Marketing Automation for B2B: Strategies to Boost Your Sales

Marketing automation has been a buzzword for years, and maybe you’ve tried it with some (or no) success, or maybe you’re just now ready to give it a shot. Either way, this article is for you.

Marketing automation tools can be a game-changer for marketing and sales teams. Still, they need proper implementation to get the most out of your marketing campaigns and sales efforts.

We will explore the ins and outs of marketing automation tools, their benefits, and how to implement them effectively to keep your sales and marketing teams happy and ultimately acquire more customers.

What is Marketing Automation?

Definition and Importance of B2B Marketing Automation

Marketing automation uses software to automate repetitive marketing tasks such as email marketing, lead tracking, and social media posting. This technology helps businesses streamline their marketing and sales efforts, which increases efficiency and capabilities to drive more leads and sales.

In short, these automation tools allow your team to focus on strategic tasks and facilitate more frequent, customized touchpoints through digital communications. Further, most B2B marketing automation platforms have robust analytics tools that provide customer data to inform your campaigns.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for B2B Businesses

B2B businesses face unique challenges that B2C businesses don’t. Most B2B sales cycles are long, involve multiple stakeholders, and require a high touch to close the sale. B2B businesses typically have fewer sales, but each sale is significant.

Automation tools can solve these marketing and sales challenges that B2B businesses face. Specifically, they can save time and resources, improve customer and prospect relationships, increase lead generations, increase close rates, and provide valuable insights about your customers.

Let’s dive into each of these topics to learn more.

Saves Time and Resources

Time-consuming tasks like sending emails, text messages, and scheduling meetings prevent teams from generating leads and selling. Marketing automation software allows you to set sequences of emails and sophisticated workflows that send targeted messages to your leads based on specific criteria, including how they engage with your website and emails or if they fall into a specific segment.

Automation platforms also have meeting scheduling tools, chatbots, and reporting capabilities that can reduce manual tasks. These tools let your team focus on more important activities like strategy development, ad campaigns, and creative work.

Improves Customer and Lead Relationships

Personalized communication is vital to building strong customer relationships. However, your sales and customer success teams probably don’t have the time to email each current and past customer manually. Most email marketing campaigns fail because they require too much effort.

B2B marketing automation allows you to track and analyze customer preferences and behavior, allowing for more effective personalization. You can send targeted messages to your audience based on their behavior and preferences, keeping you at the top of their mind and building loyalty.

Enhances Lead Generation and Conversion Rates

Marketing automation opens up a new method of generating, tracking, and nurturing leads through the sales funnel. Through gated content offers, you can collect valuable customer data in exchange for valuable information and then send targeted messages to move them closer to a sales conversation.

With more visibility into leads and potential deals, your teams can prioritize opportunities to increase conversion rates and close more deals.

Provides Valuable Insights

Marketing automation software comes packaged with detailed analytics and reporting. Because you’re collecting customer data for your marketing and sales campaigns, you can track behaviors and actions to individual contacts, whereas traditional analytics tools like GA4 and Microsoft Clarity only track anonymous data.

As a result, your teams can make data-driven decisions, monitor campaign performance in real-time, develop customer journey maps, incorporate lead scoring, and identify revenue attribution.

B2B Marketing Automation Strategies

Now that you understand B2B marketing automation and the differences between B2B and B2C marketing let’s explore specific strategies for deploying marketing automation in your business.

Email Outreach: Personalized and Targeted Campaigns

All modern marketing automation platforms have robust email marketing tools, allowing you to build relationships, nurture leads, and close deals through personalized and targeted campaigns. These tools will enable you to segment audiences based on criteria like behavior, demographics, industry, occupation, and any other customer data you collect. With precise segmentation, you can send personalized emails using dynamic elements. Dynamic elements are sections of content that can be customized based on the segment or individual prospect you’re emailing.

Additionally, you can build sequences of emails that automatically send at specific intervals. Contacts can be enrolled manually for cold outreach, or email sequences can be triggered by specific user behaviors, like downloading a white paper or visiting a particular area of your website.

Every email campaign has room for improvement. With robust A/B testing and reporting tools, you can measure the effectiveness of each email, test content, delivery times, and subject lines to improve your emails’ open, click-through, and conversion rates. With proactive optimization, the effectiveness of your email automation strategy will continually improve, driving more return on investment, which your sales and marketing teams will love.

Inbound, Content, and Social Media Marketing

In addition to automated emails, your marketing automation platform can amplify your inbound, social, and content marketing strategies. Connecting your social media accounts allows you to leverage automation tools to schedule social posts on your preferred social media platforms. You can also schedule blog posts, host video content, and even use AI to generate unique content from long-form content.

Lead Tracking and Nurturing: Building Relationships and Trust

With B2B marketing and sales, only a fraction of prospects are ready to purchase. Typically, B2B buyers undergo long research and decision-making processes before starting sales conversations.

A lead nurturing campaign is one of the most effective ways to increase sales in B2B businesses. Lead nurturing captures leads earlier in the buyer’s journey, such as the awareness or consideration phases, so you can build a relationship early and nurture them toward a sale.

Marketing automation platforms allow you to nurture leads with a “set it and forget it” approach. You can set up workflows that monitor lead behavior across multiple touchpoints, such as website visits, email interactions, and sales activity. SMS and emails are sent out at specific times or based on behavior triggers to keep leads engaged and your brand top of mind.

For example, suppose a lead frequently visits certain product pages. In that case, automated systems can trigger personalized follow-up emails or notifications to sales teams for timely outreach. Less engaged leads can be emailed regularly, delivering valuable content and trust-building information like case studies, testimonials, and thought leadership.

Monitoring what content leads engage with provides valuable insights into a lead’s interest and readiness for a sales conversation, enabling your sales team to tailor their approach accordingly.

Lead Scoring: Identifying High-Quality Leads

Prioritizing leads is critical for ensuring your sales team’s efforts are most effective. You don’t want them wasting time on leads with a low probability of closing when hot leads are available, which is where lead scoring becomes valuable.

Lead scoring assigns a value to each lead that estimates its likelihood of closing. Scores are typically assessed by measuring the level and frequency of engagement, where they are in the lead or deal pipeline, duration in the pipeline or particular stages, and how best fit they are for your solutions.

Manually tracking and updating lead scores needs to be more accurate and accurate. With marketing automation tools, you can set up workflows that set and update lead scores based on your identified criteria.

With an accurate lead score, your sales team can identify high-quality leads, prioritize follow-up efforts, and have a more accurate picture of your deal pipeline.

Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Platform

Key Features to Consider: Lead Management, Email Campaigns, and Workflow Organization

Each marketing automation platform has strengths and weaknesses. The B2B marketing automation software that is best for your business will depend on your specific needs and use cases. Generally, most platforms offer marketing automation tools like gating content, landing pages, email marketing, automation, reporting, contact management, and lead nurturing.

Suppose you’re looking for an all-in-one B2B marketing automation platform. In that case, you’ll want to select a platform that offers tools for search engine optimization, social media posts, contact management (or CRM integration,) and advertising automation tools.

Finally, consider ease of use, scalability, and customization capabilities.

The top marketing automation platforms for B2B businesses include HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Encharge, and MailChimp. Let’s dive into the details of each platform.

Top B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service platform designed to help businesses grow by providing tools for email marketing, managing ad campaigns, social media marketing, content management, web analytics, and SEO.

Generally speaking, we believe that HubSpot is the best marketing automation platform. It is one of the pioneers in marketing automation and inbound marketing. It has the most sophisticated and user-friendly tools and a broad range of additional capabilities, such as customer service, content management, operations, eCommerce, and sales tools like proposals, advertising automation tools, eSignatures, and quotes.

HubSpot is a great all-in-one solution that balances price, capabilities, ease of use, and implementation. Its CRM capabilities rival SalesForce without the high costs and complexity, and it has the most sophisticated email marketing automation tools.

HubSpot can cost more than some competitors and has limitations in customization for advanced users requiring more flexibility.

Marketo

Marketo, part of Adobe, is a B2B marketing automation platform focused on lead management, email marketing, consumer marketing, customer base marketing, social media ads, and mobile marketing. It offers advanced analytics, detailed customer segmentation, and strong integration with Salesforce. Marketo excels at handling complex workflows and nurturing campaigns for large enterprises.

While Marketo has the most sophisticated digital marketing automation tools, it has a steep learning curve for new users and higher pricing, making it less accessible for smaller businesses.

If you’re marketing strategies require a more robust automated marketing platform, Marketo will likely be worth the learning curve.

Pardot

Pardot, owned by Salesforce, is a B2B marketing automation platform that offers tools for lead generation, email marketing, and ROI reporting. The biggest advantage for Pardot is the seamless integration with Salesforce CRM, and it’s often bundled for no additional cost if you purchase enough Salesforce licenses.

While Paradot has robust automation features, its one of the least intuitive user interfaces, and the ongoing development is minimal compared to other options. If you don’t get a bundled deal with Salesforce CRM, you can expect to pay more than other alternatives.

MailChimp

MailChimp is a widely used solution email marketing platform that has expanded to include marketing automation, landing pages, and basic CRM features. It offers the most intuitive automation tools, is more affordable, and has an extensive library of templates and integrations. It is particularly well-suited for small business owners looking for straightforward email marketing automation tools.

MailChimp is an email marketing tool that recently added automation tools. However, it lacks the reporting and robust automation features that other B2B marketing automation platforms have.

How to Prepare for Your Marketing Automation Software

Map Your Sales and Marketing Processes

Your marketing automation platform must be optimized for your business’s specific marketing programs and sales process. Your marketing and sales team should be able to give you enough information to create a simple outline of your processes. Ideally, you’d create complete process diagrams to ensure you understand your marketing efforts and sales process in vivid detail.

Identify Automation Opportunities

With your processes documented, you can identify opportunities to automate repetitive tasks and free up resources for high-level strategy. Common examples include automated outreach to leads and prospects, reminders and tasks for internal teams, automated creation of deals, proposals, or quotes, and copying data from one object to another.

Identifying automation opportunities is easier than you think. Look beyond email automation, review your sales and marketing operations, and look for repeatable steps within your process’ rather than manual human action. If the step is more or less the same each time, you can probably automate it.

Identify Data to Capture and Report On

Marketing automation tools have pre-defined data properties to capture information about contacts, companies, leads, and deals. Examples include website URLs, job titles, company sizes, and deal amounts.

Most B2B businesses must add custom properties based on their industry, solutions, and target audience. If you’re a B2B service business, you might want to capture what specific solution leads are interested in. Alternatively, if you offer B2B software, you might want to capture the industry in which a particular company operates.

Get your sales team involved early to help identify their customer data requirements. By starting early, you can be sure that your marketing automation tool will capture and report on the information required to support your revenue teams and marketing strategies.

Map Your Ideal Customer Journey

Every customer goes on a buyer’s journey before making a purchase. We recommend Customer Journey Mapping, which documents each stage in your customer’s journey along with essential details at each step. At 3.7 Designs, we typically document everyday activities, questions, objections, and triggers.

Understanding the current and ideal customer journey will allow you to automate key steps within the sales and marketing process to capture more leads, fill your sales pipeline, close more sales, and improve long-term customer relationships.

Create Personalized Campaigns

With a clear picture of your customer’s journey, you can create strategies for campaigns triggered based on common criteria populated with smart content. While this sounds complex, it’s simpler than you might think with the help of B2B marketing automation.

Use the custom data you’ve captured through imports or forms to segment prospects into unique audiences and create pre-defined content based on your audience groups’ unique questions, objections, goals, and decision criteria.

Then, using your marketing automation software, you can set up email campaigns that automatically populate content based on the rules you define. This strategy not only augments your existing marketing efforts, but it often generates better results than manual outreach because you’re not limited by human resources.

Implementing Your Marketing Automation Tool

Once you’ve selected the B2B marketing automation software that best suits your business needs and budget, you need to develop an implementation plan. B2B marketing automation programs are a significant investment in time and money. You’ll want to ensure they’re implemented properly, as the longer you use a platform that isn’t well suited to your business, the harder it becomes to clean and realign it.

Hire a Consultant or Implement Yourself

Your first choice is to hire consultants or implement the tool in-house. Suppose you have a team with marketing automation software experience. In that case, you should explore leveraging existing training programs and assembling a committee to develop the plan in-house.

We highly recommend hiring a consultant if you need more resources or internal experience. While the large platforms offer onboarding services, they only guide you through the process rather than handle the planning and actual implementation.

Train Your Team(s)

Your new marketing automation tool will be complex enough that you’ll need to ensure your teams understand how to use it correctly and to their full advantage. Like poor implementation, poor usage will quickly lead to poor data management practices and missed opportunities.

HubSpot, Pardot, Mailchimp, and many other platforms offer self-paced online training programs at no cost. Some even offer certificates and continuing education, so you can be sure your team is staying current on the latest capabilities and best practices.

Suppose you need more hands-on and specific training. In that case, you can also hire consultants, with the added benefit of customized process documentation for future reference and new hires.

Start Small, Scale Gradually

It is crucial to have a defined marketing strategy and a certain level of marketing maturity before implementing marketing automation tools for B2B business. Focus on high-impact areas such as lead nurturing and email campaigns to see the most significant benefits. Continuously refine your strategies based on data and performance metrics.

Measure Success

Implementing a marketing automation tool is expensive monetarily and in terms of internal resources. You’ll want to ensure that your marketing team is taking full advantage of the platform and that you’re generating ROI.

Set up your marketing and sales dashboards immediately to monitor lead generation and conversion rates, customer engagement and retention rates, sales pipeline, and revenue growth. If you don’t see improvements in these metrics within three months, you’ll know to check in and correct the course.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

After six years of helping companies with their marketing automation, we’ve identified three common mistakes that can prevent you from getting the total value of your investment. They include over-automating, poor implementation, and stagnation.

When you over-automate your communication, you lose the personal touch. Email automation should augment your personalized communication, not replace it. Instead, use automation to assign sales and marketing tasks to your team. For example, rather than having an automated email for every touchpoint, identify important instances where personalization is necessary and automate a follow-up task to contact owners.

As discussed earlier, if you’re not thoughtful in configuring and building your platform, you’ll find yourself trying to undo months or years of bad habits and poor-quality data. It takes longer and more resources to correct bad decisions than to prevent them from the beginning.

That said, you won’t have a perfect implementation right from the start (or ever). It’s essential to continually monitor how your teams use the tools to identify ways to get more value from your investment and make your team more efficient.

Get Started With B2B Marketing Automation

By understanding and implementing these marketing automation strategies, B2B businesses can streamline their marketing efforts, improve customer relationships, and ultimately boost sales and revenue. Start integrating these tactics today to see the benefits for yourself.

Reach out for a free strategy call if you need help with your digital marketing or marketing automation strategy.