Marketing automation is essential for any business to successfully compete in today’s market. For business-to-business companies, implementing a marketing automation strategy can be a game-changer. B2B marketing automation enables businesses to automate many of the tedious and time-consuming tasks that are necessary to generate qualified leads and close deals.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of technology to automate, manage, and measure the performance of a company’s digital marketing efforts. B2B marketing automation software can not only automate various marketing tasks, but it can also provide insights into the performance of marketing campaigns. The ability to do this allows businesses to optimize their marketing strategies, better manage their sales pipelines, close more deals, and improve their bottom line.
Key features of marketing automation tools facilitate:
- Personalized marketing messages
- Improved customer segmentation
- Tracking prospects throughout the sales funnel
- Integrated marketing campaigns
- Automatic lead scoring
- In-depth analytics and reporting
- Easier scaling of marketing efforts
Why is marketing automation for B2B important?
The ability to nurture and convert leads efficiently can be the difference between a successful B2B company and one that struggles to survive. One of the greatest advantages of marketing automation for B2B companies is its ability to nurture and convert leads more efficiently than traditional marketing methods. Without automation, the processes involved in nurturing and converting leads must be completed manually. This can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to error.
Other benefits of marketing automation include:
- Saves time and resources: Automation helps businesses save time by automating tasks they would otherwise need to complete manually. This frees up time and resources that can be better spent on more strategic initiatives.
- Reduced marketing costs: Businesses that use marketing automation often see a reduction in their marketing costs. Automation eliminates the need for employees to perform manual operations, allowing businesses to be more efficient in their usage of marketing resources.
- More consistent marketing campaigns: Consistency can be difficult to achieve manually but it’s crucial for achieving long-term success. Automation can help businesses to create more consistent marketing campaigns, which helps to build trust and credibility with their target audience.
- Better engagement with customers and prospects: Tools that provide more effective segmentation enable marketers to target their audience with more relevant content and personalized messages. This helps marketers build a relationship with their leads and can improve customer engagement.
- Improved lead management: Marketing automation provides businesses with the ability to score and track leads throughout the sales funnel. This helps businesses to prioritize and follow up with their most promising leads, and to identify when a lead is ready to be passed on to the sales team.
- Increased ROI: The ability to track and measure the success of marketing campaigns enables organizations to make changes based on what is working and what isn’t. B2B marketing automation also helps generate better leads, which also helps companies achieve better returns on their investment.
What are the top B2B marketing automation platforms?
There are many different types of marketing automation tools available on the market, each with its own set of features. The ideal platform, or combination of platforms, for a specific company depends on its unique needs and objectives.
Here are 12 automation tools for the key areas of B2B marketing:
Email platforms
Businesses can create automated email sequences triggered by specific actions or interactions, such as subscribing to a newsletter or making a purchase. This type of automation is typically used to nurture leads, build relationships, and drive conversions.
The top email marketing platforms are:
CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms help sales and marketing teams nurture leads and manage customers. Many CRM platforms can integrate with other marketing automation tools to provide a complete solution for developing and maintaining relationships with customers and enabling B2B sales automation.
Some of the top CRM platforms include:
Social media
Social media is often thought of as being for B2C companies, but social media can be valuable for B2B companies too. Automating social media can increase brand awareness and visibility and can tie in with content marketing and lead generation efforts.
Popular social media automation platforms include:
Analytics and identity resolution
Analytics can provide insights into how campaigns are performing and what areas need improvement. Identity resolution can help businesses match leads across different digital channels to a single account based on criteria such as email and IP addresses. Using these can give businesses a deeper understanding of their customers, which they can then use to create more targeted campaigns.
Platforms that offer these capabilities include:
Effective B2B marketing automation tips
Here are our tips for getting the most out of marketing automation, as well as B2B marketing automation examples:
- Research and compare different platforms: Not all automation tools are created equal, so it’s important to do your research and compare different options. The best automation tools for your business should be those that fit your specific needs and objectives.
- Integrate your automation tools: Integration can make your life a lot easier by eliminating the need to switch between different platforms. It can also help you get more out of each individual tool by allowing them to work together.
- Build persona lists: Creating persona lists can help create more targeted and effective campaigns. Marketers can set up automation tools so they add prospects to the appropriate persona list based on their behavior and interactions.
- Use lead scoring: Lead scoring is a way to evaluate leads by assigning them points based on factors such as their level of interest and engagement. Using lead scoring can help B2B companies prioritize their leads and focus their efforts on those that are the most promising.
- Set up automated lead nurturing: Once you’ve captured a lead (with landing pages, for example), it’s important to keep them engaged so they don’t go cold. Automated lead nurturing can help by sending targeted content and offers based on where the lead is in the customer journey.
- Create automated workflows: These work by triggering specific actions based on specific events or interactions. B2B companies can use automated workflows to guide leads through their acquisition process and keep track of their progress.
- Monitor your results: It’s important to regularly monitor your results so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. If you’re not using a dedicated analytics platform, you can use the built-in reporting and analytics features of your marketing automation tools to track your progress.
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