Before touting the hand-and-glove analogy between marketing automation and CRM, it’s probably a good idea to first get our definitions straight. Marketing automation can be seen as a subset or an offshoot of CRM; so you can have the latter without the former, but not the other way around. Marketing automation focuses on marketing, whereas CRM focuses on sales.
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What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation can be described as the process of using software to automatically build rapport with customers and prospects, based on predefined triggers. You could also say that marketing automation is simply a way for marketers to automate tasks using software and digital tools, which saves them time and effort.
Unlike CRM—a tool focused on tracking customer data, sales management, productivity, delivering actionable insights, integration with social media, etc.—marketing automation, on the other hand is typically used to eliminate repetitive tasks from workflows and boost marketing efficiency. It comprises an array of software enabling the effective targeting of prospects with automated marketing messages across email, websites, social media and text messages to drive sales leads.
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MQLs and SQLs
Marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads are two key marketing terms that we need to keep in mind. MQLs are leads that marketing deems are qualified and ready for sales follow-up. SQLs are prospects that have been vetted to determine if there's an interest to connect them to the next stage in the buying cycle (sometimes called the Discovery or Demo stage).
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Marketing Automation v. CRM
Although marketing automation and CRM systems are clearly distinct, yet they are remarkably complementary. Working hand-in-hand, marketing automation and CRM software ensure a smooth customer journey through the transition from visitor, to MQL, to SQL, to customer.
By integrating these systems, businesses can identify and remedy shortcomings in their marketing and sales processes. A recent study has suggested that marketing automation can raise sales productivity by 14.5%.
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How Marketing Automation Works
A typical marketing automation cycle can be divided into the 7 following stages:
- Building targeted lists
- Executing the campaign
- Gauging email and website activity
- Segmenting based on activity and score leads
- Routing qualified leads to CRM
- Moving warm leads to nurture cycle
- Analyzing marketing and sales performance.
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Marketing Automation Is Not a Magic Wand
Take nothing away from the obvious advantages marketing automation can set in motion, but it cannot, however, be adopted as the sole marketing strategy. If you automate all of your marketing, you will end up delivering an impotent (at best) or an alienating message (at worst) to your customers.
The secret lies in striking the right balance between marketing automation and conventional personalized marketing.
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B2B v. B2C Marketing Automation
B2C (or business-to-consumer) marketing is all about the customer journey and where the individual is in his or her unique process, whereas B2B (or business-to-business) marketing automation is more about education and value-sharing for a large group and focused on nurturing a lead through a sales funnel.
Most of the time, B2C marketing focuses on emotion-driven purchasing decisions, while B2B marketing focuses on logical process-driven purchasing decisions.
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Marketing Automation in Figures
As a result of the digitalization of industries, rising internet penetration, and ballooning use of mobile devices, the demand for automating marketing solutions has been increasing rapidly. The size of the global marketing automation market was valued at $4.06 billion in 2019 and is expected to witness a compound annual growth rate of 9.8% from 2020 to 2027, according to a report by Grand View Research.
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Examples of Marketing Automation, CRM Tools
For most people, HubSpot is unquestionably the best choice for marketing automation. Some of the top marketing automation software brands include MailChimp, Marketo, GetResponse, OptinMonster, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign and Salesforce Pardot.
HubSpot, Zoho and Salesforce are widely seen as the leading CRM platforms.