Beyond CRM & Onto Marketing Automation

Marketing professionals constantly have to deal with new developments within the industry and trying to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and innovations. CRM – or customer relationship management – is part of this, and is a key aspect of any business. In a recent article on Biz Community, columnist Lauren Heap writes how marketing automation has become a key piece of technology for CRM.

Marketing automation has the potential to reveal key pieces of information related to CRM, but only if implemented properly – it can help create new leads and aids marketers enormously. It can help marketers create and manage a presence across a number of different platforms, including social channels, websites and via email.

With all these profiles, however, it can be hard for marketers to keep on top of content produced on every channel. Luckily, marketing automation helps with this aspect, as it allows marketing professionals to schedule a number of different tasks which can become boring or repetitive. In this way, marketing automation can help to streamline the social media strategies of a business, giving marketing some free time to focus on other tasks.

Marketing automation can also help with lead management – instead of wasting time pursuing potentially useless leads, marketing automation uses lead scoring and grading to follow only the leads with the most potential.

According to research, marketing automation in the B2B industry generated $325 million in revenue in 2011 – with the industry only growing since then. In fact, it was predicted to reach a value of $1.9 billion by 2020.

Not only does marketing automation provide the above benefits, but it is also one way to ensure that the efforts of marketing professionals are noticed by all.