Trending Marketing Automation Features

Marketing automation is becoming an integral part of the marketing mix for modern marketers. With this automated solution, they can send out the right information at the right time to nurture prospects during their buying process. Marketing automation streamlines the marketing workflows, making sure that marketers can improve their operational efficiency and increase ROI.

Here are the top marketing automation features to consider in this year as well as 2016:

1. Segmentation: Distribute your large target audience into small subsets of customers who share common interests and needs. The different list management and segmentation filters help to identify the unique individual subsets. It also facilitates the configuration of business rules, making it easy to automatically add individuals into the related segments and improving targeted marketing.
2. Visitor Tracking: Track your visitor and prospect activity in real time. You can get to know who visited your website, how much time they spent on each page and the type of content that interested them. It will also provide you the full business legal name as well as a geographic location of the previously unknown website visitors.
3. ROI Reporting and Analytics: Link each closed deal back to its source through closed-loop reporting. With powerful reporting and analytics abilities, marketers like you can determine the real ROI of their efforts. This will help you gain valuable insights into your email client, open rates, deliverability rates and more.
4. Hosted Marketing Files: Get to know how your collaterals are performing. You can host your files and automatically generate the tracking URLs, which eventually helps in the thorough analysis of your content. You can easily determine which content relates best to your prospects using insights such as content views, link clicks, or downloaded files.
5. Real-time Sales Alerts: Track every move of your potential customers with ease. With sales alerts, lead or contact records in your CRM are just one click away. You can easily gauze the sales-readiness of your prospects, while also reviewing any relevant information before making the sale initiative.
6. Responsive Landing Pages and Forms: Turbocharge your lead generation process with responsive Landing Pages and Forms. Marketing automation allows you to build customized landing pages that complements the look and feel of your brand. You can also tie the assets stocked in your automation system for the purpose of downloadable content.

Accelerate your sales funnel

Having read all this, you might be interested in implementing these Marketing Automation Solutions in your marketing and sales processes. Well, you’re on the right way. Make sure to hire the services of certified professionals to implement a solution that is robust, helping you drive amazing outcomes for your venture. Good luck!

Importance of Responsive Landing Pages in Marketing Automation

 “Companies have achieved an increase of over 50% from organic and paid campaigns by using well optimized Landing Pages”

Google’s algorithm update has made it imperative for websites to be either responsive or lose on their rankings. Responsive design not only enhances the user experience, but also adds on to the traffic of your web assets as it seamlessly fits on large screen, tablets and smart phones resolutions. So if you are looking for an ad campaign, product launch, an email newsletter, or any other marketing activity, responsive landing pages are a must!

What are the benefits of responsive landing pages?

Implementing an effective landing page enhances mobile conversion and provides a better user experience. A responsive landing page:

1. Offers flexible content layout and design changes as per phone, tablet, pc and laptop
2. Saves money as companies don’t have to design multiple design versions of website
3. Improves search engine rankings, reputation
4. Enhances user experience
5. Boosts conversion and traffic

Responsive and mobile specific pages both offer simple navigation and faster time to load. However, there are some differences that highlight which one is more suitable for your business requirements.

Difference between Responsive and Mobile Specific pages

Responsive	Mobile Specific
Single page accommodates mobile, tablet and desktop	Multiple pages must be created and maintained for desktop and mobile
Based on the width of the browser	Uses user-agent string detection identification to detect and target mobile users
May/may not provide conversion focused design	Can be personalized to provide best user experience
More expensive as more effort and skills required to set up	Comparatively less expensive as it is easier to build
Specific CSS/HTML code to adjust content or image size for desktop as well as mobile	No specific CSS/HTML to adjust image size or content

There are different types of Marketing Automation Solutions & Platforms that offer tools to design and custom build landing pages, such as Marketo, Hubspot, Instapage, Unbounce, Pagewiz, and more.

Marketo for instance, has been one of the most trusted platforms that provide handy and easy-to-use tools for Landing Page Development. The recent guided templates have been gaining a lot of popularity amongst marketers with easy drag and drop options to create custom, responsive landing pages.

Why design responsive landing pages through Marketo?

• Offers fully customizable mobile responsive templates: It offers customized mobile friendly templates.
• Provides support to view landing page reports: Marketers can measure the performance of campaigns, view website activity and average time spent by lead and bounce rate by interactive, easy-to-run reports.
• Improves landing page conversions: Enables marketers to shorten the number of form fields required for the user, custom design LPs, resulting in higher conversion of landing pages.
• Integrates social login: With the new social integration tool, social form login (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) makes it easier for the visitors to complete forms with just a click.

Hence, Marketo can be a good choice to create Landing Pages that are responsive, with less dependency on developers and a lot of options to customize your campaigns.

Top B2B Marketing Trends – 2016

We are halfway through 2015 and the year saw many B2B marketing trends such as personalization, predictive modelling, and smarketing (sales and marketing alignment). Here are the top 5 trends for B2B marketers to redefine their marketing strategies for 2016:

1. Focus on Responsive Website Design: A recent change in Google’s algorithm favoured websites that are mobile optimized, as 60% of traffic now comes from mobile devices. After the latest Google update, making your website responsive has become a necessity to provide a superlative user experience across all devices.

2. Better Customer Experience: According to a research conducted by Gartner, “89% of the companies’ surveyed plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience in 2016”. It doesn’t come as a surprise as the top marketing technology investment in 2014 was customer experience. An effective customer service strategy including new innovations such as live agent support, online communities, more responsive help portals, effective SLAs, etc. can improve your customer service experience resulting in increased CSAT and reduced support costs.

3. Emphasis on - Events and Tradeshows: Some old techniques are making a comeback (for most companies they never got old). In any relationship-driven business, in-person interactions act as the best marketing technique since there is no substitute to it, and a research by PR Newswire has proved it – “Trade shows and events, and content creation are rated the most successful marketing tactics.” As per 2014 B2B Marketing Trends, In-person events, tradeshows and expos remain the most appropriate choice over webinars, online presentations, white papers, videos and case studies in order to better collaborate.

4. Rising Importance of Social Media: Having an effective social media strategy is a key necessity in a marketing budget today. Social media helps in engaging users, improving search ranking and increasing site traffic. According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers agreed that social media is important for their business, up from 86% in 2014. As the popularity of social media platforms grow, B2B marketers will and should prefer investing more time and resources into them.

5. Marketing Automation: As per Scoop-it, “Use of marketing automation will double in 2017 in B2B organizations.” Marketing automation is bound to experience radical changes in the coming years. More focus will be on predictive modelling based on customers’ actions through behavioral data. Mobile optimization and use of predictive analytics will allow the marketers to identify better leads and target potential customers.

After analysing the above trends, it is safe to say that the continued investment in a Marketing Automation Platform, enhances customer experience and focuses on responsive web-design - will maximize brand presence and conversions.

Marketing Analytics – The Game Changer

 The Wall Street Journal reported “Spending on Marketing Analytics is expected to double over the next two years, from 7% to 12%, as Marketers supersede CTOs as a business’s biggest IT spender”.

What is it?

Marketing Analytics is the practice of analysing and measuring marketing performance using business metrics such as ROI, marketing attribution and more. Marketing Analytics has become imperative for marketers to closely evaluate the performance of their marketing initiatives, to succeed in the competitive business world. It not only helps marketers determine the competency of their marketing programs, but also increases the marketing effectiveness that boosts marketing ROI.

Why marketers need Analytics?

Marketers require analytics to quickly measure the performance of their marketing campaigns both individually and cross channels (online advertising, webinar, blog, roadshows, social media etc.)

What kind of reports they need?

1. Landing Page Reports – To view website activity, new and returning visitors, average time spent by lead and bounce rate.
2. Campaign Reports – To check the campaign performance.
3. Web Page Reports – To analyse the lead activity i.e. name of lead, activity type, first visit date and time, page view, ISP etc.
4. Email Reports – To view the email activity of leads for e.g. send emails, emails delivered, emails bounced and unsubscribed emails.

What is its impact?

• New prospects – Identifying prospects that are not in your database is a challenge for most of the marketers. Prospect Reports (includes sources from where prospects come from and what they are interested in) helps you connect with your prospects through social media channels. Twitter offers an advanced search tool that saves your time and enables you to easily search for retweets, search for a phrase with question marks and search using positive and negative comments.

• Optimization of Marketing Programs – With the use of marketing simulations tools such as market penetration analysis, marketers can evaluate the count of customers based on different market segments such as industry and geography.

• Behavioral Targeting –There are many tools that can be used for Behavioral targeting such as campaign monitor, GeoSurf, Picreel and more. Behavioral targeting let marketers use methods through which they can target different campaigns, offer different content to visitors depending on their behavior on or off website.

• Competitive Analysis –Most of the successful content marketing and SEO strategies include competitive analysis.  It helps marketers track keywords and hashtags being used by competitors on social media channels such as Twitter.

Marketing Analytics is a growing need amongst marketers. It helps reducing the web marketing waste, provides deep drill inside your marketing activities, and therefore, enhances the scope to improve your strategies. The growing need has resulted in many flourishing tools and solutions to gauge marketing data into insightful predictions and reports. This is the reason why most top Marketing Automation platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Hubspot, and more have Marketing Analytics as a noteworthy tool in their array of solutions.