Two of the questions that often come up when chatting to customers are: What is B2B marketing automation, and why does it matter? This article will answer these questions and explain the importance of marketing automation for B2B businesses.
In a nutshell: Business-to-business marketing automation explained
Essentially, B2B marketing automation refers to the use of specialised software tools or platforms to automate, streamline, and measure repetitive marketing tasks and workflows – either aimed at B2B customers or used by B2B businesses. Marketing automation saves you time and money by helping you to manage complex marketing processes more efficiently, make better use of your time, target specific market segments and audiences, and nurture leads through their buyer journey with minimal manual effort.
Marketing automation software typically integrates multiple marketing channels, including social media, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), email marketing, paid advertising, and content management, to create a tailored and consistent experience for your prospects and existing customers.
Why does this matter?
The benefit of B2B marketing automation for your business is often a higher ROI from your marketing spend. By streamlining your marketing efforts and empowering your sales team to prioritise the most qualified prospects, an automation platform will help you achieve better results with less manual intervention. Investing in marketing automation can help you allocate your resources more efficiently, reducing waste and boosting returns.
An automation platform can also help you deliver more personalised content to each prospect, increasing engagement and closures. The platform could, for instance, email tailored product or service recommendations based on a lead’s browsing history, industry needs, or their ‘point of entrance’ (e.g. the landing page, article, advert, or social media post through which they discover your website).
Marketing automation can also facilitate better collaboration between your marketing and sales functions. With shared access to real-time data through your CRM, your marketing and sales people and any external partners can work more closely together to qualify leads, deliver consistent content, and convert prospects, creating a unified process for driving revenues.
How does B2B marketing automation differ from B2C?
B2B and B2C businesses use many of the same tools. However, marketing automation is often particularly valuable in a B2B context, in which purchasing decisions often involve a longer sales cycle and multiple stakeholders. A good marketing automation system gives you better control and visibility over your communication and sales processes, helping you nurture prospects towards conversion without the risk of sales being unnecessarily delayed or going cold.
What features should you look for in a B2B marketing automation platform?
1. Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with potential customers who are not yet ready to make a purchase. This is essential for B2B businesses, where many people who get in touch with you will be at an early, ‘awareness’ stage of their journey. Automation helps you to deliver timely and relevant content to these prospects based on their behaviour, interests, and engagement history with your business. For example, if someone downloads a free e-book from your website about a certain product or issue, the platform can trigger a follow-up email workflow with related resources, instigating a conversation with the customer. This keeps prospects engaged, helps to develop trust, and moves them closer to conversion.
2. Email Marketing
Email is a critical component of B2B marketing and sales, so a good automation platform will help you segment your contact database and coordinate various email campaigns tailored to specific buyer groups, or personas. A lot of modern platforms, such as HubSpot, come with advanced features such as automated follow-ups and dynamic content so that each recipient receives a targeted message aligned with their position in the sales funnel.
3. CRM Integration
Integrating a sales CRM with a marketing automation platform bridges the gap between marketing and sales processes, and saves you a lot of time updating and accessing information. Through CRM integration, all your customer and prospect data is centralised in one place, helping you communicate more efficiently with your customers and keeping your teams on the same page with each sale. By improving the accuracy of your lead scoring systems and tracking each lead’s progress, your sales team can access detailed insight into each prospect’s interactions with your marketing collateral, helping them focus on high-value opportunities for conversion.
4. Reporting And Analytics
Most automation tools now come equipped with an inbuilt analytics dashboard to help you measure the performance of each campaign. Essential sales metrics such as email open rates, click-through rates, social media shares, website traffic, bounces, return visits, lead generation trends and other factors give you actionable insights on which to improve and strengthen your campaigns, helping you refine your strategy over time.
Next steps
To find out more about B2B marketing automation and the benefits for your business, please contact one of the inbound marketing specialists at JDR today. We can help you identify and define what you want to achieve from marketing, implement an automation platform that meets your goals and budget, and set up the platform to create targeted workflows and campaigns that can be scaled to your needs as your business grows. Click here to find out more.
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