Marketing automation

For years, marketing automation has been at the top of the list of top priorities for marketers. Marketing automation stands for automating marketing processes in your business. This can be applied in different forms. In most cases, marketing automatization revolves around optimizing the customer journey in B2B marketing. B2B marketing is business-to-business, with the goal of lead nurturing and lead generation. This means that companies generate other companies as prospects(lead generation), start nurturing them (lead nurturing) and then make them customers. The goal of marketing automation is:

• Increasing marketing ROI
• Measuring performance
• Realizing customers

Forms of marketing automation

Marketing automation can be used in endless ways. Some examples include:

• E-mail communication - Newsletters or white papers
• Personalized content on the website
• Text messages
• Driven advertising campaigns

It then looks at the situation, what one knows about the prospect and the behavior he or she is exhibiting. This behavior is also called trigger. Examples of triggers are opening the e-mail, visiting a certain page, downloading a file and engagement in the form of likes, comments and shares, for example. The situation is then analyzed and data-driven decisions can be made.

Marketing automation benefits

More and more marketers are running into the problem that customers are no longer loyal, consumer behavior continues to change online, there will be a decrease in email traffic due to the shift to social media and SMS communication, and mass communication is becoming expensive compared to what it delivers. Because marketing automation consists of software what directly supports lead realization, this form of marketing is increasingly popular among marketers. This strategy offers benefits such as:

• Lead generation - More and better leads are automatically realized
• Knowledge - You will learn more about your visitors, their behavior and how to personalize communication leading to lead conversion
• Insight - Link sales and conversion registration to marketing automation, in a CRM system, for example. This allows you to analyze which actions and channels led to the result