Inbound marketing automation may be a new phrase to you. Don’t worry, you’re not alone in that category. Despite being around for at least a decade, inbound is finally starting to make its way into the mainstream. After researching the term, you may be wondering: Is inbound marketing automation really worth it?
Coming from a position of bias: yes, inbound marketing automation is worth it, for most companies. But one of the great things about an inbound approach is that it brings an element of objectivity to your marketing efforts through measurability.
The most important strategic goals of a marketing automation strategy are increasing lead generation (61 percent), lead nurturing (57 percent) and sales revenue (47 percent). Next are improving customer engagement (36 percent), marketing productivity (29 percent), and campaign targeting (22 percent).
With marketing automation you get to see which messaging and channels are working best, in order to help you achieve important strategic goals such as the ones outlined above. This gives guidance on where to put those precious dollars, and helps your marketing team focus on fine-tuning repeatable processes so you can scale the campaigns that work best. Perhaps, most importantly, the measurability of inbound marketing gives the marketing department accountability and credibility in the eyes of the C-Suite.
According to Aberdeen Research, companies that are best-in-class at aligning marketing and sales experience a 31.6 percent average year-over-year growth in annual company revenue, versus 18.2 percent for the average organization.
In today’s time-strapped economy, time is a crucial resource that we can’t seem to find enough of. By implementing a marketing automation platform, you’re setting up your team to improve the efficiency of your efforts. This happens in multiple ways, from creating reusable templates to save time on email and landing page creation, to creating multi-step automated programs that replicate successful campaigns and run non-stop, 24/7, with speed, scale, and accuracy. These and other programs create results that are difficult to achieve when done manually.
And with the extra time on your hands, there’s more opportunity for collaboration between the marketing and sales departments. Digital marketing has made it possible for sales and marketing to work together to determine lead qualification, nurturing strategies, and much more. Marketing automation provides the infrastructure that promotes collaboration, ensuring that the two teams have transparency and accountability to each other, in turn leading to better deals and more of them.
For example, according to tech publication VentureBeat, 80 percent of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77 percent saw the number of conversions increase.
Results from inbound marketing won’t come overnight. Like any other project, it takes time for your efforts to pay off. According to B2Bmarketing.net, only eight percent of companies see increased revenues within six months of adopting marketing automation. After one year of marketing automation use 32 percent claim to see increased revenue. For those to have been using it for more than two years the figure is 40 percent.
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