Instead of just knowing how many people come to your website, wouldn't it be great for your business if you knew WHO came, what products or services they looked at and how they interacted with your site?  Well you can and that's what marketing automation can do.  Once you have this information then you can start selling a lot more of your products and services as you can really understand who your leads are and what they are interested in. The infographic below has a list of some of the companies that provide marketing automation but there are others out there not on this list.

So surely every business must be using this type of technology?  I just did a quick straw poll of 10 medium and large sized professional services firms and only 3 of them were using marketing automation.

There are two reasons that B2B marketing teams might not be using one of these tools:

1. They have not heard of marketing automation software - in which case they they need to do more to keep up to date with what is going on within digital marketing
2. They have heard about these tools but decided to do nothing about it.  This must mean they do not want to know who is visiting their website.  This is strange because all of them have Google analytics on their sites.  So they are interested in how many people come to their site but not who they are.  If this is the case then they are doing their organisation and business development teams a real injustice and are almost being negligent in their role.

These tools are not very difficult to implement and are not particularly expensive - certainly not when you look at the ROI from the increased business.

So if you are not yet running marketing automation on your website, it's probably time to have a look ...