Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a game-changer for B2B revenue teams. It enables sellers and marketers to laser-focus efforts on high-value accounts to increase the likelihood of conversion. But there’s a catch: It involves many tedious tasks that drain time and energy.
Manually providing relevant and timely outreach to every individual account is like trying to juggle flaming torches while riding a unicycle — virtually impossible and a recipe for disaster.
Marketing automation eases the weight of mind-numbing tasks that eat up precious hours. This leaves more time for marketers to analyze and alter campaigns and stretch their creative muscles to meaningfully engage accounts. It’s like having a personal assistant who never gets tired, never misses a beat, and never complains about the workload.
Let’s dive in.
Overview of Marketing Automation
B2B marketing automation allows businesses to achieve better results with fewer resources. It involves using software platforms to help with marketing activities including:
- Ad targeting
- Lead qualification
- Social media scheduling
By implementing marketing automation, businesses save time and resources while delivering personalized and targeted messaging to their audiences. Marketers can nurture leads throughout the buyer’s journey, providing relevant content at each stage to guide prospects towards conversion.
Best practices for marketing automation include:
- Using a Customer Data Platform (CDP): CDPs capture and aggregate data from various sources to create robust customer profiles.
- Integration with CRM: Integrating marketing automation with CRM enables seamless data flow for tracking customer interactions (see how CRM and CDP differ here).
- Lead nurturing: Implement automated workflows to deliver relevant content at each stage of the buyer journey.
- Segmentation: Use data to segment audiences based on set criteria to facilitate targeting and personalizing interactions at scale.
- Lead Scoring: Automated lead scoring can help marketing and sales teams prioritize efforts, which is especially helpful for account-based marketing (ABM) strategies.
- Continuous optimization: Regularly analyze data and metrics to identify areas for improvement and refine campaigns.
Benefits of Using Marketing Automation Software
Marketing automation tools provide various benefits, including:
- Increased efficiency: Streamline repetitive tasks, saving time and resources while ensuring consistent communication with prospects and customers.
- Enhanced lead nurturing: Deliver personalized content and targeted messages throughout the buying journey to guide prospects towards conversion.
- Improved lead scoring: Prioritize and focus on the most qualified leads for more effective marketing and sales efforts.
- Data-driven decision making: Measure campaign effectiveness and identify trends with robust analytics that drive better results.
Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools
Many marketers are familiar with the MarTech infographic, featuring thousands of tools that claim to “do it all” (*cough, cough,* 6sense).
To save time and trouble, below are five that we’ve found useful.
- HubSpot Marketing Hub: Offers a comprehensive suite of tools for lead generation, email marketing, social media management, analytics, and more. It provides robust automation capabilities, including workflows and lead nurturing.
- Marketo Engage: Enables businesses to create personalized experiences, automate campaigns, and track customer interactions. It offers advanced lead management, email marketing, and analytics features.
- Pardot: Provides a comprehensive set of B2B marketing automation tools. It offers lead management, email marketing, lead nurturing, and marketing ROI reporting.
- ActiveCampaign: Combines email marketing, CRM, and automation features. It offers advanced segmentation, lead scoring, and behavior tracking capabilities, enabling businesses to deliver personalized experiences.
- Eloqua: Offers lead management, email marketing, campaign automation, and advanced analytics.
Pitch alert! Many MarTech stacks integrate with 6sense to power even more impactful marketing automation campaigns. Plus, 6sense’s Conversational Email tool uses AI to create on-brand, contextually relevant, and timely automated emails that engage buyers across their journeys.
To select the right marketing automation software, take the following steps:
- Evaluate the features and capabilities of each tool, ensuring they align with your business needs (e.g., lead management, analytics).
- Consider the scalability of the tool to accommodate business growth and evolving market needs.
- Check if the software integrates with your existing CRM and other essential tools to ensure smooth data flow.
- Compare pricing plans of different tools and choose the one that fits your budget while offering the necessary features and scalability.
- Consider the ease of use and user interface of the tool, making sure it is intuitive and accessible for your marketing team.
How to Build a B2B Marketing Automation Strategy
1. Understand the Customer Journey and Personas
Map out the customer journey, from initial awareness to conversion and beyond. Identify key touchpoints and pain points along the way. Develop buyer personas to better understand target customers. This helps in creating personalized and relevant content for each stage of the customer’s journey.
2. Create Automated Campaigns
Develop workflows and nurture leads with targeted content based on behavior, interests, persona, and stage in the buyer’s journey. Implement lead scoring to prioritize and focus on the most qualified leads, ensuring efficient use of resources.
3. Personalize and Segment
Use insights to segment accounts and create targeted campaigns for more impactful buyer experiences. Craft personalized emails, landing pages, and content that resonate with each segment, addressing their pain points and offering solutions.
4. Analyze and Optimize
Track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to analyze campaign performance. Perform A/B testing to experiment with different campaign elements and optimize for better results.
Successful B2B Marketing Automation
Conducting an effective marketing automation campaign relies on accurate and consistent data. Unfortunately, many revenue teams operate in silos, with different sets of data stored across various disconnected systems.
Follow these steps to avoid data disparities and measure the ROI of marketing automation:
- Use marketing automation software to unify your marketing attribution by tracking conversions and identifying specific campaigns that contributed. This helps determine the effectiveness of marketing efforts in generating leads and driving sales.
- Calculate the revenue generated from marketing automation campaigns by analyzing the value of closed deals. This provides a clear picture of the return on investment.
- Measure the engagement metrics of campaigns, including email open rates, click-through rates, and website visits. These metrics indicate audience interest and interaction.
- Evaluate cost savings achieved through marketing automation, such as reduced manual labor, streamlined processes, and optimized resources allocation. This helps quantify the efficiency gains and cost-effectiveness of your marketing automation process.
The Future of B2B Marketing Automation
At some point in the distant future, marketers will get to spend days at the beach, piña colada in hand, leaving personal robot assistants to handle customer outreach efforts. But until then, many trends and advancements in the industry will shape the future of marketing automation.
Firstly, AI and machine learning algorithms will provide more accurate predictions, personalized recommendations, and automated decision-making.
For instance, 6sense’s AI marketing platform helps power marketing automation by gathering intent data, company data, and clues about the personas actively researching B2B solutions.
Marketers can use this data to:
- Identify which accounts are ready to buy
- Segment audiences according to
- Industry, size, growth trends, and other firmographic factors
- Keywords and topics being researched
- Personas of buying team members
- Buying stage
- Power personalized, omni-channel marketing campaigns that stay aligned because they tap into a unified data set.
B2B marketing automation capabilities enable businesses to more easily engage with their audiences through multiple channels and technologies like chatbots and voice assistants. Generative AI is already helping marketers personalize at scale, and technologies that provide rich data and sales intelligence to generative AI tools will be able to craft sophisticated 1-to-1 marketing communication at scale.
