There are billions of marketing communications professionals who hope to reach the right customers with their messages, information, and content. Imagine the challenge of finding them all.

It doesn’t even matter if you’re focused on B2B or B2C. B2B marketers have always struggled to reach the right customers. With so many options, meeting their marketing automation goals can be all the more difficult.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the features companies are increasingly looking for when selecting a marketing automation platform. Take a look at the requirements below and consider adding these 10 features if you want to get the most out of your software:

Interaction Recommendations

Getting recommendations and enabling them is becoming a key feature for any marketing automation platform. A recommendation is essential for helping companies target their marketing materials and interact with customers. These tools already help identify users with potential leads by providing a wide variety of profiles, but they can provide better service with suggestions for publications, marketing campaigns, and websites.

A survey conducted by Email Marketing Strategies highlighted that 38% of b2b marketers are making the most of the recommendations that are already available in their marketing automation tools. Take note of that and keep boosting your recommendation capabilities.

Avoiding False Positive Encounters

One of the benefits of automation is that there are so many people interacting with your sales leads that every one of them will have a unique profile. That means every piece of marketing content that’s being used to contact these prospects will need to match with the profiles they share, just like everything else in the system. This can lead to false positives, where the system identifies leads that aren’t real in order to keep you from losing money.

Using filters to stay focused on what you want to do with each lead is an important feature. So, while you’re trying to get buy-in from your prospects, make sure to come up with options for your pitches, seminars, and emails in the hopes that they match those profiles.

Audience Prediction

There are many different ways to reach your prospects, and they may all need a somewhat separate approach. Some individuals are targeted by email blasts and some are targeted by Facebook posts. This kind of targeting is already possible with some marketing automation platforms, but marketers find they still need the ability to better understand who they are reaching. That means they’ll also need to have a better understanding of who is opening emails, replying to ads, and landing on a landing page.

Companies are looking for marketing automation platforms that work even when they’re not on their own site. That means they want tools that predict user behavior based on what they’ve done in the past. This data can help determine where to send out messages, how long to wait before sending out emails, and even the call-to-action for specific websites or seminars.

Streamlining Content Creation

You want to have content that can be searched and opened by prospects. But finding the right content is an exercise in patience. There are so many marketing and content repositories out there to choose from, and sorting through them can be a pain.

That’s why companies are looking for tools that will automate the process of finding the right stuff. People will want to do this automatically, but they’ll also want the ability to do their own filtering on what content is relevant to them.

This feature would make a lot of sense for companies who want to create content that can be easily pasted onto their own landing pages. With it, those same content creators could work their digital content habits into the software, without needing to worry about their own manual tracking or adding tags to their saved creations.

Conversion tracking

This is something that companies are always looking for, but in today’s world it’s more critical than ever. With so many companies now using marketing automation tools, the more you can capture the right data the better the predictions can be. That’s why companies are looking for tools that can connect with partners’ marketing automation systems to capture all of the data available for conversions.

While that presents an issue in getting data integrated into a system as effective as a CRM, it’s still the right thing to do. Advertised solutions in the space tend to find conversions by paying attention to different data sources. Companies may have to add their own tags and techniques, but eventually the end result will be just as good as tracking completed conversions with one tool.

Not enough of these features? Visit the HubSpot website to learn more about the tools that are needed for your own marketing automation campaigns.