Why Choose Marketing Automation in South Africa?

Marketing Automation's enormous rate of growth

Internationally the industry is growing at a massive rate and is currently the biggest current trend in the digital marketing space. As with most trends, in South Africa, we lag a few years behind the USA, but we should expect the use of Marketing Automation in South Africa to trend upwards sharply in the coming years. 

The US Marketing Automation industry was at $3.3B in 2017 and is growing 30%+ annually. SharpSpring “Investor Presentation Jan 2018”

The most important objectives of Marketing Automation in South Africa

According to our own customers that we surveyed in late 2018 about Marketing Automation in South Africa, they say the most important objectives of a Marketing Automation strategy are:

• Acquiring more customers
• Improved targeting of messages
• Optimising productivity
• Increasing marketing ROI
• Improving campaign management
• Improving database quality
• Measuring performance
• Aligning Marketing and Sales

The adoption of Marketing Automation

75% of marketers say they currently use at least one type of marketing automation tools.
Social Media Today “State of Marketing Automation Survey Report” (2019)

67% of Marketing Leaders currently use a Marketing Automation Platform.
Salesforce “State of Marketing” (2017)

48% US based marketers are using Marketing Automation to create personalised customer experiences.
House of Marketing “Yearly Marketing Survey 2019.”

The benefits of Marketing Automation

Another automation provider called Omnisend analysed over 2 billion campaigns using their platform. They looked at purchase rates and engagement rates as well as retention. What they found was interesting:

90% Higher customer retention rate when using more than a single-channel

250% Higher purchase rate when using 3 or more channels

Marketing Automation allows marketers to utilise, track and report on multiple channels in a way that would take expert skills and lots of time to accomplish without it.

Marketing Automation Adoption

European firm CleverTouch released a report on the state of the Marketing Automation industry globally, surveying 200 Head Marketers and CMOs in Europe, the USA, UK, Middle East, and Africa. The survey researched adoption rates, difficulties and in-house training for Marketing Automation software.

It revealed a gap in the perceived benefits of Marketing Automation and the realities of adoption. It recognised the most used features of Marketing Automation as lead generation, lead nurturing campaigns, and account-based marketing.

Marketing Automation skills in South Africa

Although the CleverTouch survey was globally focused, we can confirm similar sentiments in the Marketing Automation space in South Africa.

33% of individuals surveyed looked to outside talent and consulting agencies to use their Marketing Automation solutions, compared to a tiny 13% of those that trained their in-house people to manage them.

This may be indicative of the fact that automation, although often perceived as easy to manage, is particularly difficult to leverage at scale. Experience makes the route to success with Marketing Automation easier and faster.

As a Marketing Automation consultancy, we are tasked to skill up and educate corporate marketing teams on Marketing Automation and rarely find staff that is skilled in Marketing Automation already in place.

If we do find staff in place, our first few months of engagement are often dominated by fixing data-based and integration errors, as well as staff training. The good news is that within a few months these teams are able to leverage their chosen Automation systems with confidence. 

Keen for some interesting facts on Marketing Automation, download our latest infographic.