Is Marketing Automation Right for Your Business?

Marketing automation can be extremely successful in enhancing communication and generating leads. Is it right for your company?

Marketing automation allows businesses to create a standardized process to distribute their digital marketing. Typically, this includes e-mail, social media, content marketing, and the rest of the digital marketing tactical mix. Marketing automation gives businesses a system through which they can send potential and existing customers materials based on their wants, needs, and behaviors.

Marketing automation has become a prominent way for businesses of all kinds to enhance their lead generation, sales, and communication with their audiences. It can strongly support certain marketing strategies.

When You Don’t Need Marketing Automation

Of course, nothing is right for everyone.

If you have a small potential customer base, investing in marketing automation—the cost of the system and the time needed to maintain it and feed it new content—likely doesn’t make sense. After all, your sales team may be able to reach out to your target client base on a personal basis regularly enough.

And speaking of the care-and-feeding aspects of marketing automation—they’re extensive. Take the time to read our article on the five realities of marketing automation before you invest. If you can’t handle the ongoing need for quality, useful content tailored to your audiences, including blog posts and articles, video, fresh and captivating imagery, examples and case studies, infographics, and more, marketing automation doesn’t fit your business reality.

How Businesses Use Marketing Automation

Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) brands successfully use marketing automation, but they use it in very different ways.

For B2B, marketing automation often focuses on lead generation and customer engagement by automating prospect interactions to better manage the customer-acquisition process. A B2B brand would use marketing-automation tools like CRM integration, lead scoring, and e-mail marketing.

On the B2C side, marketing automation uses e-mail and social marketing, loyalty programs, and in-store data capture to build the brand, inculcate brand loyalty, encourage referrals and buzz, and develop relationships with consumers.

In B2B and B2C cases, marketing automation results in increased revenue, but the way to this end goal is specific and tailored to the way the brand’s sales work.

Case Studies: Marketing Automation That Works

Here are a few examples of companies successfully using marketing automation:

• Microsoft: Microsoft started using marketing automation in 2013 to sell its software to a consumer audience. Marketing automation helped the company build detailed customer segments, enabling more personalized communications.
• Amazon: Amazon is genius at marketing automation. It uses a number of automations to increase the amount of money people spend on its site, including sending product surveys that gauge customer satisfaction while adding user-generated content to the site, suggesting additional products based on user behavior, and providing updates on products customers have searched for or purchased in the past.
• Siemens: Siemens’s PLM Software used marketing automation to streamline how it sent its content, which included case studies, analyst commentary, and product information, to its target audiences of large enterprise prospects as well as small and midsized companies. As the company used to do everything manually, including responses, marketing automation made it much more efficient—which made a global campaign possible.
• Skyline at Skybay: Skyline at Skybay, a trade show and events company, employed a marketing automation system when it launched a new blog, landing pages, and enhanced SEO. The automation led to 158 percent increase in lead generation and a 726 percent increase in organic traffic.
• The Hope Line: To increase awareness among teens, The Hope Line, a faith-based nonprofit, saw a 119 percent increase in social media reach in the first 9 months and a 71 percent increase in website traffic in the first 6 months after deploying marketing automation.

Preparing for Marketing Automation Success

Marketing automation can lead to added success for your business, but you must remember two important things:

1. Marketing automation won’t work if you don’t have a solid marketing strategy and plan in place before you begin (in fact, before you even choose a system).
2. Marketing automation is not about saving time, it is about increasing effectiveness.

Wondering whether marketing automation would support your strategy? Contact FrogDog.

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