Marketing Automation: Looking Beyond just �CRM�

Many marketers are now realizing the importance of marketing automation implementation in their marketing processes. CRM software and marketing automation are complementary tools to each other and are implemented in different stages of sales & marketing funnel. B2B marketer's esp. retail banking and healthcare industry are looking beyond CRM while implementing marketing automation. CRM forms just one functionality amongst the many- lead generation, lead nurturing, analytics other functionality of marketing automation. Marketing automation bring synergic opportunity among others marketing activities such as email marketing, display marketing search marketing. Moreover it also leads to cost savings (approx. 15%) by freeing marketers from agency engagement for designing and creating of marketing collaterals. This whitepaper highlights all the nuances of marketing automation in terms of procurement and business benefits from B2B marketer's perspective. Introduction Most B2B marketers consider marketing automation as a synonym to CRM software tool. They believe that by integrating only CRM software will resolve all their issues related to the conversion of their visitors of digital platforms into prospects. The problem lies in the fact that they are unaware or ignorant of the true potentials of the marketing automation software. This whitepaper clears the differences between CRM and marketing automation application in the sales cycle process. It also identifies various procurement benefits, industry adoption rates, vendor evaluation criteria and top global vendors of Marketing Automation.   Author: Anurag Anwariya