Are you interested to learn more about B2B marketing automation and how to put it to use to boost your results? You’ve come to the correct place. We’ll go through what B2B marketing automation is, how it’s utilized, and how to get started with it on this page. Let’s start.
What exactly is business-to-business marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a collection of automated marketing procedures that are activated by a certain activity. That is the broad definition. At a more fundamental level, “automation” refers to any technology that substitutes physical work. Adding the adjective “marketing” just indicates the area in which the automation is taking place, just as stating “manufacturing automation” implies the elimination of human labor in manufacturing processes.
Adding the prefix “B2B” indicates that it is taking place in a business-to-business setting. There is one exception to all of this: some individuals use the phrase “B2B marketing automation” to refer to the software solutions that allow automation. More on it later. Let’s get down to business for the time being.
What are the most successful B2B marketing automation strategies?
So, if B2B marketing automation is a set of automated marketing processes triggered by a particular activity, what processes should be automated, and what should trigger them? The alternatives are unlimited, but the tactics listed below are among the most successful.
ABM (Account Based Marketing)
Marketing automation may considerably help ABM (account-based marketing) efforts. We’ve written more about this technique here, but to summarize briefly, ABM entails selecting desirable customer accounts, then engaging them with several message points to create contact and generate sales.
Marketing automation has the potential to make these initiatives significantly more efficient.
For example, suppose you’ve selected the ten connections at an organization with whom you’d want to communicate, and you’ve decided to reach out through LinkedIn and email.
With marketing automation, you may add a contact into your process, then run them through a tailored workflow that connects with them on LinkedIn, sends them a follow-up email, and follows up with a personal message – all with a few clicks.
And that’s only the beginning. The actual strength of marketing automation lies in its ability to divide distinct action routes depending on different triggers. For example, whenever someone clicks a link in your email, you may instantly send them a message about what they clicked on.
Things may rapidly get convoluted, but the main truth is that one efficient application of marketing automation is to deliver more tailored communications much more simply.
Lead Management and Lead Nurture
Lead nurturing is the process of guiding contacts through your marketing funnel so that they go from lead to sale. Marketing automation is useful because data can be used to identify specific elements that make leads more sensitive to particular messages or more open to certain contact points – and then automatically send marketing that resonates.
As an example, suppose someone visits your service page after downloading an e-book from your website. Marketing automation can categorize and rank their degree of interest depending on the service they visited. They might then be automatically added to an email drip that sends them further information about that service. Perhaps two weeks later, after reading many of your emails, they will respond and request a chat with you.
Once again, this is a very simple example. The options are limitless.
Anything that decreases the need for physical work
Okay, I’ve gone general here. However, marketing automation is a broad phrase, and I want to underline that it may be used for a variety of purposes. It may be used to disseminate material automatically. Some businesses, for example, have blogs produced on their websites automatically syndicated on social media or sent out through a newsletter.
It may be used to test and implement strategies. Assume you’re testing two variations of a landing page. Instead of manually selecting and implementing the winner, you can use marketing automation to choose the top performance and make it live. It may be used to convey internal reminders.
Do you often forget to enter chats into your CRM? Marketing automation may be used to produce alerts that remind you of what you need to accomplish. If you’re weary of doing manual operations at scale, you can undoubtedly design marketing automation that minimizes your effort while also performing better.
What are the most effective B2B marketing automation tools?
As previously stated, when some individuals use the phrase “B2B marketing automation,” they are particularly referring to the software platforms that do automation.
There are too many to name here, and the greatest match will depend on what you’re attempting to accomplish, the size of your organization, and your industry. Here are a few of the best:
Salesforce’s Pardot is an excellent choice for businesses. It’s definitely designed with the Salesforce CRM in mind, and it does a fantastic job of automating operations across a contact database on a massive scale.
Marketo has been bought by Adobe. Instead of B2C marketing automation, the platform was built with B2B in mind. It’s ideal for handling complicated customer journeys.
HubSpot is an excellent marketing automation solution for mid-sized B2B companies. They provide a comprehensive suite of tools, including email marketing, landing page builders, and a CRM, and it all works together. Furthermore, they invented the phrase “inbound marketing.”
Active Campaign is most known for email automation, but they’ve also included site monitoring, social ad settings, and a CRM. This is another good alternative for medium-sized organizations.
Reply
“Reply is a sales engagement platform that lets you automate and scale multichannel outreach, so you can create more leads, acquire more clients, and build revenue quicker,” these people say. This is something we’ve used often for ABM campaigns, and it works great.
Again, the above list is just a taste. Capterra’s list of the finest marketing automation software provides a more comprehensive overview of what’s available.
How do I begin with B2B marketing automation?
Now that you’ve made it this far, let’s talk about whether or not you’re ready to use marketing automation. We’ve worked with almost every marketing automation technology on the market at Iscope. Most importantly, we understand how to leverage B2B marketing automation to deliver demonstrable outcomes for your company. We can accomplish this without the need for time-consuming human input.
Schedule an assessment of your existing marketing systems now. We can begin to map out the best course of action for you asap.