All too often, marketing takes a back seat in a company’s overall selling strategy. However, marketing is critical for creating brand awareness and providing the sales team with qualified leads to pursue. However, without the right strategy or tools, marketing activities will more than likely incur additional expenses rather than boost sales and contribute to the overall profitability of your business.

A marketing automation platform will provide the tools needed to create successful and profitable campaigns. Here’s how:

1. Effortlessly generate and nurture leads

Marketing automation platforms provide businesses with the tools to attract, hook, and maintain leads. Good marketing automation platforms will give you the ability to create gated assets, run search engine optimization reports and integrate with pay-per-click systems.

Once leads are captured through gated assets by forms or landing pages, marketing automation platforms also give marketers the tools to score leads by assigning pre-determined values to specific behaviors and profile characteristics. The practice of lead scoring provides timely information on a lead’s progress through the sales funnel and allows marketers to discover the content that produces the highest response.  Marketing automation also allows for lead nurturing capabilities, thus keeping your product and brand in front of the prospective buyer.

2. Optimize marketing campaigns

Marketing automation software takes everything from coordination, scheduling, launching, and measuring a marketing campaign and reduces it down to an intuitive, step-by-step process—regardless of the complexity of the campaign or number of channels it is intended to span.

A/B testing is essential for determining what will work in a campaign and what will fall flat.  Marketing automation software enables effortless A/B testing and easy campaign result tracking in real time. In this way, marketers are able to quickly and clearly identify what works, what doesn’t, and make adjustments immediately.

3. Empower sales

Utilizing lead scoring effectively means more accurately identifying which leads are actually sales-ready buyers. In this way, sales teams can focus their time and energy on leads that are ready to convert. Marketers will also be able to use this information to build trust amongst possible consumers by delivering relevant content at the right time.

Great marketing automation platforms will integrate with your existing CRM. Sales reps will have access to a lead’s interests, needs, and position in the sales funnel. This means that sales reps can center the flow of their conversation around what’s known about the lead and ensure no leads are lost to miscommunication or the break-down of trust. This will eliminate cold calling as sales reps are equipped with the “need to know” before ever picking up the phone.

4. Access comprehensive data and analytics

Companies and business have a limited budget when it comes to marketing activities. Marketing automation gives marketers access to powerful insights and analytics. That means you’ll be able to quickly determine each campaign’s effectiveness, optimize your efforts, and distribute marketing dollars amongst only the most effective strategies.

Tracking the return on investment of a campaign is critical to business success. Marketing automation platforms deliver reports that make ROI evident.  These reports are essential for sales reps and marketers to keep an eye on short and long-term ROI figures. These reports will clearly reveal how campaigns are performing and how they are contributing to the overall revenue and sales goals of the business.

If you’re seeking to allocate your marketing dollars more efficiently and cost-effectively, while optimizing your marketing efforts and increasing sales, a marketing automation platform could be for you. For more information about marketing automation, download this FREE eBook.