If you are a B2B marketer, your main concern and aim would be to increase quality leads and sales. Hence having a thorough understanding of your business audience, delivering relevant communication messages and develop a proper understanding across different customer touchpoints between your brand and audience is very much important.

Thus it becomes a huge challenge in everyday marketing, chiefly in B2B marketing as there is a range of audience and touchpoints. At the same time, your resources are limited and you are juggling between to increase marketing qualified leads and repeat business.

Marketing automation technique helps you to tackle these complications and to come up with unpleasant marketing communications.

What Is Marketing Automation? How Can It Help in Overall Business Growth?

Marketing automation is a type of software that helps busy marketers to reduce and automate all their marketing activities. Manage the optimal brand experience for consumers in one place. Thereby measuring marketing tasks and workflows to eventually increase their organization revenue.

Marketing automation encompasses everything be it landing pages, workflows and email responses. Along with a content strategy, email marketing, social media, analytics, and lead generation to lead nurturing with the sole aim of increasing revenue while developing efficient workflows.

The above statements simply mean sending, analyzing or tracking any marketing communication. Whether it could be through email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns or through any other way to the new or existing prospects behind the scenes, based on predetermined rules.

Marketing automation encapsulates “Buyer’s Persona and Buyer’s Journeys” like signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or sharing an email. These journeys are designed to be more relevant to the recipient than just a mass email campaign.

Quick Overview of Buyer's Persona and Buyer's Journey

Buyer’s Persona: A buyer’s persona gives detail information such as education, skills, industry, job title, key responsibilities, challenges, goals along with demographic information and behavioral patterns. Your Google Analytics dashboard report will give you more insights and a good understanding of your ideal buyers.

Buyer’s Journeys: No two buyers are identical. Likewise, no two buyer's journey is similar. When you look at different buyer personas, you’ll come to know that different buyers face different problems and have different requirements.

Also, a customer in the awareness stage searches in a totally different manner as opposed to a prospect in the decision stage. If you map content towards different stages of the buyer journey, you will be able to deliver the right message at the right time to the right prospects.

This makes it easier for marketers to execute since journeys are one-time setup process. This style of marketing communication is also valuable because it creates an ongoing conversation with your subscribers and prospects and builds brand loyalty.

Marketing automation has many practical uses that can address the unexciting duties that companies often perform every day manually.

In most cases, the things that can be handled by B2B marketing automation are tasks that otherwise would have gone unnoticed or happened at a much slower pace if a human operator had to handle them.

B2B Marketing Automation Solutions

Let's have a closer look at some of the different marketing automation strategies that can be used to support your business growth.

1. Automated Website Live Chat

A live website chat could be a great opportunity to acquire qualified b2b leads that would otherwise be missed out if your website visitors didn’t have the chance to ask questions and receive immediate answers.

Live chat has now become an expectation for many. As per the research, 30 percent of customers expect live interactions today. It becomes a difficult task for already busy customer support team; this can really consume a lot of their time and make it difficult to attend to their daily duties.

But not to worry there are solutions in handy today that allow you to reap the benefits of a live chat without even hiring someone to handle it or take time away from your current customer service reps.

There are many tools like Collect Chat, Fresh chat, Live Person and many more which gives your customers an automated way to connect with your company, communicate with customer support reps and educate themselves more about your business and product.

Recommended: How to Use Chatbots to Drive Sales and Increase the Engagement

2. Lead Nurturing, Lead Quality & Email Marketing Solution

You know the entire website visitors aren’t ready to buy. What approach do you follow to ensure a new lead entering into your system becomes a customer?

For organizations that perform this manually, it usually means a lot of email correspondence and multiple phone calls.

But, this can be taken care through automated email correspondence and other tactics, only passing out the sales qualified leads off to your team when they are truly ready.

Marketing automation uses email sequences to educate your leads, establishing rapport with them while delivering value.

As you tend to establish your bonding with them. You begin to sprinkle in more sales-focused materials, walking them toward buying your product.

Recommended: How to Create an Effective Lead Gen Strategy Using Mobile Marketing

3. Social Media Automation & Scheduling

Social media automation is one of marketing automation's most popular examples. Making its way into mainstream digital marketing was one of the first marketing automation approaches.

While you are always looking for a real person behind some of your social media conversations. You can automate a big proportion of your social media interactions.

Such as sharing content, thanking fresh supporters, or sharing messages from partner organizations, all this can be automated readily to increase your follow-up over time.

Recommended: Top 28 Social Media Tools to Make Your Job Easier

4. Helps in Customer Acquisition

Growing the number of prospects and subscribers is not a simple task but marketing automation has transformed the concept. It has tools that can facilitate you to meet your business objectives. It's a better solution for B2B marketers to opt for marketing automation in present growing business scenario to cherish and nurture existing leads as it saves time, integrates well, and drives existing leads and prospects flawlessly into sales funnel. According to the reports of top performers today, 69% use marketing automation for customer acquisition and retention.

Recommended: How to Optimize Your Marketing Automation Plan, Backed by Research

5. Increase in Sales

Marketing automation facilitates in boosting your sales by providing more quality and quantitative leads. B2B marketers who incorporated marketing automation observed an average of 20 percent improvement from nurtured leads in their sales program. Marketing automation also improves the fostering of leads and increases a customer's lifetime value. Marketing automation lead scoring is an automatic approach that either adds or removes points from each lead based on actions taken or not taken. It monitors demographic statistics to provide perfect buyer persona with high score lead. Then that high score lead will reach the limit you set and be "sales qualified" and will be pass on to the sales team.

The major marketing automation tools providers are listed below and there many more:

1. Marketo
2. Eloqua
3. SalesforcePardot
4. Hubspot

Recommended: Top 5 Marketing Automation Software that Save You More Time

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a platform that is used by marketers to plan, coordinate, manage, and measure all marketing efforts and campaigns. Both online and offline. It is the future and will play a key role in B2B marketing for large and small businesses alike. As of now, few companies have fully incorporated and adopted marketing automation; it provides a clear-cut way for small businesses to compete with larger brands.

Charles Daniel

Charles Daniel is a B2B Content Marketing Strategist at Mailing Data Solutions for the past four years, which is one of the top leading B2B data providers across the globe specialized in offering quality database services. He plays a key role in b2b marketing, content strategy, business development, and marketing for technology-related brands. He loves to interact with client’s to unfold their biggest challenges and to find a solution to it.

www.mailingdatasolutions.com/