The evolution of marketing automation
While they aimed to promote successful products and services to the market, companies realized the importance of adopting marketing strategies early on. Due to intense competition, marketing strategies merged with technological innovations to evolve like modern marketing, which is now integrated into the customer’s life and affects it at a fast pace.
Fortunately, from radio to the internet to smartphones, technology today has revolutionized the way marketers can reach potential customers. But, back then, in the late 1950s, with almost no effective marketing channel, companies found it difficult to approach a large customer base.
This is how automation technology came to be. It has traced its origins to a customer relationship management or CRM that came out of Rolodexes and a pack of business cards. It acted as a savior for companies that were striving to keep their employee and customer records in a central pool of knowledge. But, before long, it became the essential business element and began to find its applications in professional business services as well.
In the late 1980s, CRM platforms gained more power in terms of customer service, sales management, and forecasting. But the high price kept it confined to a few multinational corporations.
In 1999, Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, invented the Monthly License Fee (MLC) model, with the goal of offering a profitable and agile business model, which introduced SaaS or Software as a Service. And, by contrast, this technology evolved as an amalgamation of email, web analytics, and marketing resource management (MRM) capabilities. With the advent of the Internet, marketers were looking for potential ways to reach their customers. The pioneer of this space, Eloqua, arrived in 1999 and developed a product, later recognized as a marketing automation service in 2003.
Soon, the success of this trend led to the arrival of more players in the market, such as Pardot, HubSpot, WhatsNexx, etc., and the industry began to gain momentum as it shifted marketing automation services to cloud platforms.
In 2008, new platforms like HubSpot, Act-On dominated the market, and the advent of social media marketing, content management, and search engine optimization caused marketers to incorporate a variety of automation tools.
In the 2013-2014 period, the automation industry experienced tremendous financial growth through acquisitions when a giant marketing software company, ExactTarget, acquired a marketing automation company, Pardot, for $95.5 million and, after in turn, salesforce.com spent $2.5 billion to acquire ExactTarget. as the largest acquisition in its history.
I found people wondering if CRM and marketing automation co-exist. In fact, few consider the latter to be a subset of the CRM industry that follows one of the laws of marketing suggested by Al Ries and Jack Trout. To clarify, CRM is sales centric software while the other is user centric software that is completely focused on marketing strategy. Where a CRM manages a company’s interactions with its customers, automation software streamlines marketing tasks and business workflows. However, these two, together, go hand in hand and reinforce the knowledge and efficiency of the company. A good CRM-marketing automation integration unlocks an opportunity to manage data management and marketing strategy plans.
You can filter relevant data and required fields to standardize labeling and data, and ideal processes. Additionally, you can run automatic cleanup processes to clean up downloaded data in a CRM system. Businesses using automation software have seen an incredible 451% growth in qualified leads and 14.5% growth in sales productivity, as well as a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. We can conclude by saying that the future of marketing belongs entirely to Marketing Automation.
