As the numbers via Ve Interactive suggest, marketing automation for B2B is on the road to become an industry worth $5.5 billion dollars. This shows that the interest in marketing automation is here to stay for a long time. And companies getting a first-mover advantage are likely to thrive over their competitors in the industry.

What is marketing automation primarily used for?

A combination of web-based tools and services are utilized to automate and manage marketing processes and tasks. So, all the repetitive, manual activities turn into automated processes. This includes actions related to website management, social media, emails, and others. A variety of purpose-built applications, software, and tools are incorporated to attain accuracy and effectiveness.

There are 3 major areas of marketing automation:

1. Customer behavior and marketing automation

With insightful tracking codes, marketers can monitor how customers behave online. The patterns are identified and analyzed, which helps in creating behavior-based groups. Marketers can conveniently divide their market into various behavior-based segments.

2. Sales and marketing automation

Marketing automation is also used for business development. The customers move from one phase to another until they reach the level of purchase. This process involves segmentation and nourishment of different segments depending on qualifying leads, interests, intent and other behavioral patterns. The automated approach relies on social media, email, content marketing and search engine optimization.

3. Workflow and marketing automation

Marketing automation also improves the internal processes such as budgeting, managing digital assets, preparing a marketing calendar, and a lot more. Automation in marketing is extremely important for large organizations with complex requirements.

Problems solvable with marketing automation

1. Low rate of conversion

Marketing theory says that ideally, a potential customer turns into a customer after getting an interest. But the ground-level reality completely different. There are consumers who look for in-depth information and education before making a decision.

Consumer requirements are easily deliverable with the help of marketing automation. Marketers can nurture consumers on multiple channels and smoothly increase the rate of conversions. A variety of relevant marketing automation tools are available out there to help in the process of customer nurturing.

2. Inefficiencies of marketing

In the world of marketing, time is everything. Marketing automation allows organizations to leverage time and reduce inefficiencies. This includes all the time required to create, schedule and send emails and other communication models.

Marketing automation reduces the time required and increases the efficiency in terms of hottest leads. The efforts become result-oriented, making every marketing strategy a success for organizations.

3. Unengaged customers

Using marketing automation allows organizations to think beyond traditional marketing. It creates a perfect environment to engage all customers. Low engagement with customers harms the brand loyalty. Every business requires customer service, account management and other ways to provide personalized engagement.

Customers are available on many channels such as emails, social media, mobile, and others. Reaching them on all the channels is key to becoming memorable. At the same time, companies can judge preferred communication models for different customer groups. It helps in covering a wide range of marketing automation challenges.

Using best-suited marketing automation tools, a company can enhance the impact of web intelligence, SMS messaging, subscription management, social marketing and a lot more. It all reduces the number of unengaged customers to a great extent.

4. Unaligned marketing and sales strategies

Thanks to the technology, marketing, and sales strategies can align together nowadays. For instance, marketing automation combined with CRM solutions creates a great alignment between marketing and sales departments. Each team can gain accurate data using the right tools, which syncs marketing and sales activities with each other.

Using the same technologies, the two departments can collaborate efficiently and run campaigns together. This ensures that every prospect sees a clear and targeted message at the right time. This increases the chances of attention and conversion as well.

5. Increasing revenue

Usually, before moving forward with marketing automation, companies utilize email marketing. Various platforms provide statistics related to click-through rates and more. These basic statistics help in judging the performance of an email campaign.

However, these statistics fail to provide knowledge of the comprehensive health of marketing initiatives. The marketing team can’t understand if the efforts are impacting company’s revenue as desired.

With marketing automation, companies can easily track customers and prospects at every step of their buying cycle. It provides a bird-eye view of the marketing strategy and its impact on company revenue.

Conquering marketing automation challenges

There are a few challenges in marketing automation, which requires attention for efficient adoption. The technology asks for a continued commitment to manage content, data, information, and processes. The efforts reduce eventually as a company adopts this technology. In order to ensure the success of marketing automation, you should:

• Divide deployment in multiple stages to ensure accuracy at every stage.
• Aim to engage customers in a comprehensive manner using the right automation tools.
• Understand the skills in terms of market and technical knowledge.
• Ensure complete documentation of each and every automated effort.
• Review regularly to modify your approach in future.

Partner with reliable marketing automation companies in India to follow best practices, gain support and increase marketing ROI. Ready to get the benefits of marketing automation?! There is a huge list of marketing automation benefits you can expect with successful adoption. It improves customer engagement, number of opportunities, on-time communications, diversity of communication models, and a lot more.It would not be wrong to say that marketing automation is a business transformative technology.

• You spend lower cost to obtain more qualified leads.
• Customer relationship improves, which increases the percentage of customer retention.
• Sales and marketing departments can align together for collaboration and high revenue.
• Marketing ROI reaches a whole new level of excellence.

All in all, there are both direct and indirect benefits to utilize through marketing automation. Smart organizations are partnering with trustworthy platforms to transform their marketing approach. You should also move ahead and adopt marketing automation for qualified leads, rewarding customer loyalty, and increased revenue.

The post 5 Chronic Problems You Can Solve with Marketing Automation appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

The digital marketing world is constantly crossing newer milestones with each passing day. It is changing and growing continuously. In order to keep up the pace with the technological advancement of the latest age and enhance your business growth, you must integrate your marketing endeavours with the growing digital marketing trends in 2020.

Make your brand marketing more impactful and relevant by following these successful digital marketing trends to push newer boundaries in 2020

Digital Marketing Trends

1. Augmented Reality

The technology related to Augmented Reality (AR) is still untapped in more than one way and still in its infant stage. It offers great scope to your brand to get greater ROI with your digital marketing endeavours.

It is well-known that games like Pokémon Go that were AR-based became a major hit among the people in mid-2016. A large segment of manufacturers and developers are working to create wearable gears based on AR technology to enhance the user experience and creating value for their brand.

In the upcoming scenario, traditional advertisements will give way to AR-based 3D advertisements, allowing the users to stream 3D content directly to get an advanced experience. It enables the users to connect with your brand offering on a much deeper level emotionally.

It also enables your marketers to augment your brand awareness, leading the customers to test your products well before they move towards placing the orders.

2. Marketing Automation

The various mechanisms related to marketing are getting accelerated by data-driven technologies. Marketing automation enables marketers to establish better relationships with their customers by automating some of the repetitive tasks such as e-mail reminders, social media postings and leads generation.

It is especially beneficial for the new market entrants and small companies that are competing with the top-notch companies by saving their effort and time. Customers are attracted to the brand in a better way when they receive e-mails that cater to their particular requirements.

The process of marketing automation requires the use of software that is needed to be uploaded with the necessary data related to the user’s personalized data. It is a complex technology that can be better managed by partnering with a professional and experienced digital marketing company.

3. Artificial Intelligence

AI has been continuously making dramatic shifts in the digital marketing world for the developments of any brand. It is running parallel to any other marketing tactics and promises to offer you better marketing opportunities in the future.

It analyses the behaviour of your users by reading their search patterns on various social media platforms to enable the brands to understand the demands of their users better and offer them the services accordingly.

AI can solve the problems much more effectively than any human mind, and provides you a defined output without any definite possibility of errors.

Repetitive tasks can be better handled by AI bots that reduces the load of the employees, further enabling them to perform better. It allows your marketing team to develop a highly curated content that will be highly significant for the recipients.

4. Impactful Stories on Social Media

Social media platforms are ever-evolving and presenting the brands with unlimited opportunities to grow their business with digital marketing efforts. It enhances customer engagement in a big way.

Also, it enables marketers to keep the online audience updated with all the current developments taking place in your industry domain. It gives way to daily promotions of your brand by posting marketing content on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

5. Visual Search

Brand optimization with visual search is a great way to offer focused and defined results for your users. It allows the users to click a picture or upload a picture related to the product they are looking to find online.

It directs them to the items without any hassle. Even though it is in its nascent stage, it holds great potential to become a leading digital marketing technology to deliver perfect results.

6. Influencer Marketing

Under this marketing trend, brands use key figures to promote their brand offering among the online audience. Instagram is rapidly growing up the ladder to become a major source of becoming a platform used for influencer marketing.

As the network of social media is scaling up with every single day, there is a rapid increase in the number of influencers as well. Users tend to listen to these well-known celebrities and popular figures ardently.

With the increased use of hashtags and promotional content directed by the influencers on their social media handles, smart brands are taking the content reference from these mentioned posts, and locating the precise on-brand engagements, thereby enhancing their performance of better user engagements. It also plays as a great medium to enhance human-to-human connections and showcase your brand creativity.

7. Programmatic Advertising

An extension of AI to improve the efficiency of your marketing endeavors. Previously, ad industry was managed manually by publishers that controlled and ran the ad industry on the basis of hectic meetings with middlemen and unending negotiations.

With the multiplication of online publishers on a daily basis, it has turned out to be a challenge for the advertisers to keep up the pace with it. The solution is bringing in automation in the advertising industry to take better control over things.

It allows your brand to cut out the middleman and make the advertising procedure simply. Marketers are developing target-oriented ads that are produced by using and analyzing the personalized data of online visitors.

It has enabled the brands to promote transparency in their advertisement campaigns and curtail the instances of fraud, created by the middlemen. It also makes the process of advertising quicker that leads to increased conversions, better ROI and a decrease in the cost of spending. This digital marketing trend is definitely here to stay.

8. Video Marketing

It is one of the ever-growing trends in the digital marketing world. Over the years, visible growth has been seen in user engagements led by pre-made video posts and live videos.

It channelizes the information of a particular product or service to the audience in a much clearer manner, making a direct connection between the audience and your brand.

Directly dealing with the audience via Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels with the help of personalized messages and video content enables you to improve the consistency of lead conversions, thereby leading to better opportunities of your business development.

9. Use of Chatbots

It is a mode where you engage with your customers on a real-time basis via an instant messenger and provides solutions to all their queries related to your brand offerings. Over the years, many companies have agreed to the viability of integrating chatbots in their digital marketing strategy to add value to their business.

It also allows your brand to offer high-quality services to your customers at any hour of the day, and meet the expectations of your customers at every single time. It has been observed after research that almost 80% of the businesses are planning to incorporate the technology of chatbots in their marketing planning by 2020.

10. Voice Search

Technologies of Google Voice and Apple’s Siri have already made a big name for themselves in the digital world. Voice search provides precise answers to the customers without confusion, leading to the desired outcome for them.

Most of the successful marketers create a detailed voice script matching the customers’ requirements and offering creative solutions to their concerns. In the digital marketing world, people are looking forward to creating better voice scenarios based on surveys, internal data, and communications with real customers.

Not just the target audience, it is also hitting successfully with the new and emerging digital audience as well, especially in the small cities and towns.

To emerge as a successful marketer, you can very well explore the great potential of voice search for your marketing efforts related to brand promotions.

11. User-Generated Social Media Content

It has been on the trajectory of growth in recent years in the digital marketing world. User-generated content is any type of brand-related content that is shared by the brand audience on their social media channels like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Attention is better directed towards producing and promoting more and more user-generated content, as the targeted audience looks forward to getting validations from social and digital marketing platforms.

It also enhances customer engagements with your brand. It creates a chain of customers that bring closer the potential leads with the existing customers smoothly. It is a growing trend among the millennial generation and needs to be used to its full potential to get better access to lead conversions and brand promotions.

2020 will be all about enhancing the user experience by delivering better personalized, AI-driven and automated content.

To stay ahead in the competition, you need to get a better grip on generating custom content, integrating it well with audio and video enhancements to attract the attention of the targeted audience towards your brand in a seamless manner.

The post Top Digital Marketing Trends to Follow in 2020 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.