B2B marketing automation makes the creation of personalised experiences for customers at a large scale easily possible. Winning marketing automation strategies demand research and planning, but they can significantly elevate your lead nurturing process once in place.
According to a survey conducted by bloggingwizard, 53% of B2B organisations have already implemented marketing automation, and 37% plan on doing the same.
So whether you’re adopting automation for the first time or boosting up an existing technique, this blog will help you get all the insights that will leverage marketing automation for maximising your B2B sales.
Let’s start by defining the topic in focus.
What is B2B Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a series of processes and techniques that a business can use to nurture and enhance its marketing efforts across different channels.
B2B marketing automation works with the core aim of making repetitive tasks in a company, such as an email marketing software, consumer behavior tracking, and lead scoring, easier. Marketers use marketing automation to push leads towards conversion by nurturing them with informative content.
Marketing automation for B2B companies entails maximising your lead generation efforts. From the beginning to the end of the sales funnel, automated campaigns efficiently monitor the buyer’s journey and take action based on user behaviour.
In short, the B2B marketing methodology offers you a robust platform that manages your leads toward sales and even assists in their retention.
Key Benefits of B2B Marketing Automation
a. Optimises Marketing Investments
Marketing automation helps nurture leads with a high conversion potential and collects valuable information regarding campaign performance and consumer behaviour. With this data, you can effectively prepare your specific strategies instead of investing in general ones.
b. Streamlines Lead Generation Process
B2B marketing automation can identify the difficulties and inefficiencies in your marketing and sales pipeline through rigorous reporting. Resolving such problems can push your lead generation workflow towards higher ROI.
c. Enhances User Experience
With efficient automation, you get accurate data about your users and visitors. You can utilise it to curate better-targeted content, ads and deliver what your audience needs.
How to Use B2B Marketing Automation
According to a study carried by, integrating automation into marketing campaigns can lead to a productivity boost of 1.5 to 6.9%. It also supports an increase in sales of up to 4%.
The above stats represent the impact that marketing automation integration has on the B2B lead generation process. But what are the most effective ways to use B2B automation strategies?
Below are the top 5 methods that you can use to optimise your sales funnel with marketing automation tools.
1. Multi-Channel Approach
As the topic indicates, multi-channel B2B marketing automation targets leads across multiple stages and channels throughout the buyer journey. You should be ready to experiment and discover which platforms work best for your target audience.
The mediums you can use for this approach are email, SMS, re-targeted ads, and social media marketing.
This inter-channel marketing approach launches your automated lead generation efforts across many platforms and expands your campaign’s outreach along with its brand awareness.
Focus on perfecting one channel first if you’re just getting started with your marketing automation journey. Simple email nurturing programs are an ideal way to start. Try a multi-channel approach once you’re more acquainted with your marketing automation techniques and tactics.
2. Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a method for evaluating a lead’s willingness to convert into a buyer based on their activity. The premise behind lead scoring is tracking and figuring out where they are in the buyer’s journey.
You can give scores to your leads based on various factors, such as the information they’ve provided and how they’ve interacted with your brand across the web. You can program your marketing automation tool to move leads to another emailing list when they exceed a specific lead score.
For example, suppose a lead has high email activity and shows more interest in your offers; in that case, your automated lead scoring system will move them to a mailing list that sends more personalised emails. This way, your lead capturing operations can get solidified.
3. Prospect Profiling
Automating prospect segmentation is a huge time-saver for any business. B2B market segmentation allows you to target only leads who are most likely to become your customers and boost your conversion rate.
An automated user segmentation moves the prospects to different mailing lists based on specific activities, ranging from web pages visited, offers taken, etc. List segmentation is beneficial because it delivers an individualised experience over a large scale.
Instead of broadcasting general information to everyone and hoping it appeals to a majority of your audience, email allows you to create content for groups of prospects and distribute it in batches to increase communication efforts.
B2B marketers divide prospects based on:
- Online behaviour
- Email engagement
- Demographics
- Company’s Profile
You can strengthen your drip campaigns to boost click-through rates, conversions, and delivery with precise segmentation.
4. Customer Retention
Providing exceptional customer service is the most straightforward approach to improving customer retention. It is always easier to sell to your former clients than search for new leads. But for this to happen, you need to be following up with your existing buyers regularly.
Customer retention automation allows you to re-engage your consumers on a routine basis without contacting them manually. B2B marketing automation can help you provide prompt responses to concerns and feedback from clients with the help of chatbots.
You can also set up an automatic reward system whenever your consumer exceeds a specific buying capacity.
By automating your interaction and incentivising systems with your current clients, you can build a good market reputation and higher chances of referrals.
5. Nurturing Leads
Lead nurturing is the method of informing and nurturing leads through automated email marketing. It helps in warming up the potential client without the requirement of any manual engagement.
This strategy is especially effective in the B2B sector, where it is crucial to constantly communicate with your prospects and establish yourself as an expert. Such email campaigns ensure that personalised emails reach all your potential clients.
For example, if you want to upsell or update your customer base about your tool or product, a series of automated nurturing emails will help you secure the sale.
The lead nurturing phase begins when a visitor converts on an offer by filling out a landing page form. Following that transaction, leads start receiving a series of automated emails to nurture them towards a sale.
Final Thoughts
B2B marketing automation can change your lead generation game. It allows you to deliver to your audience at the right time and boosts your ROI consistently. The automation of B2B workflow is slowly taking over all aspects of marketing, and you surely don’t want to be left behind.
Grab on to this opportunity of increasing your sales and establishing yourself as a booming business with the above suggested B2B marketing automation strategies.
If you need assistance in choosing what to automate and what not for your next marketing campaign, go ahead and book a free consultation of 30 min with me to get rid of all your doubts. (Appointment link: https://book.apexure.com/).
Also, Check:
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Nurture Bottom of the Funnel Leads With These Strategies
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B2B Startup Marketing Guide: Key Elements and Strategies