Marketing Automation

Are you guessing or do you know how your prospects make buying decisions? If you don’t know, don’t guess. Why? Because when you make assumptions about how your target audience makes decisions, you give up the opportunity to develop a B2B marketing strategy that gives your business a competitive advantage.

You need to create buyer personas that describe your prospects’ buying cycle, the questions they ask and the reasons why they decide to buy. When you have a buyer persona, it’s like going to MapQuest®, typing the “to” and “from” addresses, and getting detailed instructions on how to get from “creating awareness” to “sales.” 

It’s only natural for marketers involved in business-to-business lead generation to be attracted to the lure of marketing automation. It’s easy to be mesmerized by software, such as Act-On, HubSpot, Marketo and Eloqua, that tracks how Web visitors find your website, the pages they look at, the path they take from one page to the next, where they spend the most time, and what content they download. All of this creates a myriad of data points that marketing can use to optimize the website, attract more traffic, and provide more of the content that Web visitors love.

It doesn’t stop there. The software captures leads and sends emails to Web visitors based on the content they download. And it collects all the juicy tidbits marketers love to know about the leads and clients in a database.

Marketing automation software captivates us with its promise to personalize communication between our business and our prospects. By keeping an eye on the content a prospect engages in, it’s able to serve up the right messages to them at the right time, practically putting lead generation and nurturing programs on autopilot.

Marketing automation also empowers marketers to dig into data, understand what’s working and what’s not, and quickly adjust the dials of the marketing automation machine to optimize results.

Given this, it’s no wonder marketing automation solutions are selling like chilled lemonade at a mid-summer marathon. The Raab Report reports that revenues for B2B marketing automation systems will grow 50% to reach $750 million in 2013.