The benefits of B2B marketing automation platforms: What you need to know

The proliferation of digital channels and devices has made it difficult for B2B marketers to accurately target prospects with the right messages, on the right devices, at the right times.

Prospects are managing more of the buying process themselves, creating decision shortlists by researching brand websites and social channels without ever speaking to a sales rep.

To be effective, B2B marketers must be creative, targeted and aligned with sales goals; they must also have greater visibility into buyer attributes and behaviors.

Faced with these challenging market dynamics and increasing ROI pressure, B2B marketers at companies of all sizes can gain these benefits from a marketing automation platform:

• Increased marketing efficiency. Automating time-consuming, manual tasks around content creation, management and personalization; campaign scheduling and execution; data hygiene (i.e. duplicate or inconsistent data residing in various silos); communication with sales; and lead nurturing saves time and improves productivity.
• Enhanced ability to generate more and better-qualified leads. Marketing automation can combine multiple criteria, including demographic, firmographic and behavioral data (pages visited, downloads, filled out forms) with a lead scoring system to generate and identify sales-qualified leads.
• A multichannel view of prospect behavior. Today’s marketing automation platforms are integrating multiple channels and devices – including social media and mobile — to create more comprehensive prospect profiles and holistic views of prospect behavior.
• Better alignment of sales and marketing goals. Marketing automation software can help align sales and marketing efforts to ensure that sales reps are working with sales-ready leads. By working cooperatively to set scoring parameters and define qualified leads, sales and marketing become one team. Marketing works on building relationships with early-stage leads to enable sales to focus their efforts on the most highly qualified prospects.
• Improved lead conversion and ROI. Numerous studies have found that using a marketing automation system can increase conversions. Forrester found that B2B marketers implementing marketing automation experience a 10% increase in their sales-pipeline contribution. Marketing automation can result in a 15% increase in sales productivity as well as a 12% decrease in marketing overhead, according to tech research firm Nucleus Research.

For more in-depth info on B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, including a chart that shows the capabilities of 13 different vendors, download our Martech Intelligence Report!

About The Author

Pamela Parker

Pamela Parker is Research Director at Third Door Media's Content Studio, where she produces Martech Intelligence Reports and other in-depth content for digital marketers in conjunction with Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Digital Marketing Depot. Prior to taking on this role at TDM, she served as Content Manager, Senior Editor and Executive Features Editor. Parker is a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since its beginning. She's a former managing editor of ClickZ and has also worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing. Parker earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.