Marketing automation opens up incredible capabilities for lead capture, nurture and conversion—at scale.
Simply put, an integrated marketing automation system is the foundation for any successful, data-driven marketing program. It gives you tools to manage all of your marketing initiatives and program elements, create synergies between those elements, automate responses to lead activity, and give the metrics you need to evaluate and iterate.
Depending on the platform you will likely see these capabilities:
- User data and activity history
- Lead scoring and MQL/SQL segmentation
- Persona management
- Workflows (automated scheduling of activities based on user activity/data)
- Email marketing
- Social media management
- Website landing pages
- Registration from events such as trade shows, conferences and webinars
- Blog management
- Search engine optimization tools
- Metrics and analytics
Rather than cobble together multiple, vertical tools, an integrated marketing platform houses all of the needed tools in one integrated system. Such a marketing automation platform can give you the ability to quickly and easily share data between multiple marketing activities, allowing you to gain unique insights into customer behavior and improve your ability to successfully engage with customers at all stages of the marketing funnel.
Having run marketing departments before the existence of marketing automation it is especially clear to me how such tools are essential for a successful marketing program today. In my most recent experience such a platform gave my small marketing team the ability to create global impact and build a sales pipeline with more than 80,000 global contacts.
Stephen E. Martin 