Some studies indicate that the marketing automation industry is about to reach $1 billion still I find many folks unable to understand the fundamental concept ofmarketing automation and its vitality for the modern marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation refers to utilization of technology and software platforms to market products/services on multiple channels and automate the repetitive tasks/assignments. Using marketing automation tools, you can easily communicate the intended messages at a given interval without doing anything manually.

Benefits of Marketing Automation:

Key Benefits of Marketing Automation include the following.

  • Reduced human error, improved HR performance and increased efficiency of the business.
  • An average increase of 77% in revenue.
  • 53% higher conversion rate
  • 65% deeper insight into prospect behavior
  • 74% top performing companies use automated nurturing and increase their sales by 20%
  • 78% marketers cite marketing automation as key factor in improving revenue.

Owing to the same, it is predicted that usage of automation platforms will soar up by 50% in the year 2015. You can check some interesting stats here.

Types of Marketing Automation Platforms:

There are different types of platforms and software that help you in a range of marketing activities.

We can divide them primarily into the following categories:

  • Marketing intelligence platforms
  • Marketing automation platforms
  • Integrated & Multi-Tasking Platforms

1. Marketing Intelligence:

These platforms use codes and track user behavior on different platforms; like social media, emails, and website pages. It helps marketers understand the prospect behavior as if someone is interested in buying/subscribing to a particular set of products/services or not. How many people clicked, open the email, bounced, visited site, and key pages can be learnt using these platforms.

2. Marketing Automation:

These platforms focus on marketing funnel and help marketers manage and convert the prospects. Based on a prospect’s engagement level, he is assigned a particular score and then using a range of channels, the marketing messages are sent. It is generally known as drip marketing, famous for salesforce drip marketing campaigns. This practice is common in business-to-business (B2B), business-to-government (B2G), or high volume business-to-consumer (B2C) sales exercises. Email marketing platforms like: MailChimp, constant contact, and Makesbridge offer this service.

3. Integrated & Multi-Tasking Platforms:

This is probably new and very popular series of platforms. These platforms help companies in the following areas:

  • Internal marketing process
  • Campaigns management
  • Deep analytics (social, web, email)
  • Tight Integration with 3rdparty apps, email and social platforms. Like integration with LinkedIn, Gmail, Salesforce etc.
  • Cloud apps store different platform contacts at one place

These platforms are turning more popular as compared to the other ones. The reason is them being one-stop-shop for all marketing needs. Companies are able to manage their internal marketing process, obtain integrated analytics, plan better, and utilize multiple platforms from single dashboard. HubSpot, Makesbridge, Marketo, and Eloqua can be cited as example here.

Marketers look at three things before subscribing to a marketing automation system: price, platform integration (CRM/social/ mobile), and ease of use.

The 2015 Perspective:

Looking at the New Year coming ahead, marketers must set their priorities and set them right. From Fortune500 to small entities, B2B companies are adopting marketing automation very fast.

According to the research by SiriusDecision, the marketing automation platforms have a penetration rate of 20% and by the end of 2015; the adoption will grow to 50%. In addition, the penetration rate is not equal in all industries as high tech and software industry is demonstrating much higher than average adoption rate. Depending on your industry and unique business needs, automate your marketing process, save time, nurture prospects automatically, and close better deals. 74% best performing B2B companies have already started using one or more marketing automation platforms.

If you want to optimize your marketing campaigns and achieve more than what you did in 2014, I recommend a fresh marketing strategy with adoption of automation. If you are confused about a product or tool, you should go for the product trial and learn the platform before formally signing up. All popular platforms provide a Free trial. At Makesbridge, we offer a 30-day Free trial with video tutorials, guides, and support that helps clients learn the product before signing up.