In the past, B2B transactions occurred in face-to-face meetings as a sales professional worked a product demo, business luncheon, or boardroom presentation to influence a customer – and close the deal. Today, however, B2B stakeholders perform much of their product and service research online. In fact, 93 percent of B2B buying starts with online searching, according to a Pinpoint Market Research study. This research occurs long before a customer engages with sales.
As your prospects research and evaluate your offerings, they leave behind valuable clues to their intent. Understanding these clues – cracking the code – can help you tailor your messages to them, thereby providing them a more tailored, relevant experience. As a result, business-savvy marketing and sales departments have embraced marketing automation platforms, so their respective teams can work together on one common platform, reach B2B customers online, and drive revenue.
Marketing automation platforms automate repetitive manual tasks for email campaigns, web forms, and landing pages, thereby freeing your marketing team to be more efficient, productive, and strategic. Equally important, marketing automation can align marketing and sales teams with vital revenue-producing tasks such as:
- Generating, nurturing, and scoring sales leads
- Improving customer loyalty and long-term engagement
- Cross-selling and upselling
- Measuring marketing ROI
As B2B buying has moved online, marketing automation has become a must-have technology for marketing and sales. Now they can reach customers wherever they are via email, targeted ads, social media platforms, and a company website – and deliver a contextual and tailored message to the right customer, in the right place, at the right time.
The companies that embrace automated marketing often enjoy increased revenue and decreased marketing costs. This is because marketing automation enables companies to automatically reach customers and prospects across multiple channels and cost-effectively target them with context-appropriate and personalized messages. Indeed, many B2B marketing professionals say marketing automation is critical to their company’s long-term business success.
