Introduction to Marketing Automation platforms: benefits and features

We want this introduction to Marketing Automation platforms to answer two fundamental questions. The first revolves around the benefits they bring to a marketing department, while the second revolves around the specific functionalities that can be found in this type of technology.

Benefits of a Marketing Automation platform

Marketing departments, especially in B2B companies, are undergoing a major transformation, as their target audience is characterised by the following: interacting with the brand through multiple channelsboth on and off line, and for being increasingly more autonomous in the purchasing decision making process (the customer has many more tools at his disposal to search for, consider and evaluate different suppliers).

As a result, marketing is adopting strategies aimed at "listening to" and "qualifying" leads on a large scale by optimising coordination processes with sales.

In such a context, the main benefits that Marketing Automation platforms can bring to marketers are the following Marketing Automation platforms can bring to marketers are as follows following:

Increased process efficiency

The automation of tasks around the creation and distribution of content, personalisation of messages, scheduling and content creation and distribution, message personalisation, campaign scheduling and execution, or the campaigns or the treatment and qualification of leads, drastically reduces the time spent on these drastically reduces the time spent on these tasks. This leads to greater efficiency and productivity.

Increase in the number and quality of leads to be managed

This is due to the capabilities to automate data management processes at scale, both sociodemographic, profile and behavioural data management processes, both socio-demographic, profile and behavioural (page views, downloads, email opens and clicks, etc.), combined with lead qualification systems through scoring systems. lead qualification through scoring systems.

A multi-channel view of prospect behaviour

Marketing automation platforms integrate multiple channels and devices, including social media and mobile devices, allowing you to create much more complete and integrated views of prospects.

Better alignment of sales and marketing objectives

Thanks to lead qualification functionalities, sales managers see an improvement in the quality of the leads they receive. The tension between quantity and quality of leads generated by marketing is reduced and the productivity of the sales department is increased.

Functionalities of Marketing Automation platforms

There are some standard functionalities that define this category within the MarTech category of MarTech as a whole. These are:

• Management of Email Marketing campaigns.
• Landing page management.
• Lead management (capture, nurturing and scoring).
• Email Marketing campaign reports and landing page conversion.

On top of this set of functionalities, the different providers have been adding improvements that significantly increase the potential of these tools. The main ones are:

Personalisation based on dynamic content management

Some platforms have developed systems in which content in emails, landing pages and even websites can be dynamically emails, landing pages and even web pages can be dynamically assembled once we have identified the user who is going to we have identified the user who is going to interact with the support. Most commonly This functionality is most commonly found in the field of email, since the management of dynamic dynamic content management has been part of the industry standards for many years. industry standards for many years. The main advantage of personalisation based on dynamic content is automation and scalability. content is the automation and scalability of a large number of versions in real time. versions in real time.

Lead Management

The most advanced platforms allow you to integrate lead capture from different sources (web visitors, landing pages and forms, paid advertising campaigns, CRM or social networks). Once we have the lead in the centralised database, it will be the combination of their profile (socio-demographic and psychographic), behaviour (based on recency, frequency) and the content with which they interact (clicks on email campaigns, content downloads, participation in surveys, etc.), which will determine their score. The more data we have about the user, the finer the score can be and therefore the higher the quality of the lead that will receive sales.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Marketing Automation applied through Inbound Marketing strategies has proven to be very effective in optimising the conversion funnel. Given this reality, a natural evolution has been to optimise processes by adapting them to complex and "big" B2B sales environments. We are talking about the adaptation of Inbound Marketing techniques to the reality of sales to large corporations in which several people are involved in the purchase decision making process and in which the process is usually long. In these cases, the strategic marketing objective is no longer the lead (the person interested in our product or service), but the account (the group of people involved in a company in the purchase decision process). The approach has changed and so have Marketing Automation tools, adapting data modelling and management around the "account" rather than the "lead". The specificities of ABM deserve a separate treatment that we will not develop in this paper.

Integration with social networks

Many Marketing Automation platforms allow you to publish, share and track content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram). This is important because it allows, on the one hand, to take advantage of the dissemination capabilities of these networks and, on the other hand, to detect profiles interested in the published content. In fact, another of the elements that can be used to score the lead is its engagement with the brand through social networks.

CRM integrations

The basic tool of a sales department is the CRM. It is the place where the records and their attributes are added, hence the importance of being able to have them integrated with Marketing Automation solutions. The objective of these integrations is none other than to automatically and as quickly as possible inform the CRM environment of the relevant information recorded in the Marketing Automation environment (e.g. the change of an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to a SQL (Sales Qualified Lead). It also happens the other way around, when a salesperson updates in the CRM a piece of information obtained through an offline event (a trade fair for example), and this has to be entered into the automated marketing mechanism. Most Marketing Automation platforms have connectors with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite and SugarCRM CRMs.