Imagine if you didn’t get reminders for your upcoming meetings. Or a pop-up telling you to buy a gift for your friend’s birthday. If there was no option other than manually paying your bills or setting aside money to invest. 

Some of the things we take for granted every day are automated. And it makes our life hassle-free and simple.  

For businesses, this often means investing in B2B marketing automation solutions so that they can 

• ensure sales and marketing alignment
• boost website traffic and derive quality sales leads
• identify leads with a high purchase intent 
• optimize the sales journey by utilizing personalized emails, high-value content, and targeted offers
• enable a positive and memorable customer experience

Recent research from Statista shows that 17.4% of marketers thought marketing automation was one of the most effective marketing techniques. 

Usually, a marketing team struggles to deliver quality results and meet its goals because of manual and repetitive tasks, lack of accuracy, and inefficient data management. 

A marketing automation platform takes care of the end-to-end buyer journey by implementing omnichannel marketing strategies to create awareness, generate and nurture conversion-ready opportunities, provide real-time account insights, and analyze the customer journey to enable personalization. 

With automation, the marketing team can finally focus on planning result-oriented campaigns, KPI tracking, maintaining brand consistency, and delivering on the brand’s expectations. 

How to use B2B Marketing Automation for best results

Whether it’s about generating a steady supply of leads or boosting customer retention, or even streamlining your key accounts activities, B2B marketing automation platforms are the catalysts in determining the path to your marketing success. 

Using B2B marketing automation can give you some great results. Here are a few benefits. 

1. Align with the sales team 

Slow lead handoff. Sluggish lead conversion. Lagging follow-ups. These are just some of the questions plaguing businesses. And the key reason is the lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams.  

Sales and marketing teams are like the two wheels of a bicycle – they need to be in sync to keep the business going. And the chainring needed to keep this bicycle cruising is B2B marketing automation. 

Automation improves communication, reduces room for errors, encourages collaboration on content, and helps parse through insights together to achieve optimal results.

2. Smooth end-to-end lead management

Lead management starts with lead nurturing and ends with reporting and analytics. With a B2B marketing automation solution, you can optimize leads from scratch and convert them into happy and engaged customers. That means more audience engagement on preferred channels and higher brand receptiveness and retention. 

End-to-end lead management also means you can use automation to take advantage of upsell and cross-sell opportunities, chart retention strategies, do audience segmentation, etc.

3. Improve email engagement strategies

The strongest business relationships are built on the strongest personal connections. In a survey by SmarterHQ, 72% of consumers say they “only engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests.”

It is crucial to build trust before prompting customers to make a purchase, and email marketing can do that for you. B2B marketing automation tools set up a lead nurturing workflow in the sales funnel to warm up the leads 

• with regular and personalized follow-ups
• by sharing educational content 
• by tapping into moment marketing with discounts and offers

Here’s an example of Grammarly’s automated email drip campaign 

B2B marketing is fuelled by email outreach, but email marketing works only when it’s on time and on-point, meaning immediate, targeted, and personalized content. Automated email sequences using B2B marketing automation platforms can be leveraged for 

• sending welcome kits, onboarding guides, welcome emails, and newsletters 
• free trial campaigns, black Friday sales, or limited-time offers
• media kits, and ready-to-use templates
• cross-sell and upsell products or services
• autoresponder emails to promptly address lead queries. 

4. Get quality leads with lead scoring.

 

Even the simplest and most sophisticated marketing campaigns can generate thousands of leads, out of which only a few would be truly viable. B2B marketing automation solutions can assess, manage, and qualify the leads that will bring you the maximum ROI. By eliminating human intervention in judging leads, you get a crisp list of market-qualified leads. 

To ensure you get the most out of your lead scoring system, configure the algorithm to assess leads based on 

• frequency of visits 
• number of website pages visited
• number of downloads of offers, white papers, reports, etc, on your site 
• adding items to the shopping cart, etc. 

The B2B marketing automation software ranks the leads based on points (which you can assign) to create a prioritized leads list.

Based on the lead score, it’s easier to prioritize the warmest leads with high chances of conversion. 

Best practices to maximize the results from B2B marketing automation

Marketing automation, when done right, can work wonders. And there are different ways in which you can do it right.

Here are 3 best practices to start with:

1. Create personas and profiles

Whether it’s your potential buyer’s persona or customer profiling, defining clear factors to target is a prerequisite. To build a solid persona, it’s imperative to gather insights from interviews with focus groups and customers and conduct surveys to fine-tune your ideal buyer profiles.

2. Tailor workflows based on the consumer journey 

Once you have understood the buyer’s persona, it’s time to model your workflows. Each buyer is unique, and your goal is to understand their personal pain points and make the journey smooth.

3. Offer valuable, downloadable, and accessible content.

Only a small fraction of search results offer comprehensive, download-worthy, and ready-to-use content that solves the most common problems of your target audience. Valuable content is often the best lead-generation method, and it’s absolutely free. 

Top B2B marketing automation software

Now, we all agree that automation is definitely the way forward if you want to get the right customers and maximum conversions.

Wondering which software will work best for your business?

Here’s a list of the top B2B marketing automation software. 

1. Adobe Marketo Engage

Marketo Engage from the house of Adobe is one of the most powerful B2B marketing automation platforms owing to its Salesforce integration and incredibly powerful process agility. It’s a great tool to improve customer engagement, scale automated marketing campaigns, and assess the revenue leveraged through marketing channels. Moreover, the software gives tons of ideas for a simple tasks, perfect for marketers who like to experiment a lot. 

Take a quick product tour of Adobe Marketo Engage

2. Act-On Automation Tool 

If you want it simple and yet creativity is your jam, this one’s for you. With its simple-to-use interface and ability to test creative campaigns, along with managing huge chunks of data, Act-On is the way to go. The automation tool is available for both B2C and B2B and provides web hosting, lead scoring, segmentation, and profiling, as well as CRM integrations.

Take a demo here 

3. Sage CRM

Sage CRM is one of the best marketing automation tools out there due to its Mailchimp integration, excellent community support for instant query addressing support, and exemplary campaign tracking tools. 

It’s easy to learn and use as well as affordable for small businesses. 

Request a callback from them to know more

4. Moosend 

Moosend is known for its prompt support and ease of use with a drag-and-drop editor. It also has automation workflow templates to help you get set up instantly. 

Moosend has a 30-day free trial

5. EngageBay

Designed expressly for small and medium businesses, EngageBay has a visual designer and promises to help you streamline sales, support, and marketing activities with one dashboard.

Check out EngageBay here.

Conclusion

There are plenty of options out there, but what’s right for you? That depends on your budget, team size, business goals, and a ton of other factors. For example, do you expect to scale quickly in the next few months? Opt for a model that gives you the flexibility to expand your usage as you grow. 

Speaking of scaling, if you’re looking to amplify your business’s growth and attract your ideal audience, Pixelmattic’s Digital Growth System is a holistic marketing solution that can help your business stand out from its competitors.

Contact us today to know how the Digital Growth System (now thrivemattic) can help your business grow!