Top 10 Tips to Improve Your B2B Marketing Automation Strategy
Top 10 Tips to Improve Your B2B Marketing Automation Strategy
Many B2B companies transform leads into sales by implementing marketing automation as it helps to measure results and create highly personalized marketing strategies. Marketing automation makes the job of marketers easier and their campaigns more effective. Emails and social media are the main tools for automation that prove helpful in bolstering campaigns. Researches show that the most successful companies extensively use their marketing automation systems. Below are the top 10 tips that you can follow to improve your B2B marketing automation strategies:
1. Score Leads
Lead scoring is one of the features of marketing automation that can have a huge impact on your pipeline. In order to rate your leads, your automation software can detect signals such as form submissions, click-throughs or page views. This can help you in determining their value and interests before forwarding them on to the sales team. As per Forrester Research, B2B marketers increase their sales pipeline contribution by an average of 10% by implementing marketing automation in their business. Marketing and sales should be aligned and agree on what makes a lead ‘sales ready’. The usage of your CRM or automation for some time will give you enough experience so that you can identify a typical buyer journey. You should be easily able to recognize the type of content that engages your customers and the points of contact they want before they transform from prospect to customer.
2. Targeted Emails
Email marketing is known to be an effective strategy and you can make your campaigns even more successful by automating them. Segmenting your data will help you to send more targeted emails and information to your prospects. Emails should not look like a cold bit of spam. Personalize emails by having at least their first name in the opening line. Provide a clear call to actions in your emails. Your recipients should feel enticed to click on a link that you emailed them.
3. Set Yourself Up to Save Time
Getting started with marketing automation can be overwhelming initially but you will not have to bother about it again if you do it properly. Marketing automation is great is saving time and you can benefit from this function by creating templates for the types of campaigns you usually launch. You can easily personalize and use such templates once they are in place.
4. Use Reporting to Your Advantage
You can determine how successful your marketing automation efforts are through reporting and analytics. However, you would want to do more than just looking at how many people opened your last email. Do something more based on data and try out a different copy or another stock photo if numbers aren’t where you wanted and then measure results again.
5. Focus on Integrations
Marketing automation software integrates with lots of tools that are already in use nowadays and connecting these platforms mean less work and smarter results. For instance, your customer service reps can log calls and view customer data if you connect your phone system with your CRM and create an online log form for incoming phone calls. You have the option to track how your prospects interact with your product when you tie your marketing automation tool to your SaaS platforms.
6. Social media
You can run an effective social profile by automating your social media. There are tweets to send, DMs to reply to, posts to share and if you don’t apply automation to your social media profiles, your work will seem never-ending. Of course, you need to react to events and send relevant news-related tweets but automation will help you to plan ahead and effectively. You can also automate campaigns off the back of your social media, for instance, an automated email can be sent to those who follow or like your page, sign up to your newsletter or something through your social media. You can disguise the fact that the message is being sent automatically by using software that allows you to personalize your message with the first name of your new follower.
7. Personalized Web Pages
PURLs (Personalized URLs) allow you to offer a personalized web page to your prospects. Automation software can be used to tailor your web content and email to suit the needs of your prospect. This means that regardless of what stage of the pipeline they are at, what they always see is the relevant information that captures their attention. You can also personalize web experience by asking about the need of the visitor by adding forms on the homepage of the website. Again, marketing automation can be used afterward to direct them to the page that is tailored directly to their wants and needs.
8. Stop Trying to Do It All at Once
Yes, you need to benefit from all the functionality in the marketing automation, but don’t go overboard. You have to try the amazing features in marketing automation but trying them all at once will leave you frustrated. You can start with one feature or technique and then add overtime. It also helps you to measure results for every single change and you can know which components brought which results.
9. Capture the Most Important Data
It can be challenging to recognize what to pay attention to when there is so much data out there. You can start by gathering the most relevant data, like email, name, and maybe zip code. Eventually, technology such as Smart Fields and Progressive Profiling can be used to capture more data.
10. Test, Test, Test
It is a must to test your campaigns, forms, CTAs, and process. However, make only one tweak at a time to accurately measure what change had what impact on your campaign. You can take notes and replicate the fonts, colors, images, and messages that got you the best results.
Conclusion:
One of the most sophisticated tools that can deliver exactly what a target wants is marketing automation. Despite the data that proves how well marketing automation works, there is also evidence that shows not every company using marketing automation is getting the most out of it. Follow the tips explained above to overcome the hurdles that marketers have with marketing automation.
