Successful B2B marketing automation takes thought and preparation, but once it’s up and running it can do a lot of work for your sales funnel.
Now you may be wondering how to use marketing automation for B2B. What are the most effective B2B automation methods and techniques for nurturing leads?
Well, you’ve come to the right place. Whether you’re trying automation for the first time or expanding on an existing strategy, you’ll learn five different ways to use marketing automation to boost B2B sales.
But first, let’s make sure we understand how B2B Marketing Automation differs from B2C.
What’s the difference between B2B vs B2C marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a way for businesses to constantly communicate with prospects and customers.
Marketing automation For B2B shares the same principles as B2C marketing automation: trigger an automated message or series of messages in response to email subscribers. Although both focus on targeting followers with the right message directly, their approach is different.
B2C focuses more on personalization. B2B, on the other hand, is less about personalization and more about education.
B2B marketing software leads to conversions by nurturing them with valuable content and tutorials.
Here are the five ways to use B2B marketing automation for high-impact results
1. Lead Nurturing
Lead generation is the use of automated email marketing to inform and develop prospects. Prospect guidance through the acquisition process is a commonly used tool for B2B marketing automation. This method works best in B2B industries where prospects need confidence and education before buying.
Once a lead has signed up to your list, follow up with targeted content until that lead is warm enough to pass on to salespeople. Lead nurturing does two things: 1. It follows leads on the buyer’s journey and 2. allowing you to change your digital marketing strategy and messaging based on different levels.
The best marketing automation techniques for building B2B relationships include:
- A welcome email process to introduce your brand/product to new subscribers
- Email marketing strategies that follow secure content (i.e. free downloads or webinar registrations)
- If / then / other steps based on specific prospect actions (page visits, email opens and clicks, etc.)
2. Lead Scoring
Just as B2B leads need to be nurtured, they need to be qualified as well. By this we mean having a system to show the level of expectation in the buyer’s journey. As mentioned, the B2B acquisition process is long. For a B2B marketer whose job it is to deliver high quality leads to sales, timing is everything. So what is the best way to achieve this?
Introduces the concept of a lead model – giving leads a “mark” to indicate their level of engagement.
Use marketing automation to provide “points” to prospects whenever their interaction shows a growing interest in your brand (clicking an email link, browsing a product page, etc.).
This includes creating a custom CRM feature for the brand, determining which events should be keyed, and setting up an automated workflow that will add key to the brand. Additionally, the lead itself can be an automatic trigger. For example, using the icon to trigger one email or move the contact to another email list (we will talk more about the automation section later).
3. Multi-channel Campaigns
Increase your advertising and brand awareness by triggering relevant automated communications across various channels.
If you are just starting out in marketing automation, focus on learning one channel first. Simple email marketing is an easy way to get started.
Once you’re comfortable that your marketing automation software has the necessary features, try a multi-channel approach. Multi-channel automation, as the name suggests, targets prospects at multiple touch points during the buyer’s journey through multiple channels.
This can be a combination of email, text messages, cross-posting on social media sites like LinkedIn, or even direct messages. Experiment to find the marketing channels that work best for your target audience.
4. Segmentation & Customer Profiling
Did you know that you can use marketing automation to update your contact list in your CRM?
We strongly recommend that you segment your B2B leads based on their role, engagement and other common characteristics. Why do this? Because the email list section leads to relevant posts and high engagement. List management software is a huge time saver for any business.
Setup is easy if your automation platform offers powerful features. Create an automated process that routes contacts to specific lists based on web pages visited, email engagement, and more.
Marketing automation should have its own CRM component or be integrated with an existing CRM. Use automation to keep this database up-to-date by assigning identities to individual customer profiles.
5. Page Tracking
Page tracking refers to the use of website actions to trigger automated B2B campaigns.
“Website action” means visiting a landing page and/or clicking a link. Basically, everything a prospect gets on your website.
This is a great opportunity to follow other information directly, whether it is related to the price or a certain product. Now you may be wondering how to know when a prospect is browsing the site?
Good question!
To install it easily, you must first add a tracking code to your website. This will identify each time a subscriber opens an email or clicks a link on your website.
All you have to do is add a JavaScript snippet into the main page of your website, just like you would for a Google search.
Key features to look out for in a marketing automation platform
- Multi-channel marketing campaigns for different customer journeys
- Visitor/page tracking to know who’s looking at your website and how they are using it
- Reporting and analytics for evaluating performance
- Segmentation to separate your lists based on different criteria like contacts’ behavior or interests
- Lead management for different stages of the customer journey, from lead generation and capture to nurturing
- A/B testing of different customer journeys and content to automatically select the best performing option
