Top 3 Benefits of Marketing Automation for B2B Companies

B2B conversions rely on professional, trusting relationships, and the ability to prove a product’s value to a client’s bottom line. Inefficient, manual marketing processes have long prevented this effect, which is why marketing automation has become incredibly useful for B2B companies. These tools allow marketers to streamline and simplify time-consuming or repetitive tasks, leaving them more time to focus on intricate tasks and strategies. Here are three top benefits of using marketing automation to speed up the lead generation process and generate more sales. 

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to software and technology with the ability to manage marketing processes and campaigns across multiple channels automatically. One of the most common uses of automation, especially for B2B companies, is contacting prospects or customers. Businesses can easily use automation to send emails, text messages, hyperlinked SMS, and social media messages. It is also possible to automate sales functions, such as continuous campaigns, as well as lead generation processes. 

3 Top Benefits of Marketing Automation

Here are three top reasons that B2B companies are increasingly implementing marketing automation into their sales processes:

1. It helps to generate leads.

Lead generation has been the mainstay of successful marketing for decades, ensuring organic or targeted interest that, if done right, makes conversion far more likely. In the past, B2B professionals have used basic tricks to ensure lead volume but, as choices in every industry proliferate, even expansive leads aren’t enough for conversions that last. Rather, B2B professionals operating in this landscape of increased choice need to implement full-cycle campaigns in order to create rich, quality leads.

Source: HubSpot

This is the secret to turning strangers into evangelists, and it’s a goal that marketing automation brings within far easier reach, especially when applied to content-to-email workflows that qualify prospects before turning the corner to conversion. In fact, you can use creative automation in B2B social media platforms like LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for B2B businesses to generate quality leads. The reason why businesses often don’t work on LinkedIn lead generation is that it requires a lot of laborious effort and time. However, this issue is also something that can be easily resolved with marketing automation.

Marketing automation lists built off the back of human-led, intelligent content are especially key, not only for creating all-important lead interest but also for ensuring that further marketing efforts are only ever dedicated towards viable avenues. It’s also possible to automatically segment these leads to ensure that only interested parties are handed to a sales team, while leads that have gone cold can be swiftly retargeted—and reheated—for potential conversions down the line. 

None of this would be easy or even possible by hand, but automation ensures this oversight while actually bringing a great deal of ease to the lead-based responsibilities of marketing teams in general. 

2. It helps with targeting and personalization.

71% of consumers report feelings of frustration if modern marketing content isn’t personalized, while an astounding 77% of B2B marketers feel that personalization builds better client relationships. Despite this, 42% of B2B experts believe that they need to improve their personalization efforts, suggesting that, despite their importance, targeted, personalized marketing materials, such as dynamic ads, which can be created by video editing software, still too often fall under the radar.

In many ways, the increasing need to do away with blanket marketing materials should come as no surprise to experts who have been at the forefront of a marketing shift fuelled by social media and opt-in email newsletters. The cold call is out in place of more efficient, warming efforts that address both the requirements of marketers (targeting) and the needs of their customers (personalization) and that ultimately increase marketing efficiency by again improving lead quality, trust, and relevance. 

For B2B professionals who often treat personalization, in particular, as a B2C issue, a focus here is especially fundamental in light of the fact that 83% of business customers prefer being treated as individuals rather than numbers, while an ever-increasing 75% of business buyers now expect companies to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before they initiate sales contact.

Source: Instapage

In fact, in attempts to overcome the challenges of a lacking personal incentive, B2B professionals are increasingly aiming to efficiently target their content based on several personal determining factors including:

• Industry
• Location
• Device
• Likely interests
• Level of seniority
• Size of company

All of this relies on the compliant, ethical handling of sometimes extensive reams of publicly and privately licensed data. Manually drawing applicable intelligence from this data onslaught is impossible. Automated marketing efforts make it far easier to tailor, repurpose, and highlight relevant, often personally addressed content and advertisements to selected clients through their preferred platforms by sifting through that data for you. 

Further, automation makes it possible to highlight content downloads or express interest to sales teams on the floor, thus supplementing lead-driving, simplified automation with the human oversight and follow-ups that perfectly punctuate those personalized experiences. 

3. It saves businesses time and money.

As audiences expand in the face of increasingly global business initiatives, manual marketing processes like emails, social media, and website management can cost a great deal in time and money. Especially with expectations of personalization as standard growing, this can see entire marketing budgets blown on management alone, preventing the adaption or expansion of efficient marketing drives moving forward. For obvious reasons, this is facilitating a push for increased efficiency, fuelled largely by the need to reduce and increase costs overall, but also in attempts to:

• Meet demand
• Grow a business
• Remain competitive
• Provide true consumer value

Marketing automation makes it possible to drastically slash the time and money needed to perfect marketing pushes in real-time. It is also possible to utilize accounting templates or online accounting software to assist with organizing marketing-related finance. 

Marketing automation helps companies to streamline their marketing processes overall, thus ensuring a system that not only runs smoothly for clients and team members but is also far more likely to create a return on investment (ROI) that can then be siphoned back into the marketing cycle. 

Specifically, marketing automation addresses a range of inefficiency pain points by making it possible to: 

1. Simplify lead nurturing
2. Retain loyal customers
3. Create dynamic, reusable content
4. Automatically oversee social platforms
5. Prioritize prospects at any given time

Real Results with B2B Marketing Automation

As the expectations of marketing teams continue to grow at a fast rate, creating content that’s expansive and efficient enough to compete is an increasingly impossible goal. As more and more companies choose to take marketing towards the future, this is only set to become more the case, meaning that companies who continue to lean on manual marketing are never going to present the professional image they need to convert. 

In direct opposition to that, getting ahead of the curve and embracing an automated marketing focus at this early stage means getting a foot in the door with professional, personalized, and innovative marketing efforts that are guaranteed to go down a treat with even high-end business leaders. Even better, automation will help you achieve these goals while drastically reducing your bottom line, freeing your team to dedicate all of their focus on future marketing campaigns, and the efficient processes necessary to ensure that they succeed.