Today, companies of every size are successfully using business automation platforms across operations, to boost efficiencies in a number of ways, including improving resource management and CRM and shrinking time-to market. It has become increasingly clear that, in order to remain competitive in a hyper-competitive global marketplace—where competition can come from unexpected sectors, market conditions change overnight, and cost-control is critical—businesses need the kind of efficiency only a platform approach can offer.

Marketing automation platforms are proving especially critical, as product and creative teams seek to stay abreast of the needs of existing customers and forge paths to new target audiences. At a time when brand loyalty is no longer a certainty and consumer sentiments change with the weather, companies need the fastest route possible to information that will help them tailor offerings and marketing campaigns to customer needs.

Toward that end, large enterprises have turned to the major marketing clouds such as Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP, with small and mid-size businesses using tools like GetResponse, Infusionsoft, Hubspot, and Marketo.

And, use of marketing automation is certain to spread further across the business landscape. In fact, it’s now estimated that the global market will reach more than $8 billion by 2025, with more than 50 percent of business sales teams either using a cloud-based marketing automation platform or plan to adopt one over the next 12 months.

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A 360-degree View of Consumer Insights

While businesses are turning in huge numbers to marketing platforms, they also need an integrated approach to consumer-insight gathering and analysis. Without an automated, platform approach to market research, businesses lack real-time access to the consumer insights they need to gain a granular, 360-degree view of individual consumer behavior and preferences.

There have, of course, been various market research programs out there, automating functions like survey creation, fielding or analysis. But it is no longer good enough to cobble together a patchwork of programs to gain the insights product development and marketing teams need to help a company remain competitive.

The marketplace and consumer sentiments change too quickly to make any option other than a platform integrating the whole range of consumer insight functions viable. And companies increasingly reject the notion of investing in solutions that provide less-than-complete platforms and are sure to be obsolete overnight.

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Specialized Expertise Part of the Package 

Companies also need to know that end-to-end insight platforms are built on a solid foundation of industry expertise. There is, after all, an element of specialization in insight-gathering and analytics. Marketing teams wonder if the insights they gather will have any value without access to the expertise they need to put them into the proper perspective. What’s been needed all along are platforms with industry-leading consumer-insight expertise baked in. 

Marketing and creative teams—both at agencies and in-house—are finding the set of functions and built-in expertise they need in our end-to-end, platform-based consumer-insight solutions. The availability of these comprehensive platforms is giving businesses an infusion of confidence. They will now be empowered to move forward with product development and marketing plans and venture into new, promising markets. It is a new era in marketing automation.

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