Traditionally, marketing has been more art than science. A successful campaign could not be easily reproduced. Marketing activities could not necessarily yield predictable business results, and marketing processes did not scale with your business. Without a systematized and measurable marketing system in place, how do you know if your email campaigns, blog, or social media streams are giving you a positive pay-off? How can you turn a single win into consistent success? Marketing automation answers these challenges with these three elements: predictability, reproducibility and scalability.
Predictable
From weather to stock market trends, some aspects of life are a challenge to predict with precision. When it comes to marketing, predictability means reliability of revenue streams and marketing automation enables far greater predictability of everything from lead acquisition and opportunity conversions to customer retention. Lead scoring and prioritization features allow more reliable forecasts of how many leads will flow through each stage of the sales pipeline and when these leads will reach a the sales-readiness level. By knowing how many leads your marketing team must generate and nurture to reach a given revenue target, you can plan for growth.
Reproducible
There’s no guarantee that a given campaign that was successful in the past will be successful in the future, but by isolating and testing a number of campaign elements such as the target audience, calls to action, subject lines, and message length, your chances of success are greatly enhanced. Real-time testing features of marketing automation enable marketers to optimize key variables that go into a successful campaign and produce vastly more reliable outcomes. Reproducible results are the foundation of marketing science. A single success might as well be luck. With the reproducibility of marketing automation, you have sustainable growth.
Scalable
Scalability refers to your marketing program’s ability to adapt to changing volume. Can your current marketing operation expand to meet new revenue targets? Or will it become unwieldy when you reach a wider audience? Can you scale it down to reach narrower and deeper audience segments? Whether working with an audience size of a few thousand leads or a few million, marketing automation software offers full scalability. The same marketing process that moves a lead from initial contact to a qualified sales opportunity applies as lead volume increases, ensuring that the system grows with your organization. As marketing transitions from a cost center to a driver of revenue, scalability is a must. A firm that outgrows its marketing strategy often loses what makes it successful, but with an integrated and scalable automated system, you continue that initial success into the future.
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