Ready to level up your B2B marketing? Get into marketing automation! Simplify your processes, speed up and get results like never before by choosing the best marketing automation software. With B2B marketing automation you can nurture leads, personalise campaigns and get ROI on autopilot. Say goodbye to manual tasks and hello to automated wins. From lead scoring to email campaigns this does it all. Are you ready to transform your B2B marketing? Let’s get started.
Takeaways
- Marketing automation can transform your marketing by simplifying processes and speeding up.
- To get the most out of it, create a marketing automation plan that’s tailored to your business and target audience.
- Lead nurturing is key to converting prospects into customers; personalise your communication to nurture leads.
- When choosing marketing automation platforms, prioritise features that fit your business and scalability for growth.
- Advanced ABM can supercharge your targeting and get you more personal and impactful interactions with key accounts.
- For enterprise tech companies, having a structured implementation roadmap is key to getting it right and getting ROI.
Marketing automation helps you and your team avoid getting lost on the journey.
What is B2B marketing automation
B2B marketing automation is using software to automate various marketing tasks in a business to business context. It simplifies email marketing, lead gen and customer segmentation. It helps customer engagement and lead management for businesses that target other businesses.
Features:
- Audience segmentation for targeted campaigns.
- Integrates with CRM for better data management.
- Analytics and reporting tools to measure performance.
How it works
This starts by collecting and analysing customer data to understand preferences and behaviour. Automating repetitive tasks like sending personalised emails saves time and ensures consistency of communication. Workflow creation allows you to trigger actions based on user interaction to increase engagement.
For Enterprise Tech companies
In the tech industry where sales cycles are long, marketing automation is key. Enterprise marketing automation enhances various marketing operations, accelerating customer interactions, managing multi-channel campaigns, and providing robust analytics. It helps companies manage leads throughout the buying process. Consistent communication across multiple channels is crucial to nurturing relationships with prospects. By managing leads well tech companies get ahead of the competition.
Strategic value and business outcomes
Market trends and innovation
Marketing automation simplifies processes, reduces manual tasks and speeds up. By automating repetitive tasks with a marketing automation tool, teams can focus on strategic initiatives and get more done. So companies get results faster and get ahead of the competition.
Marketing automation brings marketing and sales teams together. Through automated workflows both teams can align to the same goals. This harmony means better communication, simpler processes and more revenue.
- Reduces manual tasks
- Speeds up
- Brings marketing and sales teams together
№1 Marketing Automation Trend Today: GenAI
Where to start:
- Identify Simple Processes: Focus on 1-2 step processes that involve tasks like qualification, summarization or identification at scale.
- Collect Input: Get the input for these tasks in a spreadsheet.
- Apply GenAI: Use GenAI to process the input according to the prompts.
- Add Extra Tools: Add extra tools and steps to the spreadsheet workflow to make it better.
- Download all leads from your CRM that need to be qualified based on firmographics and initial messages and upload to a Google spreadsheet.
- Use Google Workspace plugins to access the GPT API and tell the AI to qualify the leads in the spreadsheet.
- Upload the qualified data as a new field back into your CRM and repeat the process until you are happy with the results.
- Use Zapier or similar to automate the process so leads are downloaded to the spreadsheet and the relevant data uploaded back into the CRM.
Case studies
Capturing leads from forms and landing pages is a key part of b2b marketing automation. Companies can get valuable lead information for targeted marketing campaigns by using marketing automation tools. This means a steady flow of qualified leads into the sales funnel.
Nurturing leads through automated follow up emails and personalised content is key to keeping engagement. Automation allows businesses to send timely and relevant content to prospects and nurture them through the buying journey. This personalisation increases the chances of conversion.
- Capturing leads from forms and landing pages
- Nurturing leads with automated follow up emails
- Keeping leads engaged until they are ready to convert
ROI and outcomes
Using customer data to personalise marketing messages is a game changer in b2b marketing automation. Companies can create highly targeted campaigns that speak to their audience by looking at customer behaviour and preferences. This personalisation increases engagement and conversion rates.
Personalisation drives conversion rates in b2b marketing. Automation allows businesses to send content based on individual preferences and increase the chances of conversion. This targeted approach means a better customer experience and more ROI.
- Using customer data to personalise marketing messages
- Boosting conversion rates with personalisation
- Creating content based on user preferences
According to McKinsey & Company companies that are good at personalisation generate 40% more revenue from their personalisation efforts than the average. Deloitte also reports 43% of executives cite personalisation as a top reason for investing in hybrid experiences.
B2B marketing automation benefits
Efficiency and productivity
Automating processes as part of your marketing efforts can lead to huge cost savings by reducing manual work. By automating repetitive tasks, businesses can allocate resources better.
Better targeting in automated campaigns means higher conversion rates and therefore higher Return on Investment (ROI). Targeted marketing means the right message to the right person at the right time.
With marketing automation, businesses can focus on customer retention strategies. By nurturing existing relationships, businesses can get long-term loyalty and sustained revenue growth.
42DM case Ssudy
We launched a demand generation campaign for our client Zeeto and automated their sales and marketing processes.
We achieved a 2.25x reduction in lead to customer conversion time and 4.95x more sales activity with the same number of sales people.
Lead generation and nurturing
Marketing needs to be aligned to business goals to succeed. Effective marketing strategies help align efforts with sales targets and growth metrics so all departments are working together.
Marketing automation nurtures leads by sending personalised content at each stage of the buyer journey. Regular campaign performance reviews to refine and improve.
Reviewing marketing automation processes regularly is key to staying aligned to changing business goals. Businesses can optimise lead generation by looking at the data and adjusting accordingly.
Personalisation and customer engagement
Automation allows businesses to do personalisation like drip campaigns and educational content. Personalising messages to individual preferences increases engagement and builds stronger relationships with customers.
Timing is key in personalisation, so follow up communications are sent at the right time. Automated workflows can be set up to send messages based on specific triggers or actions.
Feedback loops in automated marketing systems allow for continuous refinement of nurturing strategies. By looking at customer feedback and behaviour businesses can adjust their approach to meet the audience better.
Best practice:
To make your personalisation cost effective do personalisation across all three levels:
- Audience level: Personalise your messages and value proposition for different audiences or Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), typically defined by firmographics and specific pain points.
- Segment level: Further segment your audience based on their interactions with your assets (e.g. specific page visits, lead status, funnel stage etc.).
- Person level: Use tools like HubSpot or Marketo’s Dynamic Content to deliver content based on an individual’s interactions with your website, ads, emails and more.
ROI and cost savings
When planning a marketing campaign with automation you need to set clear objectives, define KPIs and map out the process step by step. Automation tools make these processes more efficient.
Measuring campaign performance against KPIs is key to measuring ROI and making decisions for future strategies. Testing and optimising campaigns based on performance data means continuous success and growth.
Marketing automation plan
Business goals
When automating marketing you need to identify the key metrics that align to business goals. Tracking conversion rates and customer acquisition costs will help you measure the effectiveness of marketing automation. By looking at these metrics you can optimise for better results.
Tracking customer interactions and engagement is key to understanding audience behaviour. By looking at how customers interact with automated campaigns you can tailor your approach to meet the customer better. Understanding customer behaviour means personalisation, which means higher engagement and conversions.
A/B testing is key to refining your marketing strategy. By testing different versions of emails, landing pages or ads you can see what works best with your audience. This iterative process of testing and optimising means better campaign performance and higher success rates.
Campaign steps
Automated content distribution helps you reach a wider audience faster by leveraging various marketing tools. By automating the delivery of relevant content to leads at the right time you can nurture and convert. This targeted approach means leads get valuable content that’s relevant to them.
Creating content that solves customer pain points is the key to marketing automation. By solving the challenges faced by customers you can build trust and credibility and long term relationships. Valuable content attracts leads and nurtures them through the sales funnel.
Using analytics to measure content engagement and performance is crucial for optimising marketing. By looking at metrics like open rates, click through rates and conversions you can see how well your content is resonating with your audience. These insights mean continuous improvement and better decision making.
Best practice:
To track content engagement and make life easier, assign each piece of content the following:
- Type: Email, article, white paper, post etc.
- Format: Long read, gated content, ungated content, case study etc.
- Audience: ICP and BP that the content is targeting.
- Main channel: Primary channel that drives traffic to the content (SEO, SMM, partners etc.)
- Goal: What’s the goal of the content (TOF lead gen or scheduling demos)
Use these to segment your content and see what works for different audiences and goals.
Note: Collect and analyse data monthly (or longer, but not shorter). Do this at the end of each month and only look at content published in previous months. This will give you consistent and reliable stats.
KPIs
Automating social media posts means you can maintain a presence across all platforms. By scheduling posts in advance you can have regular updates without manual intervention. Consistent social media activity means more brand visibility and audience engagement.
Social listening is key to responding to customer queries or feedback in real time. By being active on social media and responding to customer concerns you can build trust and loyalty with your audience. Timely responses show you care and are committed to customer satisfaction.
Tools like social media analytics platforms give you valuable insights into performance metrics and audience behaviour. These tools allow you to track metrics like reach, engagement and follower growth so you can make data driven decisions for your social media.
B2B marketing automation lead nurturing strategies
To get the most out of your B2B marketing you need to have personalised content that speaks to your target audience’s needs and preferences.
Email marketing is about segmenting audiences based on behaviour and interaction to deliver personalised content. By tailoring your marketing to specific behavioural patterns you can increase engagement and conversion rates. Behavioural data helps you predict customer needs and preferences so you can send relevant and timely messages.
Best practice:
After you’ve launched an email campaign take 5-10 minutes to create a simple visual of the campaign in Miro or Lucidchart. This should show the fields used for personalisation and how they’re populated.
If you run 10-15 email campaigns without documenting the fields and process, analysing or measuring the success of your email marketing will be a nightmare. Remember what can’t be measured can’t be improved.
Content
Before you automate marketing you need to consider key factors like target audience, content relevance and campaign goals. Choosing the right tools that fit your business is critical for successful automation. Staff training is required so your teams can use automation effectively and get the most out of it.
Social media
Marketing automation has strengths like scalability and efficiency in managing social media across multiple platforms. But a common weakness is over reliance on technology which can lead to impersonal interactions with customers. Balancing automation with a human touch is key to authentic engagement and building long term relationships.
Behavioural segmentation
There are various pricing models for marketing automation platforms including subscription based, usage based and tiered pricing. Factors that affect cost include features like lead scoring, CRM integration and user limits. When evaluating pricing options you need to assess ROI to determine if the platform is driving revenue and meeting your business goals.
Pro tip:
Start collecting data on your customer behaviour as soon as possible and as much as possible. 90% of this data can’t be collected retrospectively.
Choosing a marketing automation platform
When choosing a marketing automation platform you need to consider factors like scalability, integration and user friendliness to ensure smooth implementation and performance for your B2B marketing.
Key points
When choosing a marketing automation platform businesses need to consider many things. Scalability is key to accommodating business growth and increasing marketing demands. Integration with existing tools means seamless operation and data flow.
User reviews and demos give you the information you need to make a decision. Real life experiences from other users help you understand how the platform works and is to use. Demos let you try before you buy to see if the platform fits your business needs.
Pro tip:
As a small business use a set of tools that can be integrated with each other and each one focused on a part of the process (e.g. Mailchimp for emails & forms, Zapier for automations, Google Sheets for database etc.) That will do the job and save you a lot of money.
You can set up a free account of Hubspot at the very beginning of your business and use it as your backup DB and foundation for your future marketing software architecture.
Once you have at least 2-3 employees in sales & marketing teams its time to move to the complex solutions like Hubspot or Salesforce.
Pros and cons
Pros of marketing automation platforms are lead nurturing, personalized customer interactions and streamlined campaigns. They increase productivity, lead conversion rates and give you valuable data to target your marketing.
Cons are complex setup, high initial cost and potential integration issues with existing systems. Limited customization and need for continuous training to get the most out of it are also common.
Pricing
Pricing models vary across marketing automation platforms including subscription based plans, tiered pricing based on features and pay per use. Factors that affect pricing are number of contacts, features required, add-ons like CRM integration and level of support needed.
Consider the long term investment in a platform that fits your budget and has the essential features for your marketing automation strategy.
Pro tip:
The true value of any marketing automation platform or CRM only becomes apparent when you connect it to your real data and use it in your workflow.
Whichever marketing automation software you choose always ask for an extended trial from the sales reps to test it fully.
Choosing the right platform
To choose the right marketing automation platform businesses should research thoroughly, compare features and read user reviews. Other marketing automation tools, such as HubSpot’s focus on inbound marketing and Ontraport’s specialization for small businesses, offer unique features and advantages that can provide additional value or functionality. Prioritize platforms that offer scalability, seamless integrations, robust analytics and responsive support.
Make a list of your key requirements based on your business objectives and match it with the platform capabilities.
Ask for demos from top contenders to test usability, features and overall fit with your business goals before you make a decision.
Our top list by category (based on our experience):
- CRM: HubSpot & Salesforce
- Marketing automation: HubSpot & Marketo
- Digital analytics: Google Analytics & Mixpanel
- Landing page builders: Unbounce & HubSpot
- Sales intelligence: Apollo & ZoomInfo
- Email marketing: ActiveCampaign & Mailchimp
- Data warehouse: BigQuery & Snowflake
- Cold outreach: ReplyIO
- … and many others.
We are platform & technology agnostic but we like smooth experience with platforms as well. Hope this list will help with that as well.
Advanced ABM strategies
Using these advanced ABM strategies will increase your brand’s online visibility and get more qualified leads to your business.
Customization and integration with existing Martech
Companies using advanced ABM are focusing on customization and integration with existing Martech tools. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a specialized marketing automation platform that integrates with Salesforce, focusing on aligning marketing and sales efforts to drive revenue growth. This way they can create campaigns based on specific client needs and behaviors.
To do this they leverage advanced CRM to track customer interactions and preferences. By integrating those into their marketing automation platform they can create super personalized campaigns that resonates with target accounts.
Sales & marketing alignment tools
One of the key components of top ABM strategies is sales and marketing alignment. This means using tools that brings the two departments together, such as account-based advertising platforms and predictive analytics tools.
By using these tools companies can make sure both sales and marketing teams are working towards the same goals and targeting the same high value accounts. This alignment will lead to more leads, higher conversion rates and ultimately more revenue.
Real-time analytics and insights
Another important component of advanced premium ABM is real-time analytics and insights. By using advanced analytics tools companies can track campaign performance in real-time and make adjustments and optimizations based on data driven insights.
These analytics will provide valuable information on account engagement, conversion rates and ROI so marketers can make informed decisions on where to allocate resources for maximum impact. Real-time insights will help teams to identify trends early and adjust their strategy accordingly.
Implementation roadmap for Enterprise Tech companies
Step by step
Implementing B2B marketing automation for enterprise tech companies involves several steps. First, do a thorough audit of your current marketing processes and tools to identify gaps.
Next, define clear objectives for the automation implementation to make sure it aligns with your business goals. Then, choose an automation platform that fits your needs and integrates with existing systems.
After choosing the platform, create a detailed implementation plan with tasks, timelines and responsibilities. Make sure to do thorough testing and training before launching the automation.
Best practices
When B2B marketing automation, segment your audience to deliver personalized and targeted campaigns. Use dynamic content to engage leads at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Also integrate your automation platform with customer relationship management (CRM) systems for a single customer view. Analyze data and metrics regularly to optimize campaigns.
Roadmap
Phase 1:
Aligning automation with your goals (Weeks 1-2)
- Goal: Ensure that marketing automation strategies are aligned with business objectives.
Phase 2:
Tool selection and integration planning (Weeks 2-3)
- Goal: Choose the right automation platform and plan for integration.
Phase 3:
Implementation and configuration (Weeks 4-6)
- Goal: Set up the automation platform.
Phase 4:
Pilot testing and optimization (Weeks 6-8)
- Goal: Test and optimize.
Phase 5:
Full launch and ongoing optimization (Weeks 8-10)
- Goal: Launch automation enterprise wide.
Phase 6:
Ongoing
- Goal: Long term success and adaptability.
Note: exact timeline, goals and actions may vary depending on many factors.
Pitfalls
One of the biggest pitfalls of B2B marketing automation is not managing data properly and ending up with bad insights and bad campaigns. Another pitfall is over automation which can lead to impersonal communication and alienate potential customers.
Ignoring the human element in marketing automation will mean missing opportunities for personal engagement. You need to find the balance between automation and human touch.
For understaffed teams
For understaffed teams B2B marketing automation can be a huge efficiency booster. Automate repetitive tasks like email campaigns and lead scoring so you can focus on strategic initiatives.
Use workflow automation to streamline processes and reduce manual errors. Create lead nurturing sequences to engage prospects automatically and move them through the sales funnel.
Conclusion
In a competitive B2B world, marketing automation can be a game changer for your business. Understanding the strategic value, benefits and how to implement marketing automation will impact your lead gen and conversion. By adding advanced ABM and testing automation platforms you’re setting yourself up for better customer engagement and revenue growth.
As you start your marketing automation journey remember consistency and optimization are key. Stay ahead of the curve by refining your strategies, nurturing leads and adapting to the ever changing digital marketing landscape. By following this guide you’re setting your enterprise tech company up for long term success in the B2B world.
FAQs
What is B2B marketing automation?
B2B marketing automation is the use of software and technology to streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows in a business to business (B2B) context.
Why is B2B marketing automation important?
Understanding B2B marketing automation is important for modern businesses to increase efficiency, personalize customer experiences, nurture leads and drive revenue growth.
What are the benefits of B2B marketing automation?
B2B marketing automation will give you better lead gen, better lead nurturing, more sales productivity, better alignment between sales and marketing teams and higher ROI on marketing.
How do I create a marketing automation plan?
To create a marketing automation plan businesses should start by defining goals, segmenting audience, creating personal content, setting up automation workflows, analyzing data for optimization and refining strategies based on performance metrics.
What are the lead nurturing strategies in B2B marketing automation?
Lead nurturing strategies in B2B marketing automation are: segmenting leads by behaviour or demographics, sending targeted and personal content at different stages of the buyer journey, automating follow ups, scoring leads for prioritization and integrating with CRM for lead management.
