#1 Harness the value of the ‘empowered consumer’

Whether they are in the market for B2C or B2B products and services, digitally empowered consumers want to deal with the companies that address their needs most effectively. Marketing automation software enables you to deliver more intelligent and impactful messages to your audience, based on a better understanding of their needs at a given moment.

#2 Focus on the landing page so prospects are more likely to convert

#3 Engage in lead nurturing, not ‘drip marketing’

#4 Segmentation and workflows are the building blocks of marketing automation

"Marketing automation allows you to utilize social applications such as polls and referral programs that will get your followers engaging with your page and your company. 

Marketing automation software has features that make this social advertising most effective. Marketing automation lets you optimize social campaigns in real time, share your community stories and reach customers based on their pages and activity. The software makes sure your ads are targeted appropriately, and you can remain engaged with any ads you post.

Marketing automation software allows you to schedule posts on one or multiple pages, gain analytics on your social media pages and lets you use fun tricks such as URL shortening to create a more visually appealing post.

The social sharing button that marketing automation provides will track who is sharing your posts and, therefore, driving conversions around your brand."

The most common cause of marketing automation failure is the lack of well targeted, high-quality content. It takes true marketing expertise to illuminate buyer personas clearly and map messages to personas, buying processes and product lines. Few brands, even the largest, have this expertise in house.

The result is typically relying on a small handful of messages and content in all campaigns. Many companies create one white paper and use it for lead generation, lead nurturing and cold leads. The wrong messages end up in the wrong hands at the wrong time. When an active prospect receives messages about problems they don’t have or products they’ve already decided against, serious damage can be done to revenue.

Marketing automation has moved quickly to fill the void of knowledge and new skills required to navigate this unfamiliar marketing terrain. In fact, marketing automation is growing so quickly – 50 percent annually, according to some numbers – that some industry analysts have turned their attention to the possibility of a ‘marketing automation software bubble’.  

Why has this fast-growing marketing automation field only achieved three percent penetration in the non-tech mid-market sector? For almost all companies in America, marketing automation is still very much an unknown quantity in the business world. The high-end of the market has about a 20 percent rate of penetration. These numbers are almost baffling given the 50 percent growth rate in the field and the fact that marketing automation software can provide valuable benefits for business growth and relevancy.

WHY A THREE PERCENT PENETRATION RATE FOR MID-MARKET COMPANIES?

New data from SimilarTech shows the annual growth of the leading automation platforms in 2016. The insights show which platforms are more widely used among the biggest sites in the world (top 1 million). The chart above shows that HubSpot remains the undisputed leader, with over 4000 sites opting for what many consider the creators of the 'inbound marketing' concept as we know it today. In second place, Marketo remains a leading platform but TowerData and LiveRamp have nearly as many users. 

Some of the fastest-growing players such as LiveRamp are focusing on collecting and providing superior customer data to empower their customers to personalize their campaigns more efficiently. Other companies are focusing their platforms on perfecting a single element of the outbound marketing operation. For example, TowerData's platform focuses on email marketing - with a product that that aims to increase email engagement and conversions. 

If we look at the annual growth, we can see how LiveRamp and TowerData are exponentially growing. However, all other players have increased their customer base by at least 40% in the past year, showing that there's ample room for growth across the entire industry. Pardot, OutMarket and Emarsys managed to double their penetration among the biggest sites in 2016 alone.

1. Chatbots

2. Rise of In-the-moment campaigns: Marketers can use real-time social listening platforms so that a customer’s activity on social media triggers marketing messages.

3. Audience targeting eyeing OTS: More and more audience targeting will be driven by cross-channel marketing strategy with a view to increase a customer’s “opportunity to see” (OTS).

4. Unified view of the customer

5. Analytics

6. Mass hyper-personalisation

7. Rise of the CDOs: More than ever before, brands need to go digital or risk failure. Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) are the leaders driving this organisational change. 

Market driver: Increased need for improved customer digital experience

Market challenge: Interoperability issues and lack of comprehensive integration strategy

Market trend: Increasing adoption of omnichannel marketing model

Using a slightly dry but useful typology model, we can look at the various development stages of CRM.

• Operational CRM: 'reengineering the customer-facing business processes and systems to ensure the efficiency and accuracy of day-to-day operations across sales, marketing and customer service'.
• Analytical CRM: Storing, extracting, interpreting and reporting on customer data - to optimise business decisions and support customer-centricity.
• Collaborative CRM: 'integration of the front- and back-office processes that combine to support customer interactions.'
• Social CRM: Deliver a consistent customer experience across social media, using analytics to support customer conversations and response handling. Integration of social data with broader CRM.

1. 42% of B2B marketers plan to test or deploy marketing automation this year (DemandGen Report)
2. 59% of companies do not fully use the technology they have available (Ascend2)
3. 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in leads (VentureBeat)
4. 12% of marketing automation users saw an increase of leads by 50% or more (VentureBeat)
5. 10% of marketers feel they are able to fully execute mature marketing automation strategies (Forrester)
6. 80% of B2B marketers consider it a core requirement of their jobs to understand and use marketing technology (Forrester)

What results have they achieved before?

What does ‘multi-channel’ communications truly look like?

How is email deliverability configured?

Does the technology include an integrated report builder?

How do they attribute ROI?

Where will data reside?

Is training available to help replace lost skill-sets?

What if you encounter a problem?

How would you do X?

What does the product roadmap look like?

Choose your marketing automation tool wisely, depending on which level you’re at and what your long-term marketing plan needs in order to be realized.

• Level one tools are for entry-level, solopreneurs.
• Level two tools are for mid-range businesses serious about growing.
• Level three tools are for enterprise companies with robust teams that need one-on-one consulting and deep third-party integration.

Avoid making the same mistake as other companies who select the wrong tool that’s either too difficult to use or includes a bloated feature set they don’t really need.