Drive growth using B2B marketing automation

Highlights

You’ll learn about why you need marketing automation:

• Increases efficiency: Reduces repetitive tasks, freeing time for essential business activities
• Enhances customer engagement: Delivers personalized content, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Improves ROI: Optimizes your marketing resources and encourages customers to convert

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Before generating a viable sales deal, your customers typically interact on at least 6 to 8 digital touches. These touchpoints are the tip of the iceberg because, often, your customers need an average of 8 touchpoints to land a meeting.

Do you have the time and resources to reach eight digital touchpoints to convert prospects into customers? No one has that much time, especially when you have many customers. If you’re a B2B business, connecting with customers at all the touchpoints is impossible. 

Enters B2B marketing automation. The right automation solution can nurture leads and automate your repetitive tasks while maintaining a respectable return on investment (ROI). Marketing automation is valuable in your tech stack because it delivers more sales-qualified leads and streamlines lead generation. 

But what is B2B marketing automation? What are its benefits? What marketing activities require automation? And, how can Contentstack help with B2B automation strategies?

What is B2B marketing automation?

B2B marketing automation uses marketing technologies to automate repetitive marketing activities and campaigns, increasing the quality of leads, nurturing the leads and converting customers from leads to paying customers. By introducing automation, you can:

• Manage large-scale marketing campaign
• Improve your customer engagement
• Reduce manual errors
• Give your team time to focus on other important marketing activities

According to research, marketing automation increases qualified leads by 451%, making it the next big thing for marketers.

Here are some examples of B2B marketing automation:

• Welcome emails to engage new customers
• Tracking interactions and collecting feedback
• Automated booking and scheduling
• Monitoring social media marketing
• Customized web pages based on viewer demographics
• Automating ad campaigns
• Managing the marketing and sales pipeline and efforts
• Lead routing to streamline the sales and marketing processes
• Reminder emails for abandoned carts, sales and holidays

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B2B vs B2C marketing automation

Benefits of marketing automation

Handle larger lead volumes

Handling leads in B2B marketing is challenging, but modern marketing tools make it easy to integrate lead-scoring systems. Lead scoring evaluates prospects based on their behavior, previous interactions and demographic data. Such an automated approach helps you follow up and communicate with all your leads in the sales funnel. With automation, you can categorize or segment your people and contact the particular segment in a way that will interest them. When you manage large lead volumes, your marketing teams can focus on building relationships with the most promising prospects. 

Reduce waiting time for warm leads

In B2B marketing, timing is critical when managing warm leads—those contacts who show interest and are ready to convert. Automation reduces the wait times for these leads, ensuring you provide the prompt attention and communication they need. It identifies and directs warm leads to the right sales reps for immediate follow-up. This quick response reduces the risk of losing valuable prospects to competitors because of delays and keeps the lead engaged with timely, relevant content.

Improve customer engagement

With marketing automation, your marketers can communicate at the right time and in the right way across all your channels. Automation tools develop campaigns that speak to specific parts of your audience, enhancing your audience interaction. Analytics create personalized content like emails, social media posts or direct messages that improve customer engagement.

Personalize at scale

With automation, personalization at scale becomes easy when catering to diverse customer segments with different preferences. Automation provides key insights and personalizes your content. You can use demographic or behavioral data to create personalized messaging and offers at scale. A scalable approach ensures consistent, personalized experiences across all touchpoints. As a result, your customer satisfaction and brand loyalty increase.

Supercharge conversions and sales

Automating lead scoring helps you find promising prospects using behavior, engagement and demographic data. By zeroing in on leads most likely to convert, you can supercharge your sales efficiency and get better results. Sharing personalized content at all your touchpoints increases engagement and encourages those prospects to convert. Automated retargeting campaigns can bring back visitors who showed interest but didn't convert. This brilliant mix of data-driven personalization and efficient lead management helps you get the most out of your marketing efforts, increasing conversion rates.

What B2B marketing activities need automation?

Email outreach

In B2B marketing, email outreach is the backbone and automation has become a game-changer. Why? It enables personalized communication on a large scale. With automated emails, you deliver targeted messages that resonate with specific customer needs. A personalized approach improves your open rates and strengthens relationships. Moreover, automation ensures timely follow-ups and supports drip campaigns, guiding prospects through the sales funnel.

Lead tracking

Lead tracking helps your marketing team track which campaigns deliver the desired results and bring in more qualified leads. With a proper lead tracking system, your sales team has the necessary data to personalize and customize the marketing programs for each prospect. As a result, you witness higher conversion and sales. 

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is staying in touch with a customer in business-to-business marketing environments. When you feed the right messages to the right audience at the right time, you guide the prospects through the sales cycle. You can automate your lead nurturing to deliver timely, personalized communications to each prospect in their buying journey, whether through email, social media or direct contact. When you analyze how prospects interact, you can change your marketing strategies, improve lead quality, build trust, and increase conversion rates. Tools like Zapier help you nurture your lead.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring is another marketing activity to automate because it helps you find and rank potential leads based on specific criteria. You rank customers based on engagement, demographics and behavior to see how ready a lead is to buy. 

Based on the rank, your sales and marketing teams can focus on top prospects, ensuring optimum resource use and improved conversion rates. When you combine lead scoring with automation, you update scores in real time. As a result, you receive insights into lead quality and how they move in the sales funnel.

You can use B2B marketing automation software like Marketo

Welcome and onboarding

Effective onboarding can uniquely welcome your new customers. That’s where automation tools come to your rescue. By sending automated welcome emails, sharing helpful guides and offering personalized tutorials, you create a customized experience, which increases user engagement and satisfaction.

Drip marketing

Drip marketing involves sending automated messages to potential customers over time through email to nurture leads. Customizing content to match where the recipient is in their buying journey keeps people engaged and encourages them to buy. These campaigns keep your brand visible, build customer relationships with prospects and refine your marketing efforts using insights from the collected data.

Building B2B marketing automation strategy with Contentstack

With Contentstack's headless content management system (CMS) coupled with Automate, you can build an intelligent B2B marketing automation strategy. The headless CMS can automatically deliver personalized content across various digital channels and connect your business with other tools and platforms. Because of this, your marketing messages reach the right audience at the right time.

The platform's flexibility helps your marketing team create a central content hub, streamlining campaign planning, execution and optimization. It enables personalization at scale for specific audience segments to increase engagement and conversion rates. Thanks to its agile framework, Contentstack helps you get campaigns to market faster. Aligning content strategy with marketing goals, you achieve outstanding efficiency and productivity, helping you taste success in B2B marketing.

Case study: How did Contentstack help Wavin build world-class e-commerce capabilities?

Wavin, a B2B infrastructure and construction company, started its digital transformation after the COVID-19 pandemic. To market its products to customers, it launched an online “web shop.” Wavin chose Valtech as a partner and adopted a MACH-based strategy. The company switched from an outdated CMS to Contentstack's headless CMS. This switch increased order processing, ensured customer satisfaction and enhanced the use of technology. With Contentstack, Wavin plans to expand into digital channels, especially in Latin America.

After using Contentstack, Stephanie Devine, Global Product Owner for E-commerce at Wavin, said:

“We have been able to add technology into the existing relationships quite easily to improve the service delivered, as well as make Wavin more attractive in new markets.”

Read the complete case study here. 

The best B2B marketing automation platforms

Features and functionalities

The best B2B marketing automation platforms offer features like:

• CRM integration
• Lead management
• Advanced analytics.

These tools help your teams make smarter decisions while ensuring smoother marketing activities. Tools like Eloque are ideal because they provide numerous features and functionalities for automating your marketing activities.

User interface

A great user interface encourages your teams to manage their workflows. With an intuitive design and simple navigation, they can automate various marketing activities.

Integration capabilities

Integrating with existing tools and systems improves your business's usefulness, allowing you to maximize your tech investments.

Pricing and ROI

The best platform offers lower pricing and higher ROI. However, pricing shouldn’t be the only factor influencing your decisions. Choose a platform that fits your budget and goals. Explore Contentstack's Automate to learn more.

FAQs

What is B2B marketing automation?

B2B marketing automation segments your audience based on their behavior and demographics, automates repetitive tasks and delivers personalized shopping experiences at scale. With B2B automation, your teams can stay productive and efficient while nurturing leads.

How do you automate a B2B business?

Automate your B2B business by implementing CRM systems, marketing automation tools, ERP software, CMS and AI for data analysis. These strategies streamline operations, reduce costs, and foster client loyalty.

What are the four types of B2B marketing?

Product-based, service-based, channel-based and hybrid are four types of B2B marketing.

Learn more

B2B marketing automation saves your marketing team time, resonates with qualified leads, improves ROI and supercharges conversions. While you cannot expect automation to deliver instant results, your marketer’s life becomes much easier than before implementing marketing automation. 

To know how automation can improve your business in countless ways, talk to us.