According to a survey conducted by Upland Software with marketing professionals who adopted an automation platform, the biggest benefits that marketing automation brings to B2B companies are: time savings (74%), customer engagement (68%), assertive communications (58%) and increased business opportunities such as up-selling and cross-selling (58%).
In terms of results, a study conducted by Nucleus Research shows that well-managed marketing automation can increase sales department productivity by 14.5% and reduce marketing department expenses by 12.2%. In practical terms, this means that marketing automation for B2B companies promotes an increase in ROI and revenue, in addition to improving the company's results as a whole.
See also: Top B2B Marketing Trends for 2020
What is marketing automation?
We can define the term “marketing automation” as a platform that is programmed to manage campaigns to attract, engage and convert customers and prospects, through a series of commands manufacturing email list defined by the professional who will manage the tool. This technology can be applied or integrated through marketing software, such as HubSpot, which includes programs in its own system to perform activities such as: email marketing campaigns, social media management, personalized landing pages, among many other functions.
How does marketing automation work?
Marketing automation is guided by the “Buyer Journey” , which consists of the steps or phases that a customer will go through before purchasing a product or contracting a service offered by your company. A well-structured marketing automation will “guide” the customer through the purchase journey through content based on their interactions with your company.
Typically, customer purchase journeys guided by marketing automation begin with a “trigger,” such as filling out a form to download an e-book, subscribing to your newsletter, or simply hiring one of your services.
From there, work will be done to send content to this client , such as blog articles, infographics, and emails, for example, with the aim of strengthening ties, bringing notoriety to the brand or service and, consequently, encouraging their purchase or hiring.
Reasons why a B2B company needs marketing automation
The biggest benefit that marketing automation can bring to your company is the ability to generate more, higher-quality leads . However, there are other specific benefits that marketing automation brings, especially for B2B companies , which have the power to positively impact, directly and indirectly, your company's results.
1 - Marketing Automation eliminates repetitive tasks from your team's routine
If your company works with email marketing, you may have noticed that the opening and conversion rates for personalized emails are higher than for traditional ones, a fact proven by Monetate, which found a 20% increase in sales in companies that used personalization campaigns.
However, personalizing each email and sending them separately to each customer, besides being a arduous task that takes up a huge amount of your team's time, especially if you already have a large contact base, also tends to be inaccurate, as the chances of sending a personalized email to the wrong person are greater.
An email marketing automation platform allows you to customize each of your emails individually, with information previously collected by the platform, in an automatic flow. It also allows you to create a “path” of emails with previously scheduled sending, ideal functions for working on an ABM (Account Based Marketing) strategy.
2 - Improve customer experience
If you work directly with marketing, or are an enthusiast in studying this area that is so important for the success of any company today, you must know that there has never been so much talk about the importance of customer experience and how it influences sales results.
With marketing automation, you can obtain data that assesses how engaged a person is in your campaign and helps you focus your efforts on those most interested and work on specific content that is relevant to attract their attention.
Just like the content production itself, marketing automation also makes it easier to distribute it across different channels where your customer is actually present.
Furthermore, automations are highly customizable , which allows you to personalize your campaigns to provide a great experience for your customer and, therefore, obtain a higher conversion rate .
3 - More qualified leads for your sales team
Marketing automation provides and acts on a large amount of data that your company can analyze to obtain more information about your relationship with the customer and their purchasing journey. This makes the lead qualification process more assertive , which will make the work of your sales team easier.
If the results are below satisfactory, marketing automation also allows you to accurately identify whether this problem is related to the performance of your sales department or whether the leads captured by your marketing team are not qualified. This will, within a short period of time, lead to an increase in your company's sales.
