Relevance of Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation Development More Success for Business Challenges Support by isolutions

Successful companies automate in marketing twice as often as others. If no technologies are used to automate sales and marketing, companies are only half as successful in achieving their goals.

In this blog, we present some insights from the ZHAW Marketing Automation Report 2022. It shows the positive development of marketing automation in Swiss companies and the challenges they had to face.

Marketing automation enables a more efficient design of processes, individualized communication with customers, higher number and quality of leads as well as an increased number of conversions. Managers are forced to analyze, evaluate, standardize and, if necessary, redesign existing processes.

These study results come from a representative online survey conducted from August 15, 2021 to November 30, 2021. Of the 464 participants, three quarters are active in B2B business and target B2B customers with their marketing activities. It can be deduced from this that mainly B2B companies participated and that marketing automation is a relevant topic especially in this area.

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Marketing Automation Development

Positive Development in the Use of Marketing Automation

The study results confirm the positive development of marketing automation in the past year. Last year, just 40 percent of the companies surveyed in Switzerland ranked marketing automation among the most important marketing technologies; today, the figure is already 65 percent. This means that marketing automation is now one of the five most important marketing technologies, alongside CRM, e-mail, search engine and social media marketing, as the following graphic illustrates:

More Success for Business

With Automation to more Success in Marketing and Sales

Unsuccessful companies use marketing automation actively only 30% of the time, whereas this figure is significantly higher for successful companies at 62%. This discrepancy has narrowed compared to last year, thanks to automation efforts by companies. This trend reinforces that marketing automation is becoming a technology standard.

The use of marketing technologies is highly dependent on the size of the marketing budget. Nevertheless, among companies with smaller (<100k) and medium (100k-500k) marketing budgets, it is becoming apparent that the frequency of use of marketing automation is also increasing. Whereas in 2020 only 44% of companies with smaller budgets used marketing automation, by 2021 this figure had risen to 59%. For companies with a medium marketing budget, this figure even increased from 50% to 81%.

It is becoming apparent that marketing automation holds enormous potential in the coming years. Most companies are making investments and will further expand marketing automation in the future. 57% of the companies surveyed have a high or very high readiness for the implementation and expansion of marketing automation.

Challenges

Challenges of Marketing Automation

Companies that are still in the early stages of implementing marketing automation still face a number of challenges. Marketing automation requires a commitment of resources in the form of time, money, personnel and know-how. Specifically, the following hurdles present themselves:

Half of the companies surveyed lack the financial resources in online marketing to move forward with marketing and sales automation.
Understanding in value-added management.
Lack of consolidated customer data, as there are too many data silos in different departments.
There is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing for two out of five respondents.

Nearly half of the companies surveyed lack the appropriate marketing automation technology integrated with the company's IT at the end. The implementation and further development of IT and data architectures often remain an ongoing task at the strategic and operational level, challenging the various departments of a company.

Support by isolutions

With our approach to the introduction of marketing automation, we take into account the challenges that companies have to face. Our understanding of the introduction of software solutions is not limited to the technological components, but we see organization and processes as an integrated component.

Accompanied by change management measures, we ensure that changes are successfully adapted. With our focus on B2B marketing, we can apply a proven process model.

With this approach, companies can move step by step into the topic of marketing automation and benefit from the advantages. The topic of consolidated customer data has already been addressed in this blog. In the next post, we will take a closer look at this topic and examine a customer data platform, or rather the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights tool, in more detail.