In its simplest terms, B2B marketing automation is about taking manual tasks and automating them using software and digital tools, including artificial intelligence (AI).
It enables businesses to automate tasks and workflows for sales and marketing processes. Most people think of email marketing when they hear B2B marketing automation. Of course, it plays a major role in automating building targeting lists, executing campaigns, measuring results, routing leads, analyzing sales performance, and much more. But marketing automation can help boost all channels, ranging from social media automation and scheduling to automated website live chat. Automation and AI, in particular, can also provide new work opportunities for skilled digital talent.
The importance of technology can be seen in the number of companies adopting it. Statistics show that:
- 75% of all companies employ a minimum of one kind of marketing automation tool.
- 40% of companies not using marketing automation say they will do so soon.
- The domestic marketing automation software industry is worth more than $6 billion.
B2B marketing automation is one of the most prominent examples of how a digital revolution is currently transforming businesses, helping to:
- Increase efficiency and speed
- Reduce risk and human error
- Provide valuable sales and marketing intelligence
- Reduce overhead and unnecessary costs
To see why your organization should adopt B2B marketing automation, or evolve how you work with it, read the following examples of innovative uses.
Automating B2B: Moving marketing forward
The rigorous demands of selling to a B2B audience lend themselves to marketing automation. The pool of potential clients is smaller than with B2C marketing. Additionally, the targets are swayed more by logic and return on investment (ROI) than emotion, so they may need a lot of intelligent convincing to buy, with the benefits spelled out.
Because the pool of potential clients is smaller than with consumer marketing, businesses can’t afford to let any qualified leads slip through their fingers. Some ways your organization can benefit from effective B2B marketing automation include:
- Better capturing and nurturing prospective leads: In B2B marketing, lead generation is typically a massive marketing cost. Automation technology (including automatic notifications of hot leads) enables marketers to capture leads and engage them continually throughout the sales funnel.
- Optimizing opportunities: In the B2B space, your lead pool may be limited. Automation technology monitors and optimizes your efforts, allowing you to make the most of each customer interaction.
- Unlocking creative potential: By automating basic aspects of the B2B marketing process, marketers can focus their efforts on strategies that utilize their creative and strategic capabilities.
- Providing more personalized content: Customized, automated follow-ups to customers according to specified preferences ensure stronger business relationships.
- Saving valuable time: Automatic welcome emails, reminders, and content free your business up to tackle other important tasks.
B2B marketing automation strategies to consider
B2B marketing automation is all about running your business faster, wiser, more productively, and more profitably. Like any great tool, it’s best used if you have the right strategy based on problems with processes that need to be solved and business goals that need to be reached.
Here are some innovative and effective uses of B2B marketing automation to get you thinking about new possibilities.
Expedite sales activities
A B2B company can automate simple, repetitive sales activities that don’t require any special relationship building or answering complex questions. For example, AI lets you easily sync data from various sources into your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
AI can also suggest responses to a sales representative engaged in a live or written conversation online. Or a bot can handle live chat conversations until the customer is ready to be handed over to a live rep.
Having this kind of functionality is important since an increasing number of customers expect online businesses to have live chat capabilities. By handling part (or even all) of a customer’s conversations, live reps can use their time more productively.
Automate social media
While real people are needed to keep up conversations with customers, social media lends itself to the automation of a lot of key tasks. These include automatically scheduling and sharing content, thanking new followers, and posting content from partners.
You can also automatically monitor certain conversation streams and get immediate notifications for specific keywords, responding immediately to customers, whether happy or unhappy. You can even have a chatbot answer common customer questions.
Neglecting social media conversations with customers, especially unhappy ones, can demonstrate a lack of engagement that can hurt your brand.
Nurture leads
More often than not, when visitors come to your site, they aren’t prepared to buy on the spot. Nurturing a prospect until they’re ready to be converted to a sale can take a lot of time with back-and-forth emails and phone calls.
With a B2B marketing automation solution, you can use a stream of automated emails to keep the process alive, finally turning over the qualified lead to the sales team when the prospect is ready.
You can launch a drip campaign to increase conversions or use a content marketing tool to automatically feed them content tailored to their special requirements.
Institute dynamic pricing
AI tools enable businesses to adopt dynamic pricing for their products or services—also called surge pricing, demand pricing, real-time pricing, or algorithmic pricing.
The dynamic prices are set by rules-based or self-improving algorithms. These automatically assess variables that can include supply, demand, specific customer data, and competitive prices. Dynamic pricing can lead to strong profits since a 1% boost in prices will yield a 10% improvement in profit for businesses with a 10% profit margin.
Develop adaptive content
Dynamic, smart, or adaptive content involves website content, ads, or emails that change based on the interests or past behavior of the viewer. Having the wrong content or, worse, no content can alienate and lose viewers. However, content automatically customized for a viewer gets engagement.
Having the right adaptive content is a crucial step in leading people down the sales funnel. It can help generate leads, improve conversions, and create repeat business. To create content that motivates buying action, you need to gather enough information about your target to know how best to reach them.
About 70% of marketers routinely invest in content marketing relevant to their target’s needs because they know the effort will pay off.
Embrace programmatic ad buying
This involves an automated process of buying digital ads through large exchanges. When someone loads a page, does a search, or performs another action, these systems serve up the ads automatically tailored to the person’s preferences determined by the AI.
The predictive analytics of programmatic ad buying improves targeting and makes it more cost-effective to run campaigns.
Get the right analytics
Knowing how your marketing and sales efforts perform is crucial to meeting goals and gaining insight for future improvement. Sometimes, there are so many channels to monitor that it’s hard to keep up. There are analytics tools for B2B marketing automation that can provide an all-in-one dashboard, consolidating everything from social media mentions to email engagement, lead generation, project management, and search engine optimization (SEO).
The Goals feature of Google Analytics—with its funnel visuals—is a great tool to define concrete actions on your e-commerce site, such as form completion, how much time was spent on the page, pages per session, and “events,” which can be social shares, video plays, how many products were added to carts, and much more. You can keep track of how many actions or conversions there were.
By identifying the right metrics and understanding the data you’ve collected, you can use the analytics to answer business-critical questions and see your ROI.
To implement automation, turn to independent experts
By finding innovative ways to use B2B marketing automation—whether using chatbots for live chat, better organizing email campaigns or refining the process of social media posting and analytics—you will give your business a major boost.
Suppose you’re looking for marketing automation specialists to fill out your team and fill in any knowledge gaps. In that case, Upwork has a full roster of independent professionals, ranging from marketing automation strategists to marketing automation architects and email specialists.
