The Hidden Impact of Marketing Automation: Why It’s Critical to Adopt It for Your Midsize Business

Before I start talking about the benefits of marketing automation, in particular Dynamics 365 Marketing, let’s first define what the term actually means. It refers to software platforms and technologies, that allow businesses to market on multiple channels, automate tasks and measure the revenue contribution of each of their marketing programs. 

Companies of all sizes use marketing automation; what was historically valued by large enterprises is now becoming increasingly popular with small to medium–sized businesses. In fact, SMBs are the largest growing segment adopting this type of software. According to Raab Associates, 58% of top-performing companies; where marketing contributes more than half of the sales pipeline, have adopted marketing automation. 

It doesn’t matter what type of business you are, marketing automation is relevant to marketing teams operating in B2C or B2B environments. That’s because it has real-time benefits when it comes to building, maintaining and extending relationships with all types of prospects and customers.  

As a marketer, I have personally witnessed the positive impact marketing automation can have on the bottom line of a business. How it can align sales and marketing and in turn drive efficiency and growth. The right software can help your marketing team drive the full-funnel marketing strategy and supporting initiatives. After all, your marketing team can only do so much manual work before it gets impossible to manage! As companies grow, they need to scale their marketing activities to drive demand, fuel the sales pipeline, influence the buyers’ journey, and drive customer loyalty. Here’s a few reasons why it’s critical to adopt marketing automation and why we believe Dynamics 365 Marketing is the platform to help you achieve your goals. 

A huge role in marketing is building brand awareness and attracting the right prospects through personalized multi-channel campaigns. Dynamics 365 Marketing gives your business a competitive advantage by providing capabilities that support all of your marketing campaigns. For example, it empowers your marketing team to build web landing pages for events and other online campaigns. Marketers can easily test and optimize these pages to increase lead conversion. 

Another important channel for driving brand awareness is social media. If you’re a hands-on marketer you will know just how long it can take to set up posts and manage interactions across a variety of social media platforms. If your team don’t have the right tools in place to support them, it can be an extremely time consuming task. Dynamics 365 Marketing will save your team time by providing the capabilities needed to easily set up social media posts, monitor engagement and track performance all in once place. It also integrates with LinkedIn so you can import leads generated from LinkedIn lead gen forms and set up trigger points to kickstart an action such as an email communication.  

The need to generate demand and qualify leads for the sales team is something that every seasoned marketer is familiar with. Dynamics 365 Marketing can have a huge impact when it comes to qualifying leads and empowering the sales team to prioritize and focus on the right type of leads. You’ll often hear that sales and marketing aren’t aligned and that sales teams frequently ignore marketing leads, which can result in missed opportunities. You can prevent this problem by integrating with Dynamics 365 Sales and creating a single view of prospects by unifying data across contacts, leads, and customers.  

Lead scoring is also a popular form of marketing automation by which a lead is ranked against a scale that represents its perceived value to the organization and determines the leads fit and propensity to buy. Dynamics 365 Marketing can calculate a score for each lead based upon demographics and website behavior. Scoreable interactions could include, opening an email, visiting your website, submitting a form,  or attending a webinar.  

Marketing automation isn’t just about empowering the sales team. According to Marketo, on average only 20% of leads are sales-ready when they first come in. This makes it critical to nurture leads that aren’t ready to buy so that you can help transition leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified, and in turn produce opportunities. 

Not all marketing leads are created equal, every marketer knows that. Some are ready to buy and others have merely shown an interest in a piece of content. Dynamics 365 Marketing helps enhance every potential buyers’ journey by using data and delivering the right message at the right time in the right channel.  

It can also be an incredibly powerful tool for segmentation. Creating target segments based on unified data from different sources can hugely improve targeting and email communications. It helps your marketing team divide prospects into dynamic lists based off demographic factors and website behavior and target them with email communications and automated workflows with stage relevant content to help educate and move them further along in their decision-making process.  

The beauty of Dynamics 365 Marketing is that you can set up dynamic lists and trigger points for email communications and workflows then leave them to run in the background  – checking in on performance, of course! You can create personalized communications, A/B test email performance, and tailor campaigns accordingly.  

A marketers job is far from complete once an opportunity turns into a customer. There is a lot of work to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction and deepen the relationship. This can include selling more products to a customer, acknowledging their behavior, listening to their feedback and adjusting accordingly.     

Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you do all of this, all the while gauging customer sentiment through satisfaction surveys and other forms of automated touch-points and communications. 

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To summarize, marketing automation is critical if you want to empower your team and drive your business forward. It not only aligns marketing and sales, it empowers marketing teams to scale the activities that are working, quickly adapt to changes and save huge amounts of time by freeing resources up to focus on other business critical needs. 

Dynamics 365 Marketing empowers you to prove (and improve!) on marketing ROI. It isn’t just about streamlining processes, it’s also about providing insight into which marketing programs are working and which ones aren’t. This enables you to make data-driven decisions when it comes to marketing strategies by helping you show key stakeholders the true impact that your marketing teams efforts are having on revenue, which is notoriously hard to prove without in depth reporting.

At Catapult, we understand that looking for the right marketing automation platform isn’t always a straightforward process. There are a number of reasons that Dynamics 365 Marketing might be the right solution for your midsized business. It lives together with Dynamics 365 Sales on the same platform making it easy to leverage the collective strength of marketing and sales in one place. It has a huge number of features that support multi-channel campaigns, lead nurturing and customer happiness. It empowers you to improve marketing effectiveness with pre-built dashboards – or you can build your own custom ones! What’s more, you can utilize the Power Platform to gain actionable insights and make data-driven decisions.  

If you’ve got questions about Dynamics 365 Marketing or just want to talk to an advisor about your needs, then reach out to us today. One of our CRM and marketing experts will get back in touch right away.