Introduction
At SM, we specialize in Branding & Performance Marketing, Sales, Closing, Lead Generation, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing, and Appointment Setting. Our services aim to deliver comprehensive sales and marketing solutions for B2B products and services. Our blog is designed to assist small and medium businesses that require outsourced sales or marketing department solutions.
Why should you use marketing automation?
Modern research indicates that the adoption of automation technologies is among the fastest-growing trends. Today, an increasing number of tools are being employed to ease the burdens of business owners. For instance, B2B businesses find it more manageable to control sales and revenue, create and retain customers, collect information about potential buyers, manage cross-posting campaigns, and social media files.
Marketing automation offers B2B significant benefits: It alleviates the need to monitor every detail of your company.
Understanding marketing automation
Marketing automation involves carrying out marketing activities using specialized software and tools to enhance the sales process. The goal of such automation is to boost campaign efficiency by automatically collecting and processing information about business sales leads, thus discarding time-consuming tasks related to manual input and analysis of the said data.
Based on the data derived from the consumer's interests, demographic factors, and activities undertaken on a specific website, marketing automation software identifies potential customers and then sends them a suitable, personalized B2B email marketing message. The software automatically prepares offers and advertising content, targeting a specific group of customers, usually via email, based on a pre-existing contact database. Marketing automation software typically integrates with other systems, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP systems.
The importance of marketing automation
Marketing automation is crucial as it enables a detailed analysis of your users’ behavior and identification of qualified online business leads. It also triggers specific patterns based on such data.
There’s no need to do manual work as you can pre-set the settings of each campaign and social media post and dispatch messages at the right time, when your recipients anticipate them the most.
Cutting-edge technology will assist you in creating stunning personalized content for your customers to win their loyalty and build long-lasting relationships. Moreover, you can view the statistics as soon as the campaign is live and analyze what worked well and what can be improved. As you can see, you will save a significant amount of time and use fewer resources with automation.
Marketing automation in action
Marketing automation is a multi-faceted task that encompasses several stages.
- Content creation and submission. Without flawless content, sales and marketing automation are ineffective. Hence, you need to display your proficiency to potential clients through the materials you publish and do it regularly to retain their attention.
- Launching advertising campaigns. Naturally, the outcomes will largely depend on the technologies that will ensure the inbound traffic. There are multiple strategies and channels to begin driving traffic.
- Tracking analytics of advertising campaigns. Employ suitable tools to comprehend the metrics and implement the necessary changes.
Best B2B marketing automation practices
At SM, we know how to enhance email marketing automation for B2B lead generation. So we’ve selected 4 essential steps to take to maximize the benefits from automation.
- Map out the customer’s journey thoroughly before configuring automation workflows.
- Set the key metrics and monitor them regularly.
- Create process visualizations.
- Provide database segmentation and prepare an excellent content strategy.
Conclusion
Marketing automation's primary purpose is to streamline business processes and help them run efficiently in the background. However, it doesn’t mean that you should neglect them. Always seek ways to optimize your workflows for better engagement.
We hope you now have a better understanding of "What is marketing automation?" and how it works. Apply the tips mentioned in this article to facilitate your business growth or generate B2B sales leads with SM to skyrocket your success.