What are marketing automation tools? Benefits & key features

Table of contents:

• What are the types of marketing automation?
• What to look for in marketing automation tools
• How to use marketing automation tools
• Why use marketing automation for your business?

Marketing automation platforms are available from many vendors — at a range of prices and feature sets — to fit the needs of all sorts of organizations. That said, to better understand what marketing automation can do in different industries and situations, we can sort all of the options into a few basic types: B2B, B2C, small business, and mobile marketing automation.

Let’s take a look at these four types of automation, and how each is suited to the specific marketing and sales needs of a given market segment.

The business-to-business (B2B) arena has traditionally been the home of marketing automation. That’s because B2B prospects and customers form a small, focused target market, which is usually:

• Engaged in a multistage procurement process
• Part of an ongoing relationship of repeat business

This makes B2B a relationship-driven environment where product education and awareness building are vital. It’s also an arena where purchases are not made by individuals on the spur of the moment; instead, buying decisions are considered and rational, and usually involve more than one person.

B2B purchasing also takes time, spanning weeks, months, or longer from the start of the process to its conclusion. Generally speaking, then, B2B lead nurturing is a longer process than business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, and B2B prospects do a lot of research before they are ready to speak to a salesperson, let alone are ready to buy.

These characteristics — a long marketing-to-sales evolution, combined with customer research generating multiple data points that can be analyzed — make marketing automation software very well-suited to the B2B environment.

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If B2B marketing automation is all about long sales cycles, businesses marketing to consumers (B2C) is all about convincing potential buyers in a much shorter time frame. Tracking potential customer behavior to determine messaging strategies is a big part of B2C marketing automation, just as it is in B2B.

The big difference lies in the duration of campaigns. Consumer campaigns need to gain the customer’s interest right away, then keep the road to checkout short, simple, and enticing.

That’s not to say there’s no place in B2C for longer-term approaches to building a customer base. Garnering brand loyalty and trust is vital, as is market education. But the path from prospect to sale in B2C is different from the multi-touchpoint journey of B2B, with its emphasis on product knowledge.

When a B2C customer is passed from marketing to sales, they should ideally have:

• Familiarity with the brand and product set
• A compelling impulse to complete the purchase

In terms of marketing automation, this means a nurturing process that builds brand awareness, and a quick sales process that requires little-to-no involvement from a sales team.

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Marketing automation isn’t just for Fortune 500 companies with Fortune 500-size budgets. Automation can be a small business’ best friend, handling tasks and surfacing insights that smaller organizations just don’t have the human resources to tackle. A new breed of marketing automation software for small businesses offers key benefits, plus the ability to grow with your business, without blowing your budget.

A few great reasons to consider marketing automation for small businesses:

1. Attract and nurture leads. Capturing leads online starts with developing a great online presence. Automation platforms help with everything from building optimized landing pages, forms, and other site pages, to measuring which of your content engages leads. A good platform can also dynamically guide leads through the right content journeys based on their interests and activity.
2. Eliminate the guesswork. Let the data tell you which messaging drives the most engagement, and how often customers actually open and read your emails. By running your campaigns through an automation platform, this data is collected and reported automatically.
3. Respond quickly. According to the Harvard Business Review, prospects are seven times more likely to buy from a company that responds to their inquiry within an hour. Why keep customers waiting when an automation platform can ensure that your brand is known for prompt replies?

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what automation can do for a small business. A well-implemented platform can help your small business marketing and sales teams perform like an enterprise business, but at a fraction of the cost.

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For increasing numbers of people today, a mobile device functions as their main computer. Even office workers who rely on a laptop for creating and presenting documents turn to their phones for most everything else. Mobile marketing automation takes the capabilities of traditional marketing automation and applies them to the mobile era.

This can include a range of features, but generally centers around:

• Personalized, real-time messaging
• Analytics and A/B testing of content
• Integration with apps and other data sources coming from the user’s mobile device

Connecting directly to customers’ mobile devices is a powerful way to build active, personalized relationships, in both B2B and B2C, regardless of the size of your business. Automated mobile marketing can help drive real-time communication and integrate your messaging with other apps and data on customers’ phones, once they have opted-in to your campaign.

The benefits of marketing automation for B2B, B2C, and small businesses are clear. But as we mentioned, automation platforms come in all shapes and sizes. Which software is right for your organization? Let’s take a look at what to look for in a marketing automation platform in the next section.

What kinds of tools are we talking about when we talk about marketing automation? Table stakes for modern marketing automation software includes:

Email marketing — building and managing personalized email campaigns

Social media marketing — crafting social media personas and guiding user experiences
Mobile messaging — using SMS, MMS, and push notifications to engage customers
Managing ads — aligning advertising across every channel

Don’t expect marketing automation software to craft dazzling copy and eye-catching visuals to bring those campaigns to life for you: Human creativity and a little elbow grease still carry the day. What you should expect from a good set of automation marketing tools is the ability to manage individual campaigns, cross-channel campaigns, and personalized 1-to-1 customer journeys based on those campaigns.

Most marketing automation software is sold as a platform — an integrated suite of tools with a feature set. The automation tools, and the specific capabilities of each tool, of course vary from platform to platform. That said, you can expect most marketing automation platforms to have tools and features to assist or automate the management of the following:

• Lead capture
• Lead scoring and management
• Lead nurturing
• Campaign management
• Content management
• CRM integration
• Analytics and reporting

Get to know your prospects and what they’re looking for. Learn who they are, what role they play (for B2B marketers), what their pain points are, and how you can help. A common technique is to set up a lead capture page (that is, a landing page). Lead capture pages often ask visitors for something in exchange for a reward. For example, a user may be asked to enter her email address, zip code, and job title in exchange for a downloadable e-book or white paper, an entry to a sweepstakes raffle, or a promotional coupon or discount code.

Use demographics, behavioral data, and other prospect information to separate hot leads from “just browsing.” Route leads into nurture and drip campaigns based on their qualifications. Every company scores leads a little differently, but the main goal is to identify the most promising leads for your organization at a given time or for a given campaign. A lead score assesses the activities that a prospect has engaged with on your website, for example, downloaded a datasheet, watched a demo video, or filled out a contact form. A lead grade is assigned by demographic information, such as industry, title, company information, or market size. The combination of the lead score and grade will signal to marketing and sales who’s hot and ready to purchase, and who needs more nurturing via a drip campaign.

Sending one-off emails every two weeks is not the way to nurture leads, especially in the long sales cycles of the B2B world. Automated nurturing lets you track engagement with your emails, website, and other properties, and use that data to drip-feed the right content at the right times along each prospect’s journey.

From A/B testing of messages to SEO and social listening, automated campaign management handles the gathering and processing of marketing data, so you can focus on strategy. From qualifying leads and managing nurture campaigns, to analyzing ROI data across multiple channels, automated campaign management systems allow you to design, deploy, and monitor marketing activities without having to manually tend to every last step in the process.

One product sheet does not fit all. Draft copy, design emails and social media posts, and craft customized assets, all within your marketing automation platform. Content management systems also handle tagging and organizing of assets for repurposing across multiple formats and locations, so that you only need to upload an image or an asset once, and it runs everywhere. A content management system within your marketing automation platform also makes updating assets a breeze: Replacing the existing file with an updated one ensures that images and assets will be up to date across all campaigns, no matter how old or recent, so that links and images don’t render broken.

A hot prospect just signed up for your newsletter? Great! Now create a new lead for them in your CRM. Let the software guide them into the appropriate drip or nurture campaign, send a welcome message, and track engagement. While you’re at it, let the software also gather behavioral data and alert your sales team when the prospect is active on your channels. Marketing automation platforms that integrate with CRM do the grunt work for you.

When your marketing is automated, it’s easy to capture tons of data. Let your marketing automation platform take the next step and crunch the numbers for you, yielding insights and alerts to help you tweak active campaigns and more effectively plan new ones. If your marketing and CRM are integrated, it’s also a snap to tie ROI directly back to campaigns and other marketing activities using closed-loop reporting.

• Automate your email.
• Set a drip marketing automation program.
• Integrate marketing automation with CRM.

It’s one thing to be familiar with the tools found in marketing automation platforms. It’s another to actually use the tools to successfully grow your business. From freeing up time spent on grunt work to devote toward strategy and planning, to getting your marketing and sales teams on the same page, sharing the same data, and moving the needle together, marketing automation can work wonders for your business. Here’s how.

Automated email is a core component of marketing automation platforms, and with great reason. Automating your email is much more than scheduling messages to send when nobody’s at the computer. With email marketing automation, you can trigger workflows based on specific user actions ranging from signing up for your newsletter to abandoning an online shopping cart after putting items in it. Depending on the trigger action — and the user’s profile — anything from a simple email send to an adaptive content campaign can be set into motion.

As customers move through their buying journeys, your automated email tools move with them. Newly segmented mailing lists can be auto-generated based on new user data. The content and timing of email campaigns can be changed when users change their preferences, and as they pass through the marketing funnel.

This type of email automation is also called a drip campaign, or drip marketing. Sending your audience a series of messages over time nurtures them at a comfortable pace while growing their interest. It works, too: Research shows that automated emails get 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails, and emails with relevant content drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails.

Think of it as regular care for a garden, with each plant — or customer — getting exactly what they need to thrive over time.

Marketing automation platforms are awesome on their own. But integrating your automation with a CRM system takes everything to a new level.

A few of the many great reasons to connect your marketing automation and CRM tools together:

• Give your sales team the best leads. Marketing automation systems gather all kinds of data on prospects, and use that data to score and grade leads. Connect the system to CRM, and automatically pass the best-scoring leads on to your sales teams.
• Tailor your messaging. Speaking of data, flowing information from automated marketing to CRM lets you arm your sales teams with detailed behavioral profiles on prospects. Now they can tailor pitches and build the kind of individual relationships that win deals.
• Nurture leads throughout the journey. When marketing and sales work together, leads who aren’t yet ready to buy don’t slip through the cracks — they’re nurtured until they’re ready to make deals.
• Customize messages to grab their attention. That behavioral data we already talked about? It keeps coming in handy. Leverage what you learn about prospects to send targeted messages, personalized to what they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle.
• Highlight campaigns that move the needle. When you tie a marketing automation system to CRM, you can map closed deals back to the campaigns that created them. From there it’s a breeze to pinpoint the marketing campaigns that impact revenue, and plan future strategies and spends accordingly.

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• The benefits of marketing automation
• Generate better leads
• Nurturing leads
• Personalizing the customer journey
• Better data for smarter decisions
• Get sales and marketing on the same page
• Build a 360-degree view of your customers

Marketing automation can help your business succeed. True, but so can lots of other things. So why use marketing automation tools and strategies? What are the benefits of marketing automation to your business?

For starters, marketing automation works. Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead overall, according to Nucleus Research. Digging into the data yields even more compelling numbers for small businesses: A study by the Annuitas Group reveals that companies using marketing automation to nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads. Those nurtured leads, in turn, make purchases 47% larger than their non-nurtured counterparts.

Research also shows that marketing automation is growing fastest within the CRM space. And as the graphic above shows, Salesforce customers report an average 25% increase in marketing ROI after adopting CRM.

The data doesn’t lie: Automation can help businesses realize increased marketing ROI and overall growth. More specifically, how can marketing automation benefit your business? Let’s start with lead generation.

Lead generation is an extremely important step in any business’ growth. Automating the many steps between marketing and sales gives your team more time to focus on overall strategy and nurturing the leads that show real promise. That means more prospects, and more customers.

Marketing automation can also give you a richer, more detailed picture of potential customer behavior.

Using behavioral tracking methods such as following a user’s path through your website, marketing automation software can help your marketing team understand prospects’ interests and where they are in the purchasing lifecycle. Follow-ups can then be customized around those insights.

For instance, say a particular customer is reading about a broad category of products. This might indicate that they are at the beginning of the purchasing process, researching and comparing while preparing a short list. If they later download white papers on a specific product, that could indicate a narrowed focus, and a readiness to talk with a salesperson.

Bringing together information from touchpoints — including website visits and downloads, social media activity, and direct marketing — enables automatic scoring, qualifying, and prioritizing of leads. This, in turn, can drive wider marketing campaigns, including:

• Trigger-based marketing messages
• Infrequent “drip-feed” emails to maintain interest
• Personalized emails
• Facebook or Twitter messages

Nurturing leads can be tricky and time-consuming. Guiding a lead through the journey is absolutely worth it when it ends in a sale, but not all of your leads are going to convert to sales. In fact, according to Gleanster Research, 50% of the leads businesses generate are qualified, but not ready to buy right now.

For a small business, that can create a dilemma: You know roughly half of your leads are qualified, but still need nurturing. But with a small team handling both sales and marketing, you can’t exactly afford to keep constant tabs on half of your leads. Don’t stress! Computers were invented for precisely this reason: To do the work humans just don’t have the time for. Marketing automation can help.

Personalized content is key to nurturing leads. According to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, 77% of buyers want unique, targeted content at each stage of their research. Marketing automation tools simplify the process of getting the right content to the right buyer at the right time. They also capture data from all of that content: Which emails are customers opening and clicking on? What posts are performing well on your social media channels, and how is that converting to website visits and other user actions? Are mobile messages driving engagement? Automated data capture can answer these and many other questions relevant to your content marketing strategies.

Take the example of Dell, the well-known computer maker. After noticing heavy volumes of traffic to their online store without many sales to show for it, Dell leveraged behavior analysis. Creating new ads based on customers’ web histories, products viewed, and products left in web shopping carts resulted in a 70% increase in click-through rates and 300% higher conversion rates.

Data gathered by a marketing automation system is also super effective for qualifying leads on the marketing side before passing them on to sales. Lead scoring and lead grading are two ways a good automation system captures and processes visitor data to trigger automatic routing of qualified leads to the right sales reps.

It seems like everyone is talking about “big data” these days, but few businesses have a grasp on how to collect and utilize it. Marketing automation allows you to effortlessly embrace big data, collecting valuable intelligence at scale and putting it immediately to work.

By providing a single platform for dashboarding and analytics, closed-loop reporting, and collecting and storing data, marketing automation platforms are the most comprehensive solution for measuring campaigns and predicting consumer behavior on a small business budget. One of the many benefits of a marketing automation platform is the ability to assemble a more complete profile of your prospects than ever before. A/B test marketing assets to find the techniques that work best, and truly understand how sales and marketing are impacting the bottom line.

It’s no secret that in many organizations, integration between sales and marketing can get a little rocky. But why? As technology continues to evolve and shape the buying cycle, the work of marketing and sales only grows closer together, making efficient collaboration more important than ever.

Misalignment between the two departments isn’t necessarily the fault of one or the other. The fault lies with outdated processes and structures. When marketing and sales work with different tools toward separate goals, it’s only natural for tensions to build. Fortunately, marketing automation can help by improving lead quality, increasing revenue, and automating traditionally manual processes like lead assignment and follow-up.

Ready to take this whole marketing automation thing to the next level? Pair it with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Integrating CRM with marketing automation helps you delve into detailed behavioral tracking, like the pages your prospects are visiting, the types of content they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle. Suddenly you’ve got incredible insight into exactly what your leads are interested in, which lets you custom-tailor everything from content marketing to sales pitches.

Which brings us to the final part of the journey, for us and for your buyers. Time to go all the way down the funnel to sales, where it’s essential to keep the pipeline flowing.