If you think maybe all you read (and recently there is a great deal) about marketing automation, you’d believe it is the killer application to resolve all of your prospecting problems.
There are lots of Business to business marketers who recommend inbound marketing as the road to prospecting nirvana.
How can you separate hype from reality, especially with regards to industrial marketing? Shall we be evaluating apples to oranges whenever we discuss marketing automation versus inbound marketing?
Let us take particular notice at both.
How manufacturers are marketing today
“Quality of leads delivered” was regarded as most significant by 464 respondents in the manufacturing sector as reported in Trends in Industrial Marketing 2010 released by GlobalSpec. It scored 8.6 on the proportions of someone to ten. It was way in front of volume of leads and quantity of click-throughs to some company’s Site.
Industrial marketers appear to manage exactly the same challenges every year. Within the last 3 years, marketers have listed too couple of marketing sources, insufficient high-quality leads along with a have to improve Return on investment his or her top three challenges.
Despite all of the promises of internet marketing tactics, industrial marketers continue to be wrestling with similar prospecting problem every year. 48% of respondents still stated they aren’t generating enough top quality leads for his or her sales teams.
Notice how marketers are actually speaking about volume of quality leads and not simply filling the top funnel.
Is that this a situation from the age-old disconnect between marketing and advertising or perhaps is another thing playing here?
Good reasons to use marketing automation
I have read a great deal about marketing automation and do firmly have confidence in its benefits. The 3 key benefits for me are:
Aligning marketing and advertising by saying yes on the unified meaning of a sales qualified lead
Objective lead scoring with different group of predetermined rules
Lead nurturing of the great majority (as much as 70% based on some studies) of website visitors and prospects who aren’t “sales ready” at this time
Marketing automation is extremely good at moving prospects through the center of the marketing funnel before the handoff to sales and offers a great closed-loop system for lead recycling that will otherwise be wasted. However, you should not rely on marketing automation to resolve all of your prospecting problems. As with every marketing tactic or tool, you will find benefits and drawbacks.
Creating a strong situation for inbound marketing
Advocates of inbound marketing reason that marketing automation does not address the issue of filling the top marketing funnel having a great quantity of high-quality leads.
In situation you do not know the word inbound marketing, it describes marketing tactics that concentrate on helping your prospects and customers find and phone you instead of interruptive outbound marketing for example telemarketing, junk mail, television and radio advertisements. Some marketers also think of it as content marketing.
Submissions are the life blood of inbound marketing because that’s the way your prospects and customers will discover and interact along with you. It will help you with:
Internet search engine optimization (Search engine optimization)
Social internet marketing
Online referrals
Is cheaper
Better engagement and relevance
Nowadays Business to business and technical buyers start their search on the internet and go much much deeper to their decision-making cycle online. Therefore it will make lots of sense to create content marketing important to draw in these folks to your website.
Main point here: Consider your company objectives and evaluate where you stand today before jumping into either marketing automation or inbound marketing.
