All You Need To Know About B2B Marketing Automation
As a marketer, you are under a lot of pressure.
You need to be able to prove marketing ROI and personalise the customer journey. You have to create an excellent customer experience while dealing with the complexity of a multi-channel marketing universe.
All of this while trying to complete a host of repetitive tasks that reduces the amount of time you have for creative and strategic work.
Marketing automation is a key component in helping solve these issues.
Automation tools can help implement marketing plans faster and more effectively than possible otherwise. It can provide targeted, valuable material at key moments, improving your ability to nurture customers through the buyer’s journey.
Marketing automation has the potential to save your team time and resources. It’s a key enabler of B2B digital marketing strategy
Most importantly, we believe that, when done correctly, automation can make your marketing more human, not less.
Learn how to harness this power for your organisation in our definitive guide to B2B marketing automation.
Automation tools can provide targeted, valuable material at key moments, improving your ability to nurture customers through the buyer’s journey
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a blend of technology and practice, where marketers use software to streamline marketing efforts, improving their effectiveness.
Marketing automation allows you to effectively analyse and understand marketing data to develop a more holistic picture of your relationships with people. Turning data into usable, actionable information allows you to provide better experiences and connect with customers in ways they enjoy.
It can enhance almost any part of your strategy, from generating content ideas, to lead nurturing, evaluation and qualification, to measuring performance.
By automating routine tasks, you free up your team to do what they love about marketing - i.e. coming up with creative ways to engage with people.
As you’re likely aware, there’s a huge array of different types of marketing automation tools available on the market. Indeed, you can find a stand-alone tool for almost any marketing task you can think of.
A piecemeal approach towards building a martech stack might make sense initially if you only need one or two features. However, as your needs develop over time, trying to coordinate too many separate programs can come to represent a significant technical challenge!
In contrast to job-specific tools, an integrated marketing automation platform offers an all-in-one solution. For instance, our partner, Sharpspring, includes the following features:
CRM & Sales Automation
Behaviour-Based Automated Email
Campaign Tracking
Dynamic Landing Pages
Blog Builder
Dynamic Form Builder
Reporting and Analytics
Anonymous Visitor ID
Social media management
It’s important to note that effectively automating your marketing strategies requires more than just software. Technology is a key element, but we also recognise the importance of a considered strategy, campaign planning, and proper implementation of this powerful tool.
Indeed, the advantages and disadvantages of marketing automation tie directly to how you use it.
Marketing automation software can help provide a smoother customer experience. However, you provide the intelligence, creativity and human connection that makes for a truly successful marketing strategy.
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What Are the Key Benefits of Marketing Automation?
The value of marketing automation for B2B organisations has been proven.
For instance, research analysis by VentureBeat found that 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase. 77% of automation users also saw the number of conversions increase (VB Insight).
When properly applied, automation tools help provide a higher quality experience for your audience. Indeed, surveys found that improved user communication and experience was the top reported advantage of using B2B marketing automation. This was followed by higher conversion rates, improve lead quality, and increased lead generation overall (Smart Insights).
It’s no coincidence that more than two-thirds of organisations classified as “best-in-class” report using automation tools (Emailmonday).
In one study, more than half (55%) of companies said they currently use marketing automation software. An additional 28% said they were planning to invest in new marketing software in the next 12 months (London Research).
This is hardly surprising as we look at the many ways that automation can improve your B2B marketing efforts.
Understand Your Ideal Customer Better
In our opinion, treating your audience as people, rather than potential sales, is a vital element of good B2B marketing. The goal is to develop a long term relationship, built on a foundation of trust, with the individuals who make up the account.
These days buyers expect a more personalised, tailored service. For instance, 81% of consumers want brands to get to know them and to understand when and when not to approach them. 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalised (Business 2 Community).
The way we provide this excellent customer experience and personalisation is by understanding them better. This allows us to provide them with only the information they find relevant and at the moment they need it.
Automation aids this endeavour by collecting the robust behavioural data you need to create an amazing experience and forge a solid relationship with your audience.
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Implement Complex Marketing Strategies More Easily
Marketing automation helps you collect, organise and structure all your campaign data into actionable information. Indeed, an automation platform is key for transforming your efforts into data-driven marketing.
Its ability to automatically react to your prospects’ behavioural signals enables complex strategies like behavioural email campaigns, lead scoring and dynamic website content.
Furthermore, with comprehensive reporting and analytics, you can see what does and doesn’t work for your audience and your organisation. This allows you to learn from past actions and experiment so your marketing never becomes stagnant.
Focus on Creative Solutions, Not Repetitive Tasks
"Saving time" was the most popular response for marketers asked to identify the biggest benefit of automation for their team (Smart Insights). This makes sense, considering the raison d’etre of automation tools is to make marketing easier.
The daily operation of a marketing campaign consists of a lot of small, routine tasks. For instance, scheduling blog posts, sending emails, looking up hashtags to amplify social content, etc.
Marketing teams feel demotivated by having to constantly focus on these boring, repetitive tasks. Fortunately, these types of operations can be handled much more effectively by an automation platform. By freeing their time and resources for more creative and strategic work, your team gets more job satisfaction and your clients get more of what they value most.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Automation platforms help your marketing and sales teams work together more effectively by removing ambiguity. Lead scoring means only qualified leads are passed to sales after the relationship has been nurtured and they meet set criteria, signalling that prospects are interested and ready to buy.
Your sales team can see exactly how leads travelled through your buyer’s journey so they can provide more personalised service. And your marketing team can see which actions resulted in a closed sale. The result of this alignment is an accelerated sales cycle.
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What Can Marketing Automation Do?
We want to help you understand how you can put marketing automation to work for your organisation.
Let's explore some of the features of automation technology and the ways it can transform your digital marketing strategy.
Revolutionise Your Business
To succeed, automation requires that your organisation consider hard questions, like marketing goals and audience needs. This can lead to foundational changes in how you do business and will transform your workflow.
Indeed, marketing automation research found that it drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity. This is paired with a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead overall (Nucleus Research).
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Marketing Automation and Audience Intelligence
Marketing automation systems make use of marketing data to produce granular, customer-focused insights. AI and machine learning features also let you apply sophisticated algorithms to your data, further enhancing your audience intelligence.
For instance, predictive automation tools study how prospects behave when they encounter your brand, website, content, emails, or social media. By understanding what prospects want from you at any point in your buyer’s journey, you can serve them relevant content at exactly the right time.
Combined, all of this information can then help your marketing team build better campaigns and close more sales.
Email Marketing and Automation
Email marketing campaigns let you send your content directly to warm prospects who have opted in and expressed a desire to find out more.
Marketing automation gathers lead intelligence so your business can nurture your relationship and respond in a more relevant, human way to your audience's needs.
Combine the two and you get behaviour-based email marketing, like Sharpspring’s “Smart Email” feature. This is where you send targeted emails in response to visitor's actions across your marketing channels.
As you might imagine, it’s a highly effective marketing automation tactic. It transforms email marketing from a broadcast channel into more of a conversation. This boosts engagement and email campaign results by improving your customer relationship.
Behaviour-based marketing works by tracking your customer's behaviours as they explore your digital platforms, including your:
Website
Social media channels
Emails
Apps
Business listings
As prospects engage with your content they set off pre-selected triggers. This causes your automation platform to send out relevant emails in response to their actions.
The audience intelligence capabilities of automation help you understand what customers are looking for with each action. That way, you can provide relevant information personalised to their needs at that moment.
Through this process, automation helps you effectively bring your email marketing segmentation down to an audience of one.
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Marketing automation helps you get the right message to the right person at the right time
Marketing Automation and Personalisation
Customers expect a personalised experience.
Fortunately, marketing automation platforms like Sharpspring makes it much simpler to speak with customers in the way they desire. For instance, it helps you create dynamic automated drip campaigns that respond to user behaviour. This improves your customer experience by putting an end to boring, mass email blasts.
Sharpspring also includes email marketing campaigns as well as landing pages with dynamic content features. This means they will automatically adapt based on who users are, their interests, and their behaviours on your website. This lets your team create campaigns that engage visitors with a personalised experience. Moreover, with dynamic content, a single landing page or email template will resonate with multiple audiences – saving your team time and resources.
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Social Marketing Automation
The right marketing automation tools can also improve social marketing management. For instance, 1827 Amplify tools enhance your social media marketing strategy by:
Analysing your content and generating a campaign of posts across your social channels.
Pulling out key quotes and images to create eye-catching posts.
Suggesting hashtags to reach a wider audience.
Adding tracking codes so you can track and analyse performance.
These automatically generated campaigns are then submitted for manual review (or any last-minute edits) by your marketing team. Once approved it schedules daily content across your channels, creating a consistent posting cadence.
According to Entrepreneur, automating social posting this way saves more than 6 hours per week on social media management. All of this translates to more time for your team to focus on human engagement on social. This will leads to better customer experiences and increased campaign performance.
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Automation and Tracking/Analytics
Figuring out how to attribute the contribution of each piece of digital marketing is a significant challenge for marketers. This is where the sophisticated behaviour tracking analytic capabilities of marketing automation really shines.
Imagine having a centralised way to track campaigns across email, social, paid advertising, organic search, as well as offline actions. Of being able to gather all the necessary data to determine if you’re meeting your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Automation platforms like Sharpspring can easily track and measure performance across all of your channels. This gives you a more informed understanding of how each piece fits into your overall marketing plan. Furthermore, it integrates with your CRM software to build a robust analytics database. This produces granular, customer-focused data of your entire marketing and sales strategy and makes for easy report generation.
Having access to this information greatly enhances your ability to scale your efforts and reach prospects at precisely the right moment.
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Marketing automation is a machine to help you to be more human, not to be more like a machine
The Dos and Don'ts of Marketing Automation
As you’ve seen, automation is a powerful tool. It’s a machine to free your time to work creatively on building worthwhile relationships with your customers. It’s a machine to help you to be more human, not to be more like a machine. This is why we believe the most important rule of marketing automation is to care about your audience. Use it to send them marketing messages that inspire delight and to listen to feedback.
That said, here are some other best practices for how to implement marketing automation in your organisation.
Do: Plan How to Use Marketing Automation
You’ll find that successfully automating your marketing strategy is completely doable with some thought and planning.
We recommend taking a phased approach.
First, consider your goals for what you want to achieve and how you’ll measure progress. Next, audit your current marketing strategies to determine its current performance. Keep in mind that automation won’t fix a bad situation, rather it will enhance what’s already there. Then work with your supplier to come up with an implementation plan.
Do: Think About Audience Segmenting
Audience segmentation is a key element of successful automation, so it’s better to do it right than do it quickly.
Do your due diligence and research your audience base carefully. This will ensure your automation system has the best information possible to get started.
As the system runs, it will collect even more data, helping to refine segmentation and uncover deeper audience insights.
Do: Test Everything.
Use testing to determine pre-selected triggers for your automation system. For instance, when someone shares your content on social media or subscribes to your email list. This will tell the system when to move prospects forward.
Also, test content by using different subject lines, images, messaging, or delivery times to find what resonates most with your audience.
If any triggers or content aren’t performing as intended, you can use that information and improve your next campaign.
Finally, try identifying common elements in your best performing campaigns and test those insights in future marketing efforts.
Don’t: Treat It Like Fancy Email Marketing
A lot of businesses don’t fully understand their automation platform and end up treating it like an augmented email engine. In fact, a recent study revealed only 2% of B2B marketers use marketing automation to its full potential (MarTech Advisor).
This is such a wasted opportunity.
You’ll find that an automation platform like Sharpspring can enhance your customer’s experience across multiple channels. To maximise results, you should take the time to work with your automation supplier to integrate its full array of features into your marketing strategy. They should provide plenty of resources and support for helping your team understand how to make effective use of your new automation platform.
Don’t: Treat It Like a Magic Solution
Marketing automation is not something you can set up once and walk away. It requires time and resources to ensure that it’s correctly implemented and maintained.
Also, it's not a substitute for the creativity, intelligence and instincts of your marketing and sales team. It is software designed to help them more effectively connect with prospects on a human level.
What Does Marketing Automation Mean for the Customer Experience?
We believe that marketing is most successful when it’s centred on human connection and improving your customer relationship.
What automation does is help you create personalised buyer journeys based on real-time information, and to engage and provide exceptional customer experiences at scale.
When prospects interact with your business on various channels – social, email, paid ads, web pages, etc – it creates signals. Automation tools collect these signals and contextualise your leads’ needs at different points in their decision-making process.
When correctly implemented, marketing automation provides instant action, more personalisation, and broader reach.
Take the First Step with the Right B2B Marketing Automation Agency
We hope this guide has helped you gain a better understanding of how marketing automation can benefit your organisation.
As you can see, automation isn’t just about technology. It’s about applying the right tools to build relationships. Indeed, a truly effective marketing automation campaign combines human talent and technology to create personalised customer experiences.