Marketing Automation has come of age. Together with ZHAW and a competent research team, we have developed the Marketing Automation Report 2023. In this video contribution, we share the experiences from science and practice. The study shows that 75% of the companies surveyed consider Marketing Automation relevant, and it is now, as of this year, the fourth most important marketing technology after CRM, email marketing and search engine marketing.
Companies benefit from marketing automation by saving time on repetitive tasks and efficiently generating leads, which ultimately leads to more conversions.
However, despite these advances, challenges remain, such as a lack of resources or undefined processes for systematically nurturing leads and customers. Learning to run with this is not easy, but it predominantly requires one criterion for success: the well-thought-out plan. You can find the latest Marketing Automation Report and all handouts, summaries here.
Because of the importance of having a plan, we developed the Marketing Automation Maturity Index (MAMI) - a benchmark tool that helps companies analyze, create, and implement marketing automation strategies.
You can get the Marketing Automation Report 2023 by signing up for the Ondemand webinar or via this landing page: the report as a PDF, handouts and summaries, all compactly packaged available on this page.
MAMI is the compass for the best path to automated marketing. With this maturity model, we want to show that it requires a lot of attention in specific areas and that planning is an elementary component that should not be forgotten. MAMI originated from a master thesis at ZHAW by Alina Garbin and is continuously improved.
Our experts share their real-world experiences and challenges, as well as the benefits and use cases that work reliably. They are also happy to answer your questions, so take the chance to learn from these pros.
In this report, you'll learn more about the challenges of using marketing automation and how the MAMI can help identify where you stand against the benchmark in B2B. Let's figure out together how to effectively deploy Marketing Automation and take our businesses to the next level.
The biggest obstacles to implementing marketing automation in the enterprise (n = 251)
A lack of resources for content marketing: 72% of companies see this as a medium to big challenge, especially for small companies that struggle to create good content and distribute it across multiple channels.
Missing info on ready-to-buy leads: 64% of companies have trouble figuring out which leads are ready to buy. This makes it difficult to decide whether they are cold or hot leads.
Missing processes for systematic lead nurturing: For nearly one in four companies, missing or suboptimal lead nurturing is a major challenge.
Failing resources for lead generation and nurturing: 72% of companies struggle to allocate sufficient resources for customer acquisition.
Missing budget: For one in two companies, a lack of budget is a major or medium challenge, predominantly among SMBs that need both human and financial resources to drive marketing and sales automation.
In short, marketing automation is super important and is becoming increasingly important to staying competitive and marketing effectively.
The study shows that 75% of companies surveyed consider marketing automation relevant, and it is now, as of this year, the fourth most important marketing technology after CRM, email marketing and search engine marketing:
Relevance increased dramatically over the past three years
How relevant is marketing automation to businesses
As part of this study, a maturity model for automation was developed, the Marketing Automation Maturity Index (MAMI). It consists of the six dimensions strategy, content, organization, processes, data and automation (use cases). For this, 40 questions were asked about automation maturity.
In the dimension of strategy, it was found that two-thirds of the companies have a clear differentiator and clearly defined the target group compared to the competition. For them, marketing automation has a high priority in the growth strategy and the strategic goals are continuously measured by key performance indicators (KPIs).
Strategic direction and planning of the company
On the content dimension, most companies have plenty of informative content (articles, images, and product videos) available. At two-thirds of the companies, the content is created centrally as well as efficiently prepared for different channels, distributed and reused in marketing.
Content marketing and product information
Scalability and organizational structure
Processes of Marketing Automation
Data-Driven Marketing and Technologies
Common Use Cases for Marketing Automation
Surprisingly, half of companies do not capture the problems and needs of their target audience and tailor content to them. At four out of five companies, marketing and sales work together as equals and responsibilities are clearly Customer data is shared across departments via a common (CRM) database. Surprisingly, half have not yet defined standardized processes in lead generation and existing customer care (making digitization and automation more difficult). After all, two-thirds of the companies consistently record interactions with leads and existing customers in marketing, sales and services.