The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation

About the Guide

How can marketing automation benefit you?

Marketing automation allows businesses to save time and money, measure and optimize marketing investments, and grow revenue faster. According to our benchmark analysis, businesses that use marketing automation can grow their pipeline by 45%, enjoy 25% higher revenue, and allow sales reps to spend 22% more time selling.

Marketing automation is a must-have for modern marketing teams. It streamlines, automates, and measures marketing tasks and workflows to help you save time and money, measure investments, increase operational efficiency, and fast-track revenue growth.

A versatile marketing automation platform encompasses marketing campaigns across all channels, including email marketing, direct mail, landing pages and forms, social initiatives, and more. Marketing automation enables B2B and B2C marketing and sales teams to run campaigns across the entire customer lifecycle—from upsell and cross-sell to loyalty and retention—using personalization and cross-channel campaign management to deepen and expand customer relationships and improve the customer experience.

What’s in the guide?

• What is marketing automation?
  Gain a deeper understanding of what marketing automation is and how marketing departments are using marketing automation tools to enable modern business processes, spending less time executing tasks and more time on marketing strategy and planning.
• How marketing automation differs from email marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) tools
  In this guide, you’ll get a better understanding of the processes that marketing automation can replace and the marketing solutions that it complements. Find out how marketing automation compares and relates to other technologies and processes, including CRM, email marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, event marketing, and marketing attribution.
• Common features
  Marketing automation platforms cover a wide variety of key marketing functions. In this guide, we provide details on some of the features you might see, including email marketing, digital marketing, lead management and nurturing, lead generation, social media marketing, digital advertising, analytics, and resource management.
• Building a business case
  The numbers don’t lie—marketing automation has a strong return on investment (ROI). Get tips for building a business case for marketing automation, and learn how to get buy-in from your extended marketing team, CMO, and executive team.
• Taking your marketing automation to the next level
  If you’re ready to expand the way you use marketing automation, this guide is for you. Learn how to define personas, map messages, run content inventory and gap analysis, implement lead scoring, build nurture campaigns for each persona and lifecycle stage, and integrate additional applications as needed into your MarTech stack.
• How to be successful—more than just the right technology
  There are important differences between marketing automation platforms, but setting yourself up for success is also about your strategy and process, your content and lead flow, and your people. Discover why it’s important to dream big and how to start small, focusing on small wins that can generate valuable results.
• Buying marketing automation
  Which marketing automation solution is right for your organization? In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to identify goals and requirements, plan your timeline, assemble a team, evaluate vendors, and talk to references to find the best solution.
• Marketo's marketing automation
  Why Marketo? Find out what features set the Marketo Engage marketing automation platform apart from others. See how Marketo can drive marketing automation ROI, including faster time to value, seamless connection with key sales, reporting and business applications, and a community of 20,000+ marketing experts ready to help you optimize your marketing programs whether you’re new to marketing automation or looking to take your marketing automation efforts to the next level, this comprehensive, resource-packed guide will help you get the most out of marketing automation for your business.

Whether you’re new to marketing automation or looking to take your marketing automation efforts to the next level, this comprehensive, resource-packed guide will help you get the most out of marketing automation for your business.