B2B Marketing Automation – Best Practices and Strategies in 2023
What is B2B Marketing Automation?
To begin, B2B refers to 'business to business,' a transaction or business conducted between two companies, but not always, and may include modern-day remote teams. Second, marketing automation refers to any software that handles a large number of B2B marketing and early-stage sales-related events. As a result, this software assists you in streamlining, automating, and measuring marketing tasks and workflows. As a result, it improves operational efficiency and allows you to grow revenue more quickly.
B2B Marketing Automation is a huge step in the right direction for bringing multiple stakeholders to the table to begin discussing what your company is all about.
Marketing automation aids in the automation of nearly everything, including email marketing, social media, and data capture analytics for improved iterations. Having the sole goal of increasing revenue while developing efficient workflows.
The differences between B2C and B2B Marketing Automation
Before delving deeper into B2B marketing, consider the distinction between B2B and B2C marketing automation. B2B is an abbreviation. B2B is an abbreviation for Business to Business, whereas B2C is an abbreviation for Business to Customer. The primary and critical distinction between the two marketing automation systems is in their customer.
Businesses in B2B will sell their products or services to other businesses and related stakeholders, whereas businesses in B2C will sell their products directly to individual customers.
Both companies use marketing automation, but due to differences in customer behavior, they must adjust how they use automation technology.
The benefits of B2B marketing automation
Marketing automation may benefit your company by carrying out your digital marketing strategy and providing you with the tools you need to improve it. Here are a few ways your company could benefit from a strong marketing automation strategy:
Reduced expenses:
Marketing automation aids in cost reduction by reducing the number of employees required and streamlining operations.
Save time:
Automation is self-contained once set up. All that is required is maintenance and updating to ensure that everything is running smoothly.
Generate and nurture qualified leads:
You may not have the time to nurture every lead your company receives, but if you use lead scoring to automatically qualify your leads, you will have more time for this process.
Improved reporting:
Your team will be able to report on the effectiveness of specific emails, landing pages, social postings, sponsored advertisements, and so on with marketing automation.
Scale more easily:
You'll need automated processes to create a scalable marketing team structure if you want to grow. Because problems cost time and money to resolve, having these automated systems in place to assist with scaling growth is critical.
B2B Marketing Automation Strategies
1. Automated Email Sequences
In terms of email, nearly six out of ten B2B marketers (59%) say it is their top revenue-generating channel. However, many marketers struggle with timely follow-up with leads and getting the right email content to them.
Using automated email sequences solves this problem by allowing you to perfect your outreach at scale. Assume a prospect visits your website and subscribes to your newsletter.
2. Chatbots for Answering Lead Questions and Directing Them to Relevant Resources
Chatbots have risen in popularity in recent years, and they are quickly becoming commonplace for B2B brands. According to Outgrow research, by the end of 2021, 80 percent of businesses will have integrated chatbots in some capacity. When used properly, they can be a huge marketing asset.
Separate research discovered that the top 28% of companies use chatbots and other forms of AI in their marketing. One of the most practical ways to use chatbots is to answer lead questions and direct them to helpful resources on your website. Rather than going through actual people, this method allows you to provide leads with the information they require instantly and around the clock.
Consider the omnichannel messaging platform MobileMonkey. They provide a simple, user-friendly tool that allows B2B companies to create a fully customized chatbot that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
You can use it to create a chatbot funnel, allowing you to efficiently answer your leads' questions and direct them to the product or information they require.
3. Self-Nurturing Content
Your average B2B lead will most likely spend considerable time researching your product.
After all, if they're going to invest, they'll want to learn everything they can about you, including your product's features, benefits, UVP, and so on, to ensure they make the right decision.
Aside from that, many leads will want to learn more about your industry in general and will turn to your content for information.
Creating self-nurturing content is one way to facilitate better research and effectively nurture leads while essentially putting the process on autopilot.
4. Trigger Marketing
The final strategy I'd like to discuss is trigger marketing, which HubSpot defines as "the use of marketing automation software to perform a task as a result of an event, frequently an action taken by a prospect or customer."
They point out that a "trigger" can be anything you can measure with your CRM, such as specific pages viewed, number of pages viewed, and form conversions. The idea here is to configure your site so that leads are shown relevant content whenever they take a specific action.
Trigger marketing is something HubSpot legitimately uses to create a better, more streamlined marketing funnel, not just something they discuss in one of their blog posts.
Best practices for B2B marketing automation
Define buyer personas:
Buyer personas are fictitious representations of your scenarios, customers, and influencers. To master this strategy, however, you must first understand your buyers.
A buyer's persona includes all types of information and behavioral patterns from your customers. You'll need information like their education, skills, industry, job title, key responsibilities, challenges, goals, and demographics. Interviewing customers and focus groups, conducting surveys, and gathering product feedback will all aid in the development of a more accurate buyer persona.
It would also help if you looked at your analytics dashboard. It will also provide you with a good understanding of your ideal buyers.
Build your workflow:
Always keep in mind that each buyer is unique. As a result, each buyer will have unique problems and requirements. As a result, brace yourself for multiple search queries for the same product.
The key is to design your workflow around the Buyer's Journey. You must tailor your content to the various stages of your buyer's journey. It will also assist you in sending the right message to the right prospects at the right time.
Make a lead scoring model:
Not every lead will immediately become a customer. Some will be testing the waters, while others will be ready to buy from you.
Based on their activities, the lead scoring model will assist you in assigning a number to each lead. It will determine how hard the sales team works. It also enables your sales team to scale their efforts by focusing on prospects. It also assists marketers in sending personalized content based on the score.
Conclusion
B2B marketing automation is something that I am very interested in.
It's been a game changer for many businesses, allowing them to accomplish much more and provide a better customer experience with very little manpower.
To quantify, one study discovered that marketing automation reduced marketing overhead by 12.2 percent while increasing sales productivity by 14.5 percent. As a result, using it is a no-brainer.The B2B marketing automation strategies I've listed here should give you an idea of some of the options available to you, as well as some inspiration to get you started.