Marketing automation supporting sales

The past couple of decades has been a time of major changes in marketing. Digitalization has become a permanent part of marketing and at the same time enabled efficient collection of data. Personalization and customization of content are playing a crucial role in marketing when new customers are acquired. This has also created a need for automation to facilitate the distribution of targeted content. As a result of successful marketing automation more information of the customers is gathered and at the same time, the work of sales force will be facilitated due to a larger amount of information. Marketing automation is used to support sales in modern companies, and specialized companies are also offering these services, which has introduced marketing automation to a wide range of companies. Although marketing automation is already used among companies it has not yet achieved wide academic attention. Thus, the research is attempting to find out how marketing automation works and what are the key elements and benefits when marketing automation is used to support sales. This research also aims to contribute ideas for managerial implications. The research was conducted as a qualitative case study. Interviewees were specialists and representatives of the companies, which were using marketing automation in sales. An abductive approach was taken where both, the existing literature, and empirical findings were used. The study revealed the benefits when marketing automation is used to support sales. The main findings were the improvement in sales lead quality due to the information gathered, sustainment of the customer relationship and increase in brand loyalty. The interviewees saw that usage of marketing automation will increase in the future, and new methods in data collection will make automation even more personalized.