Marketing is hard.
On any given day, you could be writing content, building landing pages, meeting with clients, preparing social media posts, or editing a podcast – and I haven’t even mentioned internal strategy meetings. We've all been there, drowning in a sea of never-ending tasks and wondering if there's a magical solution to streamline our marketing efforts.
Well – it’s not magic, but marketing automation can take your operations from a spluttering, beat-up clunker to a well-oiled machine if you do it right.
In this post, we'll explore five B2B marketing automation examples to inspire your strategies and turn leads into sales so you can focus on growth.
At this point, email marketing is the bread and butter of digital marketing. Social media, video, and other channels should be part of your marketing campaigns, but email is still essential. And email marketing automation can take it to the next level!
Email marketing automation lets you send personalized emails at the right time. For example, when a prospect becomes a customer, you can sign them up for an onboarding series to help them get the most out of your product. Or if a customer abandons their shopping cart, you can send a friendly, personalized reminder that nudges them to complete their purchase.
Emails are a great way to nurture leads and generate conversions. Let’s see how you can implement them.
Lead scoring is a way to identify if a lead fits your ideal buyer profile so you know how to best segment and nurture that leas.
Sometimes, people download your lead magnets or get in touch with your business, thinking it’s something else or to accomplish one singular purpose without real intent to purchase (trust us, it happens).
But with lead scoring in place, you can score leads based on their behaviors, your ideal customer profile, and firmographic data. You then assign values to leads based on their likelihood to convert. Lead nurturing helps guide high-value leads through your sales funnel. And you can automate parts of this process!
For example, let's say you sell software to businesses. If a lead visits your pricing page, downloads a whitepaper, or attends a webinar, they get a higher score. You can then use those scores to send targeted content and offers that address their needs and concerns, moving them closer to purchasing.
Related: The 6 Growth Marketing Metrics Every Business Needs to Track (& How to Track)
Whether your prospects are in the awareness, consideration, or decision stages of the buyer’s journey, you can create content they’ll find helpful and relevant. With the right content (that meets customers where they are), you’ll get increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and customers that stick around.
And content isn’t just blogs, whitepapers, and social media posts. It’s product demos, webinars, and even landing pages. Consider a prospect lands (sorry) on your landing page; is the content compelling enough for them to take the desired action?
You may want them to download a lead magnet. Does the copy tell your prospect that your lead magnet can solve an immediate problem? Hopefully, it does. When they download your lead magnet (and if they fit your lead criteria), you now have a warm or even hot lead that has raised their hand and said, “Yes! You can market to me!” And now you can send personalized content that moves them along the buyer journey.
Ah, AI. In ten years, we won’t know how we did things without AI.
We’re just starting to see what it's capable of. This is evident in the development of customer support. Conversational marketing and sales platforms–like Drift–enable you to engage with your customers in real-time using chatbots.
An AI-powered chatbot can answer FAQs and guide users through processes, among other things. Chatbots learn from interactions and improve over time, providing a better user experience. They can even integrate with your CRM and marketing automation tools.
For example, let’s say one of your customers has a problem with their account. They turn to your customer support page, but your offices are closed for the day. A chatbot can still provide value by asking what the problem is and giving troubleshooting tips or creating a ticket. As a result, the customer feels heard and knows someone will be in touch.
At Lean Labs, we use HubSpot and its various marketing automation tools to
And more!
The automation tools you use will depend on your needs. HubSpot works for us because we run complex campaigns for multiple clients.
There are hundreds of tools you can use to automate marketing tasks. Mailchimp is great for email marketing, and Zapier is fantastic for managing workflows across multiple platforms. Choose a platform that suits your needs, team, and budget.
Before automating marketing campaigns, you need a clear strategy. Having a strategy before automating marketing campaigns helps define objectives, understand the target audience, communicate your messaging consistently, and continuously inform and improve your campaign performance.
Once you have a strategy, determine where automation can impact most. What do you hope to achieve with automation? Is it better engagement? Higher email open rates? Set goals and objectives to guide your implementation and track success.
Knowing your audience inside and out is essential. Once you have a buyer persona, you should know (from research) their pain points, preferences, and behaviors. Only then can you create relevant content and launch effective campaigns.
You’ll want a centralized platform to store data and analytics. We mentioned HubSpot earlier; our workflows, data, blog, and all other marketing tools are on one platform, streamlining our marketing efforts.
Decide on the tools and platforms to use based on your goals, budget, and existing tech stack.
Lastly, review, improve, and expand your marketing automation efforts.
Marketing automation is vital to your efforts to drive and scale growth. You can automate repetitive tasks and nurture leads through targeted campaigns, creating a more seamless customer experience and encouraging prospects deeper down the sales funnel.
At Lean Labs, we use marketing automation to streamline our processes and create a seamless client experience that ultimately helps drive growth for our clients. Want to learn more about how you drive your company's growth? Book a meeting with us to discuss HubSpot. If you’re worried about the cost of HubSpot, don’t be… you can start for free!
Alternatively, unlock the Growth Playbook and see how we can help you make marketing a profit center instead of a cost center. We’re in this together!