7 Best Practices for Successful B2B Marketing Automation

Every marketer working in B2B marketing aims to drive sales, maintain strong relationships with their prospects, create engaging campaigns, and deliver a compelling online shopping experience for the audience. However, this is not a one-man job, and as a business grows, it becomes increasingly hectic to manage all these tasks manually. 

In addition, customers have become a lot more demanding as well and ask for more personalized experiences. To cater to these demands, companies are shifting towards marketing automation for better operational efficiency, customized experiences, and faster revenue generation.

Recent research claims that more than 50% of today’s best-performing corporations in the B2B Industry are using marketing automation to retain customer engagement and boost sales. If your business has employed marketing automation but is yet to see any promising outcomes, then take a look at our recommendations to improve your current B2B marketing strategy.

1. Identify Business Objectives

To fully benefit from marketing automation, one must define the areas they wish to work on and improve. Identifying your business objectives is the first step towards striving for success, and once that’s outlined, you can integrate marketing automation to help accomplish those goals. 

When you give a purpose to your campaign, it helps align your business goals. It’s essential to understand the rewards of marketing automation from attracting more leads to improving customer experience, so you know what supports your business objectives. This makes it easier to measure success and make improvements to your automation strategy and drive better results.

2. Define Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are the imaginary representation of your target customers and help you understand the performance of your marketing efforts. All the customer data you curate overtime should be used to refine and enhance your buyer personas. Marketing automation provides valuable insights that can be used to better serve prospects and deliver a better experience. 

Staying up-to-date with the needs and requirements of your customers is crucial for the success of any B2B marketing campaign, hence use your buyer personas to communicate and understand your prospect’s interests. This will help businesses in addressing their needs and delivering a memorable experience.

3. Publish Relevant and Informative Content to Enhance Buyer’s Experience

Marketing automation delivers valuable insights to marketers to help them understand their customers on a deeper level. In doing so, they can provide engaging and exciting content to prospects that cater to their needs and convinces them to make a purchase. Failure in delivering relevant and valuable content can lead you to lose critical engagement leads and investment on ineffective campaigns.

Marketing automation enables companies to engage customers at every stage of their purchase journey. You can customize your content to address a particular need and promote the product that results in positive sales and happy customers. refining the quality of your content is crucial for the success of any marketing automation campaign and is often the contributing factor to a rise in sales.

4. Map the Shopper’s Journey

Every buyer that lands on your page has a different journey from the previous buyer. While some come to get what they want and immediately checkout, the others could prefer to browse and window shop before making a purchase. They might even land on your page through different channels and will use different keyword/phrases to find the same product or service. 

This is where your buyer personas can come in handy and help you identify which Stage of buying your prospects are at. Typically, this is how each stage of the buyer’s journey follows:

• Awareness Stage: the potential buyer recognizes their problem and performs a search to find a solution. 
• Consideration Stage: depending on the results, the buyer considers options that cater to their requirements. 
• Decision or Buying Stage: the final selection is made for the most suitable product or service that solves their problem. 
• Post-purchase Stage: where they wish to acquire deeper knowledge about the product to fully benefit from their purchase. 

By mapping the buyer’s journey, one can identify the steps needed to fully convert the prospect and turn them into a successful lead. Marketing automation is also essential for internet marketing services to deliver enhanced customer experiences and retain users. It will help in putting the right content in front of the right customers at the right time, allowing you to fully benefit from the automation system.

5. Create a Lead Scoring Model

Marketing automation aids businesses in understanding their prospects and scoring leads. Setting up a lead scoring system can help identify prospects based on their behaviors. It monitors their journey to determine their level of sale readiness and the kind of technique you should employ to interact with these prospects. For instance, the implementation of an automated lead scoring system can help in recognizing visitors who take more time to buy while also those who are sales-ready. Based on their scores, marketers can personalize their experience and target their efforts into converting them. After observing customer behaviors and monitoring their engagement levels with web content, one can scale their actions accordingly and prioritize them for sales.

6. Go Mobile-Friendly

Nowadays, most online shoppers browse the web using their mobile devices, and it’s the same in the case of B2B buyers. Marketing automation covers all devices and communication channels, which facilitates a smooth and efficient experience for clients across the board. The increasing demand for mobile-friendly websites has driven businesses to shift their attention towards implementing mobile-friendly standards. In doing so, there will be a higher chance of your business being ranked in top search results and gaining escalated visibility.

7. Focus on Valuable Lead Info

If you aim to keep customers engaged throughout their shopping experience, then you need to know the right information to keep them interested. The point is to drive personalization, so your marketing campaigns are tailored to the right audience at the right time. You can do this by asking for more details about your customers when they want access to gated content. The idea of segmenting your target customers from the start is to create more personalized campaigns that can help narrow down the appropriate candidates for your business.

Wrapping Up

Marketing automation has the potential to exponentially scale results for your B2B marketing campaigns and give your business a competitive advantage. Incorporating this methodology into your strategy can drive quality leads, deliver engaging experiences to prospects, and retain customers. All in all, it can identify areas that require improvement and help you address customer needs, so they don’t lose interest.

About the author:
Shawn Mike has been working with writing challenging clients for over five years. His educational background in the technical field and business studies has given him the edge to write on many topics. He occasionally writes blog articles for Dynamologic Solutions.