The most obvious benefit of marketing automation is potentially the least interesting. While it’s true that you can free up resources by outsourcing marketing’s more mundane tasks to software, it is the potential that opens up for your marketing strategy that should be capturing your attention.

Because using an integrated marketing automation platform does more than just help to keep your marketing strategy running like a well-oiled machine.

Marketing automation can't replace strategic insight and creative campaign ideas, but it can create the time your team needs to come up with them. It can also make their implementation easier, faster, more efficient and impactful by enabling the digital-first, customised experiences that B2B buyers have come to expect.

In short, marketing automation software can provide the foundations for a truly satisfying customer experience that nurtures customer relationships at scale.

B2B Marketing Automation is More Than Time Savings and Efficiencies

When marketing automation is approached like this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that employees are generally supportive. When Hays UK polled 14,500 workers, 73% said they were open-minded about digital transformation and 87% welcomed automation being implemented in their workplace. Perhaps this reflects a recognition that by automating your marketing efforts, your team can redirect their talents and focus on the more complex and interesting tasks that increase their job satisfaction.

While automation can achieve a great many desirable results, it cannot replace the value of creativity and personal attention. Automating tasks such as routine emails and maintaining your email list gives your team time to focus on actions that address company priorities, such as nurturing engagement and high value contacts, or transforming the sales process.

Marketing automation software can also help to streamline your team’s outreach efforts. For example, they can set alerts to trigger when prospects reach a certain lead score threshold or their accounts begin to deviate from set parameters. This means they will be reaching out to see if they can be of any assistance at exactly the right moment, and with a better sense of what the customer is looking for from the data gathered on them. A quick conversation and a little brainstorming may be all that's needed to convert a potential customer to a sale, or to save an account that might otherwise be lost simply because no one contacted them until it was too late.

Marketing Automation Improves the Customer Experience

The digital customer experience is made up of so many moving parts, and every single one of them can be improved by automation.

Lead Capture Forms

Forms have been around forever so it's easy to overlook their significance. However, automation linked to lead capture can help you to deliver relevant personalised content and experiences. Form fields can trigger workflows that drip feed appropriate email campaigns or enable list segmentation, lead scoring and more. More data is what leads to a much more effective and relevant response.

While people understand this, they are also notoriously reluctant to give up their personal information. Asking for much more than an email address on the first touch can result in immediate abandonment. Progressive profiling allows you to collect small amounts of information at strategic intervals along the buyer's journey, using incentives such as e-books or webinars designed to help your target audience to elicit valuable data.

Landing Pages

Few long-standing tools of the marketing process have been more affected by automation than landing pages. Lead capture forms were almost always found on landing pages, just as they are now, but those pages were static. Everyone saw the same thing and got the same response.

Now the content on landing pages can be dynamic, serving up a version that is tailored to your audience.

This can be targeted based on a number of factors. You might provide different images based on what you know about a lead’s industry in your CRM. You can tailor the page’s copy based on where the visitor is on their buyer's journey or what products and services they’ve looked at on your website.

The information they've provided via lead capture forms now not only results in a timely response. It also provides data that enhances your knowledge and determines future interactions.

Email Marketing

It's almost inconceivable to imagine any kind of marketing, whether B2C or B2B, without using email. Email marketing has been markedly improved with technological advances, with automation taking a lot of the routine work out of it for your digital marketers.

A persistent rumour about the death of email marketing is always around, but that has never been more false than it is today. In many ways, automation has turbo-charged the effectiveness of email marketing.

Automated email is particularly effective for lead nurturing and new customer onboarding, but holistic campaigns can be built across the customer journey. From welcoming and thanking your new subscribers and setting expectations; to delivering newsletters and drip-feeding relevant content; to offering deals, extending and following up on event invitations; to abandoned cart notifications - email is so powerful because it is so versatile.

Customer Relationship Management

You will hear people go on and on about the importance of email lists, as though having a huge number of email addresses is the be-all and end-all of successful marketing. But in reality, that data is only the very beginning of what you want to know about the people who find their way to you.

That said, even the most basic automatic data collection can be hugely impactful. Imagine how much more effective you can be when you know, down to the tiniest detail, what is working in your marketing efforts and what is not. You can gather data to measure and analyse performance across your digital platform and refine your strategies based on what people respond to.

A significant advantage B2B marketers have over B2C is that tracking can show the name of a company when an employee visits. This is an enormous boost for lead generation. You can use this to research decision makers’ contact information and then use targeting to get your company’s content in front of the right people via platforms like LinkedIn.

Every extra scrap of information you get can help you refine not only your buyer personas, which are vital to targeting your broad marketing efforts, but also your ability to talk directly to prospects on an individual basis. You can also see the pages prospects are visiting on your website, the links they are clicking on in your emails, the digital ads or social media posts they’re responding to, and that builds up a comprehensive picture of their interests and requirements. This wealth of customer intelligence allows you to serve relevant information to the people who want to see it.

By using the data you acquire through automation, you can target higher quality leads which match your ideal customer profile, which should boost conversion rates. Automation helps you build CRM profiles that are filled with treasured gems of data that will move the sales process further and faster than email addresses alone could ever hope to achieve.

Creative Thinking, Precise Action

While automated data collection is nothing new, the effectiveness and efficiency with which its used these days is truly breathtaking. There is a reason businesses have become enamoured with the idea of Big Data, and that reason harks all the way back to that old axiom, “Knowledge is power.”

However, data is not valuable or actionable information in itself. In fact, the sheer volume of data from multiple sources can lead to overwhelm without a means to dig into, analyse and make sense of it. The job of analytics is to help you to determine which actions provide better results than others. And automation software performs those calculations and provides reporting with more speed and accuracy than people can.

As we saw above, improving relevance is a truly exciting prospect. However, data also helps you refine more basic components of the marketing mix, such as timing. When running campaigns, the intervals between releasing your content is crucial, as is following up while the lead is hot. As more information rolls in, you can automatically segment your leads to see where each one falls in the buyer's journey and assign a lead score. This allows you to respond accordingly, with follow-up taking place in an appropriate timeframe.

Another area you want to pay close attention to is choosing which platforms you use, and for what purpose. Twitter and LinkedIn can both achieve great results, but they obviously require different types of content. So deciding which platform is the best vehicle for which messages is not one to be taken lightly.

The beauty of automation in this context is that you can schedule so much in advance. During the creation of a campaign, you can use AI powered social creation, scheduling and amplification tools to decide on all the different components and build out a content calendar.

That way, although someone will certainly be overseeing the releases, no one has to be in charge of manually posting every single one as they are due. Not only will this reduce the interruptions during normal business, it will also cut down on the opportunities for human error.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing departments have often been adversaries in the past. Perhaps one thought the other could have been doing more with the other's efforts, and vice versa.

Now, however, both departments have access to all of the data mentioned above to guide and align their activities. Equally important, they can both see very clearly how everyone's efforts are succeeding in helping customers with their purchase decisions.

Since both departments are using the same data, there should be more cohesiveness and synergy between their strategies, as well. After all, the primary goal of both departments is to increase sales revenue. Automated data collection and analytics can help marketing provide higher quality leads, which will allow sales to achieve higher rates of conversion.

Automation is Liberation

It’s a liberating feeling when you first activate your MarTech stack. Your content buffer is filled and will be regularly published for you. A steady beat of social media posts is prepared and scheduled. Email campaigns will go out as planned, and the initial follow up will be automated. Prospects and customers are able to find the information they need on your content-rich website, through interacting with your chatbot, or by using the online tools and calculators that you provide. New customers receive well-timed and well-crafted onboarding emails.

Suddenly you will find a huge burden of administrative effort will be lifted. You’re free to engage spontaneously with emerging topics on social media, you can spend more time with your more valuable clients, and you’re free to focus on the future direction of your business. You could even spend more time with your family.

Create a Digital Experience For Your Customers

On the face of it, the value of marketing automation is in time savings and business efficiencies. But if your interest is primarily in cutting your staff overheads, you’re missing the main opportunity. B2B buyers now expect a far more sophisticated, relevant and responsive digital-first, self-led experience. Marketing automation software provides the tools to create and deliver the customer experience your buyer wants, as well as the data to inform your strategic and creative output.

If there are any areas where you feel your company may be somewhat out of its depth and could use a little help, reach out to 1827 Marketing. We will be happy to discuss how our expertise in B2B marketing automation might be of use to you.