60% of B2B marketers have increased their automation spend in recent years - but many are still missing opportunities to save time and improve performance. There are several underappreciated tactics that help eliminate waste, increase accuracy and deliver better ROI.
This blog helps you hit all of them and make marketing automation a bigger value driver in your company. We explore the full range of benefits automation should deliver for B2B marketing before creating a proper foundation and optimizing your program.
Expect to learn:
Marketing automation leverages technology to automatically execute tasks such as:
It has slowly evolved from pioneering software in the early 1990s to a billion-dollar industry many companies rely on daily. However, during that development, it became clear that these tools would have far wider applicability and value for B2B marketers.
There are three core factors that distinguish B2B and B2C marketing automation:
B2B marketing relies on a far larger volume of content than B2C. Buyer cycles are longer, with more personas to cater to and more channels to leverage to distribute content. This creates a much larger burden on B2B marketing teams; 42% of companies still struggle to produce a consistent enough flow of content – despite the rise of generative AI.
Automation helps alleviate that burden by taking over many repetitive tasks. Sure, automation can support B2C marketers as they scale. But it rarely produces the same sense of relief B2B marketers feel when they're finally freed from the relentless content workflow.
Humans are driven by irrational force, whether they’re purchasing for themselves or a Fortune 500 company. But B2B buying is a far more structured process. Purchase cycles are relatively predictable; buyers have fixed needs – such as vendor due diligence and developing a business case – which marketers can bank on.
This makes fine-grained automation more effective. B2B marketers can develop precision-targeted messages to deliver at very specific moments – and reuse that same automation repeatedly.
Sales plays a smaller role in B2C companies; there is far less active collaboration between marketing and sales, and processes like sales hand-offs or lead scoring rarely apply. As a result, there are simply more ways to automate B2B marketing processes and enhance the overarching performance of your company.
Given the factors outlined above, B2B marketers can expect to:
So clearly, automation is good for B2B marketers – but how can you actually make it a reality?
Our experience has found four key ingredients every B2B company needs to build and scale marketing automation:
Imagine setting your alarm before you know when you’ll need to wake up: wouldn’t that just be frustrating and pointless? The same applies to marketing automation; while it can make your marketing far more efficient, your program must be based on a deep understanding of the audience to ensure your processes actually align with their behavior and needs.
Extensive audience research helps you:
But it’s not enough to just know your audience; you also need hard data to build that automation upon.
Marketing automation is driven by data in multiple different ways:
But it’s not just that automation requires data; it needs accurate and reliable data – otherwise, you’ll end up with a mess of poorly timed automation sent to the wrong audience. We recommend investing in extensive data cleaning before you start automating processes to avoid basing your program on outdated or duplicate information.
There are tons of marketing automation platforms; Google the term once and just watch the targeted ads roll in. But most tools are either:
HubSpot is one of the few tools that avoids these pitfalls; we recommend that most of our clients transition to it, and it even helps make the process seamless for them.
There are four underappreciated best practices that companies with top-performing marketing automation take:
Create granular buyer personas and attendant copy guidelines to develop highly personalized messages with minimal effort. These should address:
Your framework creates a solid foundation to create automated campaigns that actually resonate; it is also the closest you can get to “automating” the content production process effectively, as we find a strong framework that can save hours of writing and editing.
Outline how your ideal buyer would move through the marketing and sales funnel based on a realistic understanding of their purchase cycle and historical behavior. The goal is to identify:
All this allows you to create a complete overview of the marketing process – and identify every touchpoint where automation could be leveraged.
Implement revenue operations (RevOps) framework to guide your automation and ensure they drive increased revenue and profit. This involves focusing on marketing and sales alignment to optimize not just marketing performance, but the actual influence marketing has on your bottom line. A few key steps to take include:
Don’t create automation and leave it for years; regularly assess and revise the targeting strategy, content, design elements, and automation criteria to ensure your automated content delivers reliable performance. Most B2B markets change regularly, with new technology or business needs affecting what buyers care about.
Outdated automation can, therefore, do more harm than good – and you need to refresh them constantly. We find the average automation has a maximum half-life of 1 year, while companies can often benefit from revising their automated messaging and targeting strategies based on new data at least once every 3 months.
Our experience helping over 75 B2B companies leverage marketing automation has taught us one thing: almost every business is missing something that could elevate its performance.
In just 15 minutes, our automation experts can walk through your existing setup and identify where you could generate immediate extra value.
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