B2B Marketing Automation Challenges, Rewards Businesses

Companies that are challenged by marketing automation (MA) deployments will exist happy to acquire that they're not solitary. Sixty percent of companies struggle to find the resource necessary to successfully deploy MA within their system, according to a study conducted by Econsultancy on behalf of Act-On Software. Fifty percent of survey respondents said their company doesn't have the skilled feel to get the almost out of MA.

Other factors that contribute to less-than-ideal deployments are data management (48 percent), software complexity (44 pct), and integrating MA tools with other legacy software (37 pct), co-ordinate to the report. Just over half (53 percent) of business-to-business (B2B) organizations surveyed are already using MA and 37 percent say they are planning to implement it. Yet, 10 percent of B2B companies that haven't implemented MA aren't planning to do so at all. Despite the challenges, 90 percent of respondents who take implemented MA said they have no plans to change vendors.

The majority of companies (38 percent) that have deployed MA were able to testify return on investment (ROI) within three to vi months. Six percent of companies were able to generate ROI in less than a month, and fourteen pct were able to bear witness ROI between one and three months afterwards deployment. Unfortunately, it took 26 per centum of companies 6 months to one year to realize ROI, and it took longer than ane year to attain ROI for 16 per centum of companies.

"Marketing automation is a somewhat a new concept for the mainstream audience, which ways there is still a fundamental lack of marketing automation expertise," said Michelle Huff, CMO at Human activity-On Software. We still encounter a divide betwixt those marketers who know how to utilize and those who do not know how to use marketing automation. This is why it is an important lease for vendors to offer and provide continuous learning and educational activity to help continue marketers at the forefront of the marketing automation game and skilled on the latest use cases."

What Is Marketing Automation?

MA software lets you create pre-programmed email sequences designed past using if/then branching elements. Contacts are funneled through an automation based on how they interact with marketing collateral, such every bit email opens, link clicks, web form submissions, and abased e-commerce shopping carts.

Like to e-mail marketing software vendors, MA vendors design templates that guide marketers through the automation process. The templates start with a basic interaction, such equally a "Welcome" or a "Thank you for making a purchase" message. A recipient is so guided through a sequence based on his or her deportment.

"I've always considered marketing automation a foundational tool, a cornerstone really, of the modern B2B marketing technology stack because of the control it allows, consolidating the functionalities yous'd otherwise take to assemble via point solutions into a centralized workspace," said Huff. "The technology'due south breadth—a deep bench of features beyond spider web, email, mobile, social—means marketers have the ability to tell a consequent and compelling brand story beyond the customer journey, at every touchpoint."

When asked why 13 percent of companies still aren't using MA, Huff said complexity, need, and tactic preference all play a office in keeping companies from inbound the infinite. "While we've seen tremendous growth in the space in contempo years, it's worth remembering that marketing automation is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that marketers, early adopters, and at present, an early majority of industries, are only just beginning to grapple with," she said.

"It'due south a technology that requires organizations to have a clear vision for their marketing efforts, a strategy effectually usage, articulate and cogent metrics to operate by, objectives to respond to, and a curriculum for content which, for some businesses and industries, can prove a tall order, particularly when so many businesses and industries are rethinking what marketing ways and looks similar....across that, not every business has a capacity or articulate demand for automation in general. Several of our respondents from niche and modest marketing teams fabricated clear that, while they saw a benefit in the tool for tracking website visits, opens, and clickthroughs, there was only and so many automated programs they could run and benefit from given their relatively low numbers of inbound leads."

Marketing Automation Use Cases

Acquisition of new leads is the near significant marketing challenge in B2B, with nearly half (46 per centum) of those surveyed citing it as their master headache. Lx-six percent of those surveyed said generating higher-quality leads is why they implemented MA tools. Forty-nine per centum of respondents said increasing revenue was their number i reason while generating more leads was just cited by 41 percent of respondents.

70-three percent of respondents use MA for electronic mail while 63 percentage are using it for spider web form lead capture and 56 percent use it for landing page pb capture. Less than one-half (47 percent) of respondents apply it for customer relationship management (CRM) integration while just 41 pct use it for atomic number 82 nurturing. Companies have largely ignored business intelligence (BI), account-based marketing, and dynamic partition, all of which were beingness used aslope MA software by fewer than 25 pct of respondents.

"Some of this might be the fault of the technologies themselves," said Huff. "A number of marketers in our survey complained of poor integrations betwixt their marketing automation and CRM systems that kept their data from migrating and prevented their organizations from fully harnessing the solutions' power. But a larger obstacle might be organizational: a lack of alignment betwixt sales and marketing that leads to counterproductive processes and programs."

Huff said it's possible that a lack of collaboration betwixt section heads might limit the amount of technological integration that occurs, and that each department might be operating under a unlike set of metrics and objectives. For example, if sales has to focus on gaining new accounts, closing deals, and increasing and managing renewals and marketing has to focus on pipeline, atomic number 82 quantity, lead quality, and brand awareness, and then a software integration might not brand articulate and immediate sense to decision makers.

In terms of measurement, 69 pct of companies are using MA to runway traffic to landing pages and forms. Sixty-seven percent of respondents are measuring how many new contracts the company has created. Roughly half of all respondents are using MA tools to mensurate marketing and sales campaigns to qualified and generated leads. Simply 28 percentage are measuring customer success through a MA tool.

The survey included responses from 355 in-house marketers from B2B organizations fielded in April and May of 2022.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/feature/17150/b2b-marketing-automation-challenges-rewards-businesses

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