What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation uses technology to align marketing efforts from lead generation to retention and re-engagement. You can manage all your campaigns within a single platform, including email, social media marketing, mobile messaging and advertising, and you can also align your sales and marketing teams.
One of the key benefits of marketing automation is the ability to develop 1-to-1 cross-channel journeys to bring your prospects closer to becoming customers and beyond.
Marketing automation lets you develop 1-to-1 cross-channel journeys bringing prospects closers to being customers
Why is marketing automation important for your business?
Marketing automation is fast becoming an essential part of any business. Marketing departments are busy places with numerous, often repetitive, processes and campaigns running at any time. Manually running each process consumes vast amounts of time and opens it up to human error.
Some of the benefits of marketing automation include the following:
- Freeing up time and resources to focus on strategy
- Reduces human errors in repetitive tasks
- The ability to build and iteratively improve campaigns at scale
- Align sales and marketing by prioritising leads and handing them off at the right time
- Improve return on investment on your marketing spend
- Provide better customer experiences by delivering personalised content at scale
- See the customer journey and interactions in one place
- Create and manage customer lifecycle communications from lead generation to retention and re-engagement

Is there a difference between B2C and B2B marketing automation?
Yes. The buying cycle in B2C and B2B businesses are very different, with B2C cycles generally being much shorter than B2B. Also, in many cases, B2C companies have less direct involvement with a sales team as customers tend to purchase online or in-store. They spend time researching products online, learning about brands and understanding how others see the products and brands. Marketing automation is vital in building the brand’s value in a B2C customer’s mind and giving them a clear path to purchase.
With online purchasing being prominent in B2C environments, bringing people back to their abandoned purchases is essential too. Marketing automation fills this need easily.
B2B sales cycles are longer by nature. So the focus is primarily on nurturing potential customers through a series of relevant, personalised content that helps them understand the product, create an affinity with the brand and develop trust in the business. These nurture journeys can be singular in channel but most often are multi-channel journeys reaching many touchpoints.
B2B businesses often rely on sales teams to develop relationships and close sales. Marketing automation is integral to “warming leads up” until they are ready to have direct conversations with this team. You can build lead scoring models that help identify leads who are most likely to buy from your business by looking at their business attributes and engagement with your business. By aligning your sales and marketing departments, you are better positioned to convert the leads that reach your sales team.
What marketing automation options are available?
There are numerous marketing automation platforms available on the market. Deciding which is best suited to your business starts with understanding your goals, business type and budget.
Examples of marketing automation tools:
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot)
- Hubspot
- Adobe Marketo Engage
- Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation
- Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Sugar Market
- ActiveCampaign
- SharpSpring
Gartner offers excellent reviews of multiple marketing automation platforms. Take a look at their latest B2C and B2B reviews.
At Slater Watson, we focus on helping businesses maximise the value of their Salesforce Marketing Cloud investments. We support companies with new Marketing Automation platform implementations, marketing automation strategy development, customisation of the platform to suit their specific business needs, campaign development, and system integrations.
Please get in touch if you want to bring Salesforce Marketing Cloud into your business or make your current instance work harder for you.
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