8 B2B Marketing Automation Strategies

More than half of the companies in the world use marketing automation of some kind to stay ahead of the curve. 

With a market size of USD 5.2 billion in 2022, marketing automation solutions have become a quintessential part of most businesses. From start-ups to enterprises, countless companies are leaving their mark using B2B marketing automation tools. 

However, only tools alone cannot grow your business. You need the best strategies too.

So, keep reading to discover the top eight marketing automation strategies for B2B companies in detail. 

What is B2B Marketing Automation?

B2B marketing automation is a way to replace manual and repetitive processes to save time and increase productivity. It is a scalable process of streamlining your marketing efforts by outsourcing the repetitive work. 

Example – For B2B companies, automation of the scheduling system works wonders. If you implement an appointment scheduling system like RevenueHero, prospects can easily schedule meetings from your website at their own convenience. Also, you can automate sending meeting reminders, personalized emails, and alerts. 

How Marketing Automation Helps B2B Marketers?

To start with, let me tell you that businesses recover the cost of their initial investment in marketing automation within six months, on average. Encouraging enough?!

Further research also suggests that marketing automation boosts sales productivity by 14.5% and reduces overhead by 12.2%. 

Besides, there are three more aspects that marketing automation helps B2B marketers with. Let’s have a look. 

1. B2B marketing automation streamlines company processes.

B2B marketing automation can help you align all your company processes, making it easier for everyone to stay on the same page. Unify processes across different functional teams to reduce customer journey friction. Break through silos and ensure a wholesome customer experience. 

Marketing automation strategies for B2B eliminate the need for complex manual hand-offs, lead qualification, etc. Everything automatically gets saved in the central storage of the automation tool. Further, internal workflows can help you prioritize tasks. 

2. B2B marketing automation personalizes workflows.

Your prospect’s actions convey what they’re looking for. Marketing automation helps you to track their behavior in real-time, which is impossible to do manually. 

Further, marketing automation software can help you utilize these customer behavior insights across multiple channels to understand their needs and pain points and to deliver the right content at the right time. 

These workflows help you drive high-potential prospects to valuable content that results in warm leads that can be converted into loyal customers. Moreover, marketing automation can also help you to engage customers and offer them the perfect shopping experience. 

3. B2B marketing automation reduces lead conversion times.

A B2B marketing report by Oracle suggests that 77% of marketing automation users reported a boost in their conversion rates. 

The customer journey in B2B companies is a lengthy one. But marketing automation can help you reduce the lead conversion time by providing prospect insights and allowing you to qualify and prioritize leads. 

As you qualify and prioritize leads, you can proactively reach them when their interest is high. Striking the metal while it’s hot makes conversion more likely. Further, email automation and automated responses can help you nurture the leads and move them faster down the sales funnel. 

Now that we have discussed the importance of B2B marketing automation, let’s get into the top eight marketing automation strategies for B2B marketers. 

8 B2B Marketing Automation Strategies for Your B2B Sales Pipeline Management

As more firms embrace marketing automation, the industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.67% by 2027. If you, too, are ready to get on the bandwagon, these eight effective B2B marketing automation strategies will come in handy. Take a look. 

1. Automate the Lead Nurturing Process

Generating leads is never enough. After you generate leads and qualify them as high-potential prospects, lead nurturing comes into the picture. 

The lead nurturing process is crucial for successful sales. However, following up with leads and checking on proposals now and then is difficult and time-consuming. Here, B2B marketing automation can be your savior. You can ensure a seamless and efficient customer journey by automating your lead nurturing process. 

So, how can you automate your lead nurturing process? There are several ways to do so, including:

• Using lead scoring systems for lead prioritization
• Automated email marketing campaigns
• Automated follow-ups
• Automate reminder emails when waiting on proposals or quotations

These above-mentioned automation save time and help you seal deals quicker and more effectively. 

SmartBear Software, a B2B cloud mobile software company, witnessed a 200% growth in lead volume after implementing automation in its lead nurturing process. The company started by automating a few email campaigns, and later, it automated the lead nurturing process to handle high lead volume efficiently.

2. Implement Lead Scoring to Identify Warm Leads

There’s never enough time for you to follow up on every lead. Hence, qualifying and prioritizing leads is essential. But, since lead qualification is a difficult and time-consuming task, companies use lead scoring to simplify the process.

Lead scoring is a significant part of B2B marketing automation. It helps you to identify the most promising leads so that you can focus your resources to secure conversions. Using lead scoring with data points like demographic or geographic information, you can create highly targeted marketing campaigns for each segment of your target market.

Overall, lead scoring helps the marketing and sales teams prioritize leads that are more likely to convert than the rest. 

Most B2B marketing automation software has an in-built lead scoring system. A few software also offers a custom lead-scoring feature that enables you to create lead-scoring models as per your business needs. 

For example, Zoho CRM is a B2B marketing automation software with a custom lead scoring system. You can set your scoring rules for leads and then prioritize based on the scoreboard. 

3. Align Teams to Boost Efficiency

Sometimes all you need is an internal upgrade to perform better, and B2B marketing automation can help you with that. 

Aligning the marketing, sales, customer service, and other teams is crucial to increase revenue. If your teams cannot collaborate well, the ROI may suffer. 

B2B marketing automation software and CRM can help you bring your teams together and increase efficiency through streamlined processes and systems. Marketing automation software generally offers central data storage, ensuring aligning different teams and stakeholders. 

Thomson Reuters failed to align its sales and marketing teams among many large-scale enterprises. There was no target market segmentation for campaigns, and even leads were passed on to the sales team without being qualified. 

After the B2B marketing automation and CRM implementation, leads got consolidated, a lead scoring system was built, and ideal customer profiles could be created. With the help of automation, Thomson Reuters experienced a 23% increase in leads passed on to the sales team and a 175% increase in revenue attributed to marketing-generated leads.

4. Run Automated A/B Testing to Drive Open Rates and Conversion

A/B tests your email campaigns to identify the aspects generating the best results. 

For instance, you can compare email subject lines sent to two different audiences. With the insights gained, make your emails better. Further, you can compare different CTAs to see which version generates your desired results. But these are elementary A/B testing tactics. So, what are top marketers testing?

• Content – Test the email content using split tests to see which content topics engages your audience the most. 
• Tone - Test the tone of the content language. Experiment with a casual tone, formal, straightforward, etc., to see what resonates best with your audience. 
• Email length – Compare short, to-the-point emails with longer emails to see what your audience prefers the most. 

The tech giant Dell experimented with its email templates after A/B testing. The team split their navigation bars in the emails to know whether the navigation performed better in the header or at the bottom of the emails. Dell discovered that their target audience engaged more with the email content when the navigation was at the bottom. Thus, by placing the navigation at the bottom, Dell witnessed increased customer engagement. 

5. Personalize Automation to Boost Conversions

Marketers often worry about losing the human touch when using marketing automation, which is quite justified. That’s because 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that offers tailored experiences.

The good news is that you can personalize automation to increase conversions. In fact, data says that automated, personalized offers based on browsing and purchase history can increase sales by 20%. So, to stand out, personalize your automation. 

Personalization has now become more important than ever. With so many emails flooding a recipient’s inbox daily, personalizing emails is vital to get ‘seen.’ Personalized emails and messages are more likely to be read. Also, it helps in building strong customer relationships. 

There are several ways to personalize B2B marketing automation campaigns, like,

• Creating personalized content for each audience segment
• Embedding a CTA with a personalized offer or discount. 
• Using the recipient’s first name for emails (Bonus✨: Readers are 26% more likely to open emails with personalized subject lines)

Here’s an example of Alaska Airlines using personalized emails as a reminder. The email nudges the recipient to check Alaska emails more frequently to avoid missing out on discounts and offers. 

6. Deploy AI Chatbots to Drive More Leads

If you’re yet to integrate AI chatbots or live website chatbots, know that 55% of businesses that use chatbots generate higher-quality leads. Hence, chatbots are an essential B2B marketing automation tool for lead generation. 

Chatbots can stimulate conversations as visitors navigate through your website. They can respond to user queries via live chat in real-time, offer product recommendations, assist visitors in navigating and make personalized offers based on visitors’ preferences. 

Thanks to these intelligent beings, you can generate leads with chatbots and collect data about site visitors and leads. In short, bots can serve as online sales reps for you. Moreover, they also improve the quality of customer service. 

The professional services firm JLL implemented an AI chatbot to capture insightful visitor data and learn about their goals through user conversations. The company integrated the bot with its B2B marketing automation tool for seamless lead generation. As a result, JLL saw 12x more leads from their content section. 

7. Remarket Leads to Close More Deals

For various reasons, sales conversations often stall at a later stage of the sales funnel. Using remarketing strategies can ensure that no leads fall through the cracks. 

Hmlet, a co-living company, wanted to improve its lead-to-sales conversion rate. While they generate a good volume of leads, some leads showed interest in a stay in advance, making it difficult to follow them up effectively. 

The company created a remarketing journey using marketing automation to follow up on the leads. It automated follow-up email sequences to schedule calls, get the final details, send confirmation, and close the deal successfully. This remarketing strategy improved the company’s lead-to-sales conversion rate by 28%.

8. Create and Automate Targeted ABM Campaigns

Account-Based Marketing, or ABM, is a targeted marketing approach that uses outbound tactics to help you get potential leads and build relationships. 

This marketing strategy has been gaining popularity in recent times. In fact, in a 2020 State of ABM survey, 94.3% of respondents stated that they use an ABM strategy. 

Several B2B companies run ABM campaigns manually because these highly targeted campaigns focus more on quality than quantity. But, with B2B marketing automation, several aspects of ABM campaigns can be automated effectively, resulting in saved time, resources, and improved performance.  

Using B2B marketing automation software, you can find your ABM target accounts and plug them into the automation software to;

• Introduce your brand;
• Nurture the contact; and 
• Assist them in becoming qualified leads. 

Here are a few additional tactics to automate your ABM campaigns.

• If emailing a cold account, start with an introductory personalized email and provide an option to exit. 
• Go for ABM-targeted ads before sending emails to warm up your target account. It will increase open rate and engagement rates. 

Choose your B2B Marketing Automation Strategy Now!

Before you get your tools ready, plan the marketing automation strategies for your B2B business. Finding the best marketing automation tools is important, but picking the best strategy must be more focused. 

Plan your automation strategy first if you want a brimming pipeline with quality leads and high conversions. Then, let RevenueHero take care of the rest!

RevenueHero can help you automate everything when it comes to lead management. The B2B marketing automation software can capture your inbound leads, qualify them, route them to the right salespeople, and schedule instant meetings. 

So, stop waiting and start scheduling to learn more about the platform!