In order to reach their target audiences, marketers have to tackle complicated marketing campaigns and the automation of these campaigns seems to benefit both businesses and their customers. The implementation of marketing automation promises businesses of any scale to propel the productivity of their marketing activities and turn your marketing team into an actual revenue-generating machine. The chance to attract more leads in less time makes the deployment of marketing automation platform a very compelling offer. But what hides behind the curtain of these promises? Instead of providing reasons for marketing automation, let us take a closer look at the statistics. These figures will actually prove how imperative it is to deploy a marketing automation platform for modern B2B organizations.
The number of responsibilities and tactics the marketers need to test is permanently growing. Your marketing reps need to devise innovative tactics to attract as many leads as possible to then nurture them until the sales department gets them. They need to utilize sophisticated lead generation strategies and exploit every available resource. For example, email, content marketing, social media etc. Simply put, marketing automation is a technological solution that enables your company to nurture leads and turn them into clients via enthralling and relevant content. It allows marketers to organize their tasks in order to boost efficiency while keeping an eye on results. Now that we have this sorted out, let’s dig into these crucial facts.
Content Marketing
First things first, content marketing is crucially important for any B2B company as 83% of marketing reps use it to reach their lead generation goals and over a half of them consider content marketing efforts fruitful. These figures are expected to increase as 85% of B2B organizations have reported that lead generation is their top content marketing priority for 2016. However, there are legitimate obstacles that marketers face every day. For instance, high quality content is something left to be desired with 68% of marketers rating their content as inconsistent. Unfortunately, only 12% have a sense of optimized strategy. Despite that, 76% of B2B marketers are planning to produce even more content this year. Moreover, the companies who performed successful content marketing campaigns dedicate to it up to 46% of their total marketing budgets.
Email Marketing
Email is the most widely used marketing channel in B2B marketing and its effectiveness has been proved many times. So much so, that 60% of companies consider this communication channel as the best in terms of ROI. In fact, marketers are expected to invest $ 2.4 billion on email marketing. The popularity of email marketing is so overwhelming that 97% of B2B marketers confirm using an email marketing software of some sort. However, personalized approach holds the key to a successful email marketing campaign. Your open rates will increase by 10% and click-through rate will rise to 14% if you apply personalized tactics to your email marketing. The businesses should definitely consider deployment of excellent marketing automation platform, like bpm’online, if they ought to address each of their leads individually.
Social Media and Mobile
92% of B2B organizations say that social media are incredibly important for their companies. Although, 40% of social media advertisers are concentrating their efforts on brand awareness rather than lead gen. Social media can be a powerful lead generation tool as well. Actually, 80% of leads that were aggregated via social media come from LinkedIn. Moreover, the majority of B2B organizations admit that LinkedIn turned out to be the most efficient social media platform for their company. They also ranked Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and SlideShare as the most efficient platforms. 78% of businesses say they have distinct teams focused solely on social media. On the contrary, mobile marketing seems like more of an uncharted territory despite the fact that 86% of B2B customers research content on mobile. Moreover, 40% of these prospects open their emails on mobile first and then re-open them later on laptops. B2B companies continuously explore this area and the total mobile ad investments will top $100 billion worldwide as 44% of buyers are expecting brands to deliver their promo material to their mobile devices.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is one of the most significant aspects in marketing automation. To ensure the delivery of sale-ready leads to your sales representatives, your marketers need to concentrate on qualified leads who are not yet ready to buy. The lack of appropriate lead nurturing results in the fact that tremendous 79% of marketing leads never transform into sales. Marketing automation platform is capable of fixing that as businesses who nurture prospects make 50% more sales at a cost 33% cheaper than non-nurtured leads. Not only do these companies increase their sales rate, these nurtured leads actually make 47% larger purchases. Marketing automation is such an irreplaceable tool for lead nurturing that the majority of B2B companies report a 451% increase in qualified leads.
The digital space is moving forward at a light speed rate and if your company is ought to keep up with the ever-rising competition, it will have to implement process-driven automation tools. Otherwise, you will be left behind. B2B companies praise marketing automation for its ability to generate more and higher quality leads. It is an incredibly effective technology that will definitely improve your company’s productivity and revenues.
