5 Best Practices for Successful B2B Marketing Automation

Looking to scale and streamline your marketing activities? Be sure to read our 5 best practices for a successful B2B marketing automation. 

For any organization, time and personnel are finite resources. As your company grows, it becomes impossible to maintain one-on-one relationships with your prospects and clients. At some point, you need to implement a system that lets you manage one-on-one relationships at scale.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketo defines marketing automation as, “a category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.”

Marketing automation encapsulates everything from email marketing, social media, analytics, lead generation to lead nurturing with the sole aim of increasing revenue while developing efficient workflows.

80% of marketers using automation software generate more leads. 

Here are 5 marketing automation best practices to follow if you are just starting out.

1. Define Buyer Personas

Your marketing automation strategy should begin with developing buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictitious versions of your prospects, customers and influencers. Having a sound understanding of your buyers is the key to the implementation of any marketing program. Any marketing activity (content, communication, workflows, etc.) that you do should trace back to your buyer personas.

A buyer’s persona consists of information such as their education, skills, industry, job title, key responsibilities, challenges, goals along with demographic information and behavioral patterns.

To build buyer personas, interview your customers and focus groups, conduct surveys, take feedback on your product. Also, taking a look at your analytics dashboard will give you a good understanding of your ideal buyers.

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2. Build Your Workflow Based on the Buyer’s Journey

No two buyers are alike. Similarly, no two buyers’ journeys are alike. When you look at different buyer personas, you’ll realize that different buyers face different problems and have different needs. Therefore, they will use different search queries for the same product. For example, a freelancer and a project manager will use different queries to search a task management app.

Also, a prospect, in the awareness stage, searches in a vastly different manner as compared to a prospect in the decision stage. When you map content towards different stages of the buyer journey, you will be able to deliver the right message at the right time to the right prospects.

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3. Capture the Right Lead Information

How much information should you collect from your visitors to convert them into leads? Well, that depends on the stage of the buyer’s journey they are in. For example, if you, a marketing automation platform have released an ebook targeted for prospects in the awareness stage, you don’t have to collect detailed information such as their phone number, designation etc. because they might not be a serious buyer at this stage.

On the other hand, for a resource like The Buyer’s Guide: Marketing Automation, you need to collect as much information as possible like phone number, location, company size, and revenue, because the lead is quite possibly in the decision stage, and the chances of the lead becoming a customer are high.

Also Read: 10 Ways to Make Your Lead Generation More Data-driven

4. Offer Solid Content to Generate Leads

In the age of content proliferation and information overload, how do you manage to break through the clutter and pull in leads? The answer is, by providing unique, high-value content.  You understand the most pressing problems of your prospects based on the buyer persona and create content (articles, ebooks, webinars, infographics, videos and so on) targeting different stages of the buyer’s journey that addresses those problems.

Also Read: 3 Easy Ways to Repurpose Lead Generation Strategies for Customer Retention

5. Build a Lead Scoring Model

Not all leads are looking to buy from you right away. Some are just testing the waters by looking for alternatives, others are ready to buy. Lead scoring is a methodology that ranks leads based on their sales readiness. The lead scoring model assigns a number to each lead based their activities to determine how much effort should the sales team employ.

A lead scoring model helps the sales team scale their efforts by targeting the prospects who are at the bottom of the funnel. Lead scoring also helps marketers send out personalized content based on the score.

Also Read: CRM Best Practices and Innovations for Lead Gathering and Lead Scoring

Marketing automation sometimes gets a bad rap for coming across as either spammy, impersonal or cold. That usually happens when the marketers do not spend enough time doing the groundwork. When implemented correctly, marketing automation gives you an opportunity to connect with your audience via multiple marketing channels, generate more leads, and drive more revenue.