Marketing automation
Marketing automation in b2b is almost always part of a bigger marketing strategy. It helps marketing and sales departments to automate certain tasks that drive the incomings leads down the b2b marketing funnel.
Marketing automation makes use of technologies and tools to make sure that your leads get the best nurturing and follow-up in the marketing process. It improves automatic segmentation via the various channels (website, social media, e-mail, ..) and tries to ensure a personal and consistent follow-up. Also called lead nurturing.
The goal of marketing automation is to increase your efficiency, streamline your lead nurturing process and increase the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Marketing automation for b2b
The buyer journey in b2b is often more complex than in a B2C context. Multiple decision makers in the company, multiple buyer personas, a longer tender process and more complexities. Marketing automation tools ensure proper follow-up and assist in giving each buyer the right content at the right time. Due to the complexities in the B2B market some leads and actions are easy overlooked.
A frequently used example of automating your marketing is lead scoring. Based on actions a certain lead or prospect takes on your website, social media or emails you assign a score to that lead. E.g. lead score +10 when a leads visits your website more than 3 times in the last 15 days. This automatically segments the interesting leads from the not-so interesting leads and determines priorities for the sales and marketing department.
Marketing automation software
The list of marketing automation tools is growing year over year. Different technologies and tools can be used to automate your lead nurturing process. Depending on the needs of your company we can define the best marketing automation tool for you. The most well-know tool for marketing automation and used by Weblevels is Hubspot. No matter if you are big international company, a medium sized company or a start-up. Hubspot has different plans that adapt to the needs of each company size and lead generation process. Other tools that could be used are Marketo, Eloqua , close.io , Pardot, … .
The marketing automation process
Marketing automation consist of tools to improve your lead nurturing process and improve your segmentation and ROI but it is no strategy on its own. Before you start using marketing automation tools you should look at your marketing process and how you drive leads down the funnel.
A frequently used methodology that we also use here at Weblevels is the marketing flywheel from Hubspot. It consists of 3 phases: Attract, engage, delight.
Attract
This phase in the flywheel is all about attracting new leads to your website. Marketing automation can help automatic monitoring of social media ads, automatic outreach, automatic retargeting, … .
Engage
Once a lead is attracted to your website the goal is to know who the lead is. For that you want them to engage with your website and content. Examples of this engagement phase are a whitepaper with a download form and automated email sequence. Or a personalized landing page based on website visit history, … . Marketing automation can streamline these processes and help you to create workflows that optimize your lead nurturing.
Delight
Once a lead becomes a customer or is qualified as a suitable candidate to become a customer it is essential that they become a fan of your brand. Marketing automation can help by automatically offering relevant content, offering dynamic forms , follow-up notifications to the sales department, .. and so on.
Start with the customer in mind
To make your b2b marketing a success , you should always start with the customer in mind. What do they want and how can I reach them best? Marketing automation optimizes this process and ensures an even better experience for your leads and customers.
At Weblevels we have broad experience in setting up, optimizing and monitoring marketing automation tools for b2b companies. Contact us today and let’s have a talk to see how we can make your lead generation process more efficient with marketing automation.