As digital marketing takes up more and more of the overall marketing space, more and more companies are invetsing in marketing automation solutions to help streamline their marketing process.
In the past few years, marketing automation has been a revolutionary force in the world of digital selling. B2B companies who leverage marketing automation as a part of an integrated sales and marketing program gain better targeting of prospects, improved lead management, the ability to measure results and ROI and better customer relationship management.
In a recently published report from Regalix Research on the State of Marketing Automation in 2014, it was found that 88% of B2B marketers are either currently using or implementing marketing automation tools in the coming year. Of those who did not currently have a solution in place, 69% plan to implement a solution in 2014.
The report also looked at the biggest obstacles to effective use of marketing automation. While the report lists over a dozen, two of the top obstacles are lack of expertise to use the data and intelligence offered by the tool (55%) and complexity of marketing automation software (34%). This helps to explain why the top factor companies look at when evaluating a marketing automation software (86%) is ‘ease of use’.
In addition to the complexity, it can often take a while to see results once your marketing automation system is in place. The report found that only 20% of marketing automation users saw results within the first three months, while it took at least six months for 64% of users.
