Fundamental devices exist to do your advertising systems and accomplish your objectives. In executing an inbound showcasing methodology in B2B, advertising mechanization is THE answer for conveying inside your organization to support the age of inbound leads in B2B. What might it do for you to close more arrangements? Which highlights to utilize, and how? How to pick your answer? We guide you!
Marketing Automation: Definition
Marketing automation is an interaction that makes it conceivable to mechanize and industrialize because of instruments and promoting efforts per predefined situations. Among the most popular functionalities, we find, for instance, the chance of setting off email or SMS crusades contingent upon a guest’s conduct on your site. However, this is just a glimpse of something more significant! Indeed, advertising mechanization enjoys numerous different benefits.
Why Implement A Marketing Automation Tool?
The objective of implementing a marketing automation strategy is to automate marketing actions based on the data we have on our visitors or prospects. In this sense, automation tools represent a considerable time saver for marketing teams (and, therefore, money-saving). But above all, it is the efficiency of the marketing department and the sales department that is affected. Marketing teams have a much clearer view of the journey of website visitors and know exactly what service to offer them and when.
Thanks to marketing automation and its scoring features, they can identify the most promising leads and thus maximize conversion rates by addressing them in a personalized way. And the work doesn’t stop there: when the marketing campaigns are launched, the automation tools make it clear which prospect has opened your email and who has clicked on it… This helps you to truly optimize all your campaigns, to improve them little by little and make them more effective and impactful. Your company thus has solid weapons to understand:
- Which areas to improve?
- What messages convert prospects into customers?
- Which channels work? / Which ones do not work?
In short, marketing automation helps optimize lead generation and sales funnel.
How Does A Marketing Automation Tool Work?
Imagine… If you could know what’s on the mind of a customer who comes to browse your website. If you could automatically submit to him the content that corresponds precisely to what he is looking for and which will also reinforce his choice to direct him to your products or services. Good news: marketing automation tools have been designed with this in mind!
Tracking And Scoring
Thanks to tracking tools, you analyze the actions of your visitors. You can then tell if it’s a cold, warm, or hot prospect based on the pages they’ve visited and how long they’ve spent on each one. The goal? Transmit the option at the right time to the sales teams as soon as it is “hot”, that is to say, neither too early nor too late.
Achieve Segmentation With Marketing Automation
Marketing automation allows you to segment your prospects. You can then send targeted messages and announcements via email, considering how far your chance has come through the sales funnel. You can turn to those who, for example, have downloaded specific content or those who have simply looked at your services. Thus, you send them an excellently targeted message which has a real impact on them. You then build a personalized relationship.
Mature Your Leads And Advance Them Through The Buying Cycle
Marketing automation tools also help you educate and mature your leads, which moves them significantly forward in their decision cycle while reducing the buying cycle. To do this, you can rely on lead nurturing techniques. They help you gradually strengthen the marketing relationship with prospects who are not yet mature. Very interesting in BtoB, lead nurturing is particularly useful for long purchasing cycles. With quality content, personalized, educational and bringing real added value, you help customers reach maturity.
Sending Emails Using A Predefined Scenario
You can send automatic and targeted email campaigns when your segmentation is established. To do this, you just need to create workflows. These automated and personalized scenarios comprised several emails, which led the prospect to perform a specific action. It’s up to you to choose how this workflow will be triggered: subscription to your newsletter, downloading a white paper, action on a landing page, participation in a webinar… The possibilities are endless.
You can, among other things, create a workflow for new subscribers. These “boarding processes” allow you to welcome your new prospects in due form and coach them to help them use your product. You can also create another workflow for candidates who have downloaded a “decision” type white paper or a free trial version to offer them an appointment with a salesperson automatically.
Implementation Of Marketing Campaigns By Channel
Do you want different marketing campaigns depending on the acquisition channels? Again, marketing automation tools help you. You can create other sales tunnels, depending on the behaviour of your prospects: emailing campaign, SMS campaign, publication on social networks… For example, if you sell training to companies, you can create an advertisement on a social network, which will guide your prospect to an online conference, during which you will explain which tools can accompany managers daily.
By registering for the online conference using their email address, the prospect enters a workflow of 2 emails during which you remind them of the approach to the forum. And following this conference, you continue to send him three emails to give him additional advice and encourage him to take advantage of a special offer on one of the training courses you sell.
On the other hand, if you start a relationship with this client via the subscription form on your site, you can choose to send him an ebook and then make him enter a workflow of several emails in which you will complete the information offered by the ebook and present him with your paid training. In short, each acquisition channel has its sales funnel.
Automated Social Media Posts
Marketing automation also allows you to optimize your social media strategy. When you post content to your site, you can schedule it automatically to post to your social networks. Marketing automation tools help you produce quality content and think carefully about its distribution while measuring the impact of your distribution on visitors to your website or the conversion of visitors into leads. In short, on social media, marketing automation allows you to publish the right content, at the right time, in the correct format, to the right people.
Lead Analysis
To do well, you must be able to analyze each of your leads accurately. Marketing automation tools then make it possible to measure:
- The conversion rate of visitors into leads
- The opening rates of an email campaign
- Click-through rates on calls to action
- The ROI of a campaign
- The level of commitment…
In short, thanks to marketing automation, you have a global vision of the course of action to adopt to improve your sales.
The Integration Of Marketing Automation In The CRM
The purpose of marketing automation is obviously to allow you to improve your commercial efficiency by creating new sales opportunities. Each piece of information you collect on prospects will enable you to feed a scoring. You then know where the option is in the buying process based on his interactions with you via social networks, mailing campaigns, viewing your site and downloading content. All data is cross-referenced. When it reaches a specific score, the lead is automatically created in the CRM so that the salesperson quickly calls the prospect back.
How To Choose Your Marketing Automation Software?
There are several criteria to consider to choose the right marketing automation software.
The Criteria To Be Analyzed
First, you must dwell on the functionalities: upstream, clearly define your challenges to turn to a tool that responds to them precisely. Take stock of the customer information you currently lack and need to be more effective. Secondly, analyze the value for money of the tools. Indeed, marketing automation solutions offer formulas ranging from 300€ per month to several thousand euros.
So define your budget precisely, which will largely depend on the features you want to have. Also, please pay attention to the ergonomics of the tool and its ease of use. The more advanced the elements, the more difficult it will be to get started with the software. If there are training courses to learn how to use the tools, you should still turn to solutions adapted to the skills of your employees.
Also, choose devices with teams available and ready to answer all your questions in implementing your strategy. Also, check the possibilities of integrating the marketing automation tool into your CRM. Finally, consider the number of contacts you must incorporate into the device. If your database is extensive, analyze the monthly cost of the marketing automation tool license to manage your database.
Where To Turn?
There are many vendors of marketing automation solutions. To find our way around, let’s quickly look at the most interesting of them.
- For starters, there’s Hubspot: the tool that introduced the concept of inbound marketing. It offers many features and very pleasant ergonomics.
- Pardot is another tool, exciting if your CRM software is Salesforce since it integrates perfectly with the latter to offer all its functionalities.
- If you want to orient your strategy towards content promotion, Plezi is undoubtedly the most suitable tool. This solution puts the content in the foreground, thanks to functionalities precisely designed in this direction.
- Webmecanik, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, or low-budget solutions like ActiveCampaign, or SendinBlue are exciting options for implementing your strategy.
Would you like to know more about marketing automation or be supported in developing and implementing your strategy? B2B digital marketing agency Webconversion offers tailor-made support to convert your website and social networks into a real lead-generation machine! A project? A question? Contact us!
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