6 Good Reasons for B2B Marketing Automation in Your Company
Florian Langer8/11/2022
In this article, you will learn about 6 good reasons why B2B marketing automation is beneficial for you.
Table of contents
- What is Marketing Automation?
- What is B2B marketing automation used for?
- , based on real, anonymized data from customers. It takes 192 days from the first touch to the closed-won. That's a lot of time and the implications are far-reaching.
- Smart prospecting is about building meaningful relationships. The challenge lies in setting up human-like automations that help the sales team do an even better job for the success of your current and future customers.
- As you've just realized, without a plan for customer acquisition, you're heading straight for a failure. Implementation requires some considerations beforehand. Here are the most important steps:
- Tools like
What is Marketing Automation?
Finally, no more manually written follow-ups, summaries of calls, or manual outreach to podcasts you'd like to be featured on. Sounds too good to be true?
B2B marketing automations automate many of the tasks you need to maintain your funnel, your Lead Nurturing or your (personal) branding. In other words - B2B marketing automations are the perfect tool for winning new and especially qualified leads, retaining existing prospects, or pushing them one step further in the funnel, building an authentic relationship with your existing customers, and establishing yourself as a person or brand.
Recommended Marketing Automation Software
On our comparison platform OMR Reviews you can find more recommended marketing automation tools. We present more than 210 solutions that are specifically designed to meet the needs of marketing automation experts, companies and brands. These tools offer comprehensive support in all facets of marketing automation. Take this opportunity to compare different software solutions, relying on authentic and verified user reviews:
What is B2B marketing automation used for?
The basic level is a go-to-market strategy that includes the following:
- Target market segments you want to market to
- ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) and content segmentation (not all customers are the same).
- Marketing message (positioning, value proposition)
- Aligning marketing, sales, and executives with the above points and strategic goals
Next, you'll take a journey through the B2B customer journey and learn at each step how B2B marketing automations can support you.
1. Awareness
No matter what goals you set for B2B marketing automations, everything starts with creating brand awareness. Initially, it's about attracting attention and generating demand.
These points can be massively improved through B2B marketing automation:
- The distribution of guides, whitepapers, or one-pagers optimized for niche keywords systematically generating organic traffic
- Push your profile proactively on social media and establish thought-leadership within your target audience. Thereby, you can generate organic attention.
- Increase the awareness of your (personal) brand and multiply the reach of guest appearances, podcasts, or webinars.
- Engaging in communities and groups where your audience is already present.
2. Demand generation
Demand arises when you can demonstrate that your product helps achieve the desired result or solve a specific challenge for your audience.
For B2B marketing automation software, this could be anything that generates demand for your services, products, or offers. These could include:
- Detailed guides and Marketing Automation Tools, which add value for your audience
- Podcasts and Customer Experience Automation platforms like ActiveCampaign
- Webinars where the frameworks are presented step-by-step, demonstrating how marketing automations from HubSpot Marketing Hub
- Newsletters in which you support the frameworks with additional comments and links
3. Demand capturing
To capture the demand, it is essential to establish a benchmark for engagement and specific "intent" milestones in order to get your prospects into the "warm-up game".
Especially if your B2B company has a high ACV (Annualized Contract Value) or CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), it is important to actively support "buyer enablement".
This can be done, for example, through content hubs that are specifically tailored to your target audience, like the marketing blog of HubSpot Marketing Hub.
Especially in the field of continuous nurturing, B2B marketing automation can really flex its muscles. For example, by automating interaction with LinkedIn or Twitter content of your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) or sending targeted emails when your prospect interacts with certain landing pages or blog posts in your content universe.
Imagine, your lead reads a blog post on a particular topic and automatically receives a message about this very topic from you. You've already started a conversation. B2B-automated, of course. More automated e-mail sequences can be found in the article by Nick.
4. Activation
If you haven't skipped any of the previous points, you will have leads at this point that sales can actively approach. Social selling and a creative, personalized approach are the most effective ways to activate.
Little tip from me, the smaller and more personalized the batch is, the higher the response, click, and interaction rate ;)
5. Client Success
Your goal is to ensure that your customers achieve the results they hope for from your product. If not, you cannot expect many, if any, positive reviews, success stories or referrals.
In this phase, your opportunity is to conduct surveys! If you want to understand the purchasing process and the customer journey with all its touchpoints, send an automated message as soon as you notice that your customers had an "aha moment". Now, it's time to start asking questions :) HubSpot Marketing HubA segment on ActiveCampaign, or
, which gets filled at a certain conversion, might turn out to be your best friend. IntercomThese newly gained insights can help you … HubSpot Marketing HubImprove your marketing message ActiveCampaignAdapt your marketing and sales to your customers' purchasing behavior
Further optimize activities and channels mentioned by customers
- 6. Expansion
- Customer testimonials and success stories are a great way to spread your name even further and refine your marketing message in your target segment.
- The tools mentioned in this article can help you:
Prepare/ push upselling with existing customers
Ask for testimonials
Invite potential customers to your webinars
- Who needs B2B marketing automation?
- According to a study by
- Dreamdata
, based on real, anonymized data from customers. It takes 192 days from the first touch to the closed-won. That's a lot of time and the implications are far-reaching.
For marketing and growth teams, this could mean that experiments are possibly aborted too soon because no revenue was generated in the short term and within one or two months. For planning and budgeting, this still means that an early plan and budget allocation is needed to influence the pipeline through marketing activities. Little tip: If you want to close a deal before Christmas, it's time to start in summer.The study further showed that it takes an average of 32 touchpoints to wrap up a deal. Once again, B2B marketing automation software can help orchestrate these touchpoints and save valuable time.
B2B is a discipline with many touchpoints and several stakeholders that you should know and understand in order to use your time and marketing spend as efficiently as possible.
It is tempting to consider individual touchpoints in isolation due to the lower effort, but it is also much less goal oriented. If you consider the entire customer journey holistically, i.e., the big picture, B2B marketing automation software helps you accompany potential customers from the first ad impression to the "welcome email". A/B tests are useful here to expand your
and to check.
Tools like
can also be used to trace your customer journey holistically using various events, segments and timestamps. They also offer the possibility to create basic reporting in order to share the data and insights with other teams and stakeholders. IntercomB2B marketing automation, examples for your company HubSpot Marketing HubEngage with your leads on their favorite channels Salesforce Sales CloudAs discussed above, the journey your B2B Lead embarks on spans a longer timeframe with many touchpoints. It's clear from this that one channel can't be enough. B2B marketing automation software helps you create cross-channel touchpoints and communicate with your prospects.
Smart prospecting is about building meaningful relationships. The challenge lies in setting up human-like automations that help the sales team do an even better job for the success of your current and future customers.
B2B marketing automation software supports you when it comes to understanding the challenges of your potential customers and clearly explaining why your products or your services are the best solution for these challenges.
Nobody has time for untimely advertising approaches. When you walk through the pedestrian zone, you are probably one of the many passers-by who dodge the nice promo teams asking for a donation.
You probably aren't the first people in the world to suddenly hang up when a voice on the phone says: 'Hello, with our new phone/ energy/ whatever tariff you can [...]'.
The same applies when you want to sell products/ services that the people in front of you do not need your services at the moment. Here, you are wasting your time.
As salespeople, it's your job to sell. If you didn't have a strategy in place for acquisition beforehand, you run the risk of your efforts being completely counterproductive.
Lead scoring based on data from your B2B marketing automation software
If someone has signed up for newsletters or other emails from your company, it is hard to know how strong the real buying interest is. Open and click rates can give a little more insight there.
These metrics can be found in all B2B marketing automation email tools. Your sales team may find it more interesting to talk to a prospect who has opened and maybe even clicked every email in the nurturing sequence so far.
This way, they can focus on the leads that appear most engaged. You can also assign a higher value to certain emails, such as invitations to webinars or demos, or prioritize leads who had positive engagement with these messages. In this article, you can learn,
what email automations are and how to use them correctly
.
Build deeper customer relationships and automate interactionsB2B Marketing Automation tools like ,
and
, also offer the possibility to create forms using a modular system, which you can integrate into your landing pages. If someone actively fills out a form, that's a good sign of interest. Why else would they take the time to voluntarily share information about themselves? That's a good time to follow up with email content or even a direct approach by someone from your team to make sure they stay engaged. ActiveCampaignSuppose a website visitor wants to download specific content or sign-up for a newsletter. Here, you can use a form to ask for basic information such as name, email address, and phone number. With custom fields, however, you can also collect further information. For example, which products they are interested in, where they work, or if they want to apply for an initial interview. HubSpot Marketing HubThis way, your leads still get the great content they're looking for. In addition, you gain a deeper understanding of the people on the other side of the screen, so you can write even more relevant messages. Salesforce Sales CloudHow do you start implementing a B2B marketing automation?
Before you can start prospecting, it makes sense to set achievable goals and determine the necessary means to achieve them.
How to: Sales prospecting with the help of B2B Marketing Automation
As you've just realized, without a plan for customer acquisition, you're heading straight for a failure. Implementation requires some considerations beforehand. Here are the most important steps:
Defining goals:
What's the purpose of your strategy?
Do you want to generate actual sales or book discovery calls/demos?
Are you trying to distribute free trials or simply expand your database?
Who is your target audience?
- Business Goals
- Personal Challenges
Benefits of buying your product
- Reasons why your target audience might not buy
- What are your sales goals?
- What relationship(s) do you want to build?
- Most B2B companies ignore the question of the target audience and try to market and sell to companies that will never buy these products.
Why?
Because they play the numbers game and only worry about pushing the volume of leads addressed.
The truth is, you don't need more leads, but fewer. These just need to be better qualified, engaged, and have a real buying intention.
Conclusion
B2B marketing automation software provides more insight into your leads, helps to build better relationships with the leads and generate more relevant hypotheses.
Combining personalization, automation, and segmentation, you can determine exactly which content is sent when and to which leads.
Tools like
or
, allow users to easily connect all important programs into one system and automate corresponding workflows.
The best thing is: Once you've chosen a "recipe", the whole thing runs on autopilot and you have more time for other things, while maintaining communication with your customers! ZapierWant to learn more about Salesforce's services? All tools and helpful articles about the products can be found on n8nour company's overviews page of Salesforce.
Das beste dabei ist: Sobald Ihr Euch für ein „Rezept“ entschieden habt, läuft das ganze auf Autopilot und Ihr habt mehr Zeit für andere Dinge, während Ihr gleichzeitig die Kommunikation zu Euren Kund:innen aufrechterhaltet!
Du willst mehr über die Leistungen von Salesforce erfahren? Alle Tools und hilfreiche Artikel zu den Produkten findest du auf unserer Company-Overview-Seite von Salesforce.
Author
Florian Langer
Author
Florian Langer
In der DECAID-Group ist Florian der Ansprechpartner Nummer eins für sämtliche Go-To-Market-Belange. Er kreiert Content für die decaid.academy und Le Wagon, mit Schwerpunkt auf Data Analytics und Growth, um Firmen die effektive Nutzung innovativer Lösungen zu ermöglichen.
