Today’s industrial B2B world is hectic. Between staffing issues, supply chain disruptions, and other factors outside of your control, business days are getting busier and busier. The same is true for your marketing endeavors. From sending emails to nurturing leads and beyond, it’s easy to let the day-to-day work of marketing slip through the cracks. A few missed details can add up to a lot of missed business, though. It’s crucial to the success of your business to keep a dynamic, healthy marketing program in place—especially when things are busy.

One solution is marketing automation. Once used only by a few corporations, marketing automation is now one of the best marketing strategies in the B2B and B2C worlds. It frees up your people for higher-order concerns, creates more effective email blasts, and is a proven strategy to grow your business. You may have some reservations, but don’t worry! The marketing experts at Ecreative are here to guide you through establishing marketing automation services to grow your customer engagement and business.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is computer software that takes your more repetitive marketing work and automates it. Email marketing, social media posting, some ad campaigns, and much more are made more efficient through these automated processes. While each marketing automation software will have its own features, general capabilities include:

• Lead generation, nurturing, and scoring
• Segmenting customer bases
• Cross-channel marketing campaigns
• And many, many others.

Remember: Marketing automation does not replace your marketing team. Instead, it frees up your marketing specialists to invest time and energy in less repetitive and more essential tasks. It’s a tool designed to complement your workers’ efforts by automating some processes to heighten your brand’s overall marketing effectiveness.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing automation software runs off data you collect from emails, website visits, app usage, social media, forms, surveys, or any other interaction with your online presence. That collected data is used to segment your users based on any criteria: stage in the buyer’s journey, demographic, specific action taken, etc. Messaging is then tailored to each individual, distributing relevant information at the best time to create a cohesive experience across your various platforms.

What are the Pros and Cons of B2B Marketing Automation?

In addition to taking some of the heavy lifting off your people, marketing automation comes with many other advantages. These include, but are not limited to:

• Stretching your available budget further
• Generating and nurturing more quality leads
• Increasing your overall revenue
• Tracking your results with greater efficiency and more accuracy.

One drawback to marketing automation is that it requires a significant investment of time and money at the beginning of your strategy. However, the advantages, pay-offs, and growth opportunities quickly earn back and exceed the resources initially spent on implementing your program. In fact, according to a CMS Wire survey, companies saw a 27% shortened sales cycle and a 31% increase in sales productivity and effectiveness after implementing marketing automation software.

How Can Automated Email Marketing Grow Customer Engagement?

While not all email marketing strategies involve marketing automation, all effective marketing automation practices should include email marketing. Creating segmented lists, responding using templates or form answers, and sending messages takes up hours of your valuable time. B2B marketing automation can take care of all of these—and more! Using marketing automation software provides information about how your email marketing strategy is performing, answering questions such as:

• Did the prospect or customer open your email?
• Did the recipient click a link?
• How many times did a recipient click a link?
• And more.

You may worry that using an automated marketing program will cause your messaging to be robotic or impersonal, but the exact opposite is true. Marketing automation is one of the best marketing strategies available for creating curated, individualized experiences for your customers through segmented content distribution lists. You get to learn more about your target audience and their habits, and your users move further through the buyer’s journey by interacting with relevant content.

How Can I Implement B2B Marketing Automation in My Business?

Before implementing marketing automation software, identify what you want to accomplish and who you want to reach. With all the best marketing strategies, you should have SMART goals in mind and a fully realized target audience before beginning a new initiative. Once you’ve identified these things, you can tailor your marketing automation to your specific needs.

Keep in mind that marketing automation, like any new strategy in your B2B workplace, is a work-in-progress. Marketing automation software runs on data. As you implement your strategy, you may need to tweak, redirect, and rework certain aspects of it as you collect more data and see performance results. This course correction is to be expected, and why marketing automation cannot replace your human marketing team!

That being said, not all growing B2B businesses have full marketing teams. Even if you do, bringing in a marketing service provider such as Ecreative can help smooth your transition as you establish your B2B marketing automation strategy. We can assist you in collecting or organizing data, pinpointing goals, and navigating through details of digital marketing as your business grows.

Your Partner for Effective B2B Marketing Services & Strategies

Are you interested in finding out what a marketing automation service can do for your industrial B2B business but aren’t sure where to begin?  We’re ready to collaborate with you to provide innovative and impactful B2B marketing automation solutions.

Contact Us for a B2B Marketing Automation Consultation