At this point, it’s nothing new that 2020 has been a year of change for marketers and the brands they serve, the disruption to business has been felt from Wall Street to Main Street, and the year is not over yet. Furthermore, we know the pandemic and its effects on business will carry over into 2021 and continue to create changes to the way we live, consume, and make choices.

One of the largest effects for marketers is just how much emphasis 2020 put on their digital marketing channels. McKinsey reported in their research* that B2B customers are 200% more likely to choose a supplier or service provider if they have delivered an outstanding digital experience to them during their selection process. This isn’t limited to just your website, or how you utilize social media channels. Live chat, for instance, has become the top channel for researching vendors as digital self-service has taken a more central role.

2020’s business climate has meant smaller budgets for most marketers, along with added scrutiny on ROI. With this increased focus on driving improved performance across digital, many marketing leaders have turned to automation and AI as they retooled to meet this year’s challenges.

Here are 4 fairly big reasons to push your organization forward with a marketing automation and CRM platform to deliver on your marketing objectives going forward into 2021.

1. More Time to Plan: Automation solutions can act like a second set of hands on the wheels and levers across a number of marketing channels. Along with saving time usually spent on scheduling email marketing campaigns or social posts, marketers gain extra bandwidth to do more focused strategic planning.

2. Optimize Your ROI: As a marketing leader, you and your team could have numerous campaigns working across your digital channels. However, seeing the effectiveness in driving and nurturing your leads across various channels and tracking that back to business outcomes is statistically the top challenge* most marketers face. It’s all about attribution, being able to see in real time how your campaigns and channels are performing, so you can pivot and iteratively experiment to optimize spend and drive more opportunities. Omni-channel marketing optimization is hugely important as more clients are interacting with a greater number of channels in today’s business climate. Without the ability to merge web metrics, email marketing, social, PPC, chat, and lead conversions together, it’s hard to get clarity on what’s driving success or failure.

3. Relevancy & Personalization: Google cares more about matching search intent with results than it does a wide variety of things it used to. That’s because the better Google knows me, the more they make money. Marketing automation CRM’s have similar capabilities for the same reason, and that’s where their power really shines. Driving tailored content based on my unique profile, my engagement behavior, or through general personalization delivers an average 760%* performance boost. At the heart of this is the power of segmentation, and the rules and logic-based nature of automation systems that can turn digital experiences into highly relevant interactions for your potential customers.

4. Chatbot Concierge: Live and automated chat has been trending for a few years in the B2B space, but 2020 put it at the front of the line statistically speaking. The way we do things both in business and in person have been altered this year, and the changes are a sign of shifting behavior toward chat experiences to get us where we need to be with the help of artificial intelligence. When done correctly, these tools can play a concierge role in lead acquisition as well with adding frictionless conversions through question and response. As the top channel for vendor research, this trend will only continue to create more opportunity with artificial or live chat.

If you want to learn more about how to get the most out of your marketing automation and CRM platform, or if you would like to look at adding marketing automation and CRM to your marketing toolbox, contact us to set up a consultation with one of our experts. The opportunity to transform aspects of your marketing program has a lower barrier to entry than you might think.