Ever since marketing automation was introduced as a classification of software, it’s been sold as a way to increase the overall effectiveness of marketing operations. Features for automating workflows, tracking prospect behavior and qualifying leads help take a lot of the manual labor and guesswork out of marketing to help departments run more efficiently.
While many accept that marketing automation helps marketing campaigns run more efficiently, there hasn’t been much research on whether this efficiency results in improved effectiveness. After all, the ability to manage more prospects and score leads faster isn’t the same thing as doing a better job of managing those prospects.
Recently, a joint study by the Pedowitz Group and Lenskold Group recently set out to test the claim that marketing automation improves marketing effectiveness in the B2B arena. The study surveyed more than 350 marketing organizations involved in B2B lead generation and found marketing automation (combined with ROI metrics) helped make marketing operations more efficient and effective. Not only are departments that use ROI metrics in combination with marketing automation more effective, the top performing organizations actually outgrew their competitors.
The backs up these claims with hard statistics derived from marketing activities. The top segment – 11% of all marketers surveyed – demonstrated distinct advantages in outgrowing competitors by adopting integrated marketing automation and using ROI metrics. Beyond that, the report found that, after deploying a marketing automation solution, 48 percent of marketing organizations saw an increase in lead acceptance. Meanwhile, 28 percent or organizations saw an increase in revenue per sale.
CRMSoftware.TV recently caught up with representatives from the Pedowitz Group and Lenskold Group to discuss these findings, and a few surprises from the study. You can watch the full video interview here.
