important because it allows you to take advantage of the diffusion capabilities of these networks and, on the other hand, to detect profiles interested in the published content. In fact, another element that can be used to score the lead is their engagement with the brand through social networks.
CRM Integrations
The basic tool of a sales department is the CRM. It is the place where records and their attributes are added, hence the importance of being able to have them integrated with Marketing Automation solutions. The objective of these integrations is none other than to automatically inform the CRM environment in the shortest possible time of the relevant information recorded in the Marketing Automation environment (for example, the change of an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) into an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead). The opposite also happens, when a salesperson updates in the CRM a piece of data obtained through an offline event (a trade fair for example), and this has to enter the automated marketing mechanism. Most Marketing Automation platforms have connectors with the CRMs of Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite and SugarCRM.