One thing I’ve learned as a marketer is to lead with the data. 53% of companies that use marketing automation have higher conversion rates from marketing response to marketing qualified leads. Combine that with the fact that MA users experience a 20% increase in sales opportunities. The data speaks for itself.
Of course, there are strategies that can drive greater performance – like integrating your MA with your other systems, focusing on the quality of prospect data going into your MA database and closing the loop between your outbound and inbound marketing programs. You can read more about those tactics to increase the ROI on your marketing automation investment here.
In order to understand the effect marketing automation has had on marketing as a whole, it’s important to understand its roots. Check out the evolution of the marketing automation industry spanning 23 years. Even though it’s really only blossomed over the last eight to ten, this graphic pinpoints the first marketing automation tool (Unica) as having launched in 1992. Fueled by the customer-driven digital age, the last 5 years have seen $5.5B in acquisitions of and by key marketing automation players, in addition to well-received IPOs by HubSpot and Marketo in the last two years.
Here is a great example of taking a lot of information beyond just data and presenting it in a compelling way. It’s staggering to see the team investment that can be required to maintain scalable marketing automation practices.
I am surprised though that it doesn’t identify which team member/s are responsible for actually uploading third-party data into marketing automation. This aspect alone can bog organizations down. Five9 actually eliminated 40 hours a month in manual ops tasks by automating data validation and processing. You can read their story here.
It’s also interesting that two roles are identified as somewhat responsible for database cleanliness, but no one is actually accredited with owning it at the end of the day. This could be indicative that automation users have yet to put comprehensive data strategies in place and often feel powerless to keep databases clean and accurate.
Courtesy of Francois Mathieu at Uberflip, this infographic covers key terminology among five of the top marketing automation players: Marketo, Salesforce Pardot, HubSpot, Act-On and Oracle Eloqua. If you’re marketing a solution targeted towards automation users, it’s definitely helpful.
Speaking the language of your customers can be challenging when each group uses different nuances in terminology. Getting to know these differences and using the right words at the right time with the right person is paramount in the current era of engagement marketing.
Here’s a unique view of the benefits sales receives when they embrace (and utilize) marketing automation. When both sides of the team are using the same system, it can only promote greater sales-marketing alignment. Here’s another strategy we recommend to marketers seeking to build stronger relationships with sales peers.
Of course, this is no surprise coming from Salesforce Pardot – one of the most strategic sales and marketing alliances today. Speaking of Salesforce Pardot…
Even though Pardot has already made this list twice (and I certainly don’t intend to show favoritism) I couldn’t pass this one up because it really is about the power of integration. We’re burying ourselves in marketing tech, many on a mission to build extraordinary tech stacks. But until our tech is fully connected, we will fail to reap the full value.