A Comprehensive Guide for B2B Businesses to Digital Marketing Automation

Marketing automation has been around for a while and it has proven itself to be a very valuable asset for the businesses. 

 

Digital marketing is also impacted by the automation in every aspect, be it email marketing, generating and managing customers, and also managing the pipeline for media planning and content marketing.

 

Every small to medium business is performing well with the help of B2B marketing methods and it has changed the way they deal with their clients on a daily basis.

 

For the newbies in B2B marketing automation, it is a little bit hard to understand how the scope of B2B marketing automation and the benefits it provides for the business. But, for those who are unaware of the technology, there are various tools and techniques available in the layman language.

 

B2B marketing automation is all about knowing which marketing mix will work great when used together. B2B Marketing automation lifts your efforts for the manual tasks in the marketing processes.

 

This write-up might go a little bit technical, hold on for exciting information and details…

 

What is B2B Marketing Automation?

 

Marketing automation solutions are handled with the help of software and digital tools where most of the tasks are done by the businesses on their own.

 

B2B marketing more of deals with businesses rather than live people so it has to be handled more professionally than emotionally.

 

B2B marketing automation solutions will increase the speed with which marketing processes are done by the actual people.

 

Marketing automation for B2B businesses is helpful in generating, managing and nurturing leads throughout the sales funnel.

 

B2B businesses can use automated messages and other digital tactics to build beautiful relationships with clients, prospects throughout the process which creates solutions to the problems they experience during the lead nurturing.

 

Various marketing channels in the digital world use automation techniques but it is a misconception that marketing automation is all about email marketing. WRONG; marketing automation for B2B businesses can be applied to any digital platform you use.

 

Most importantly, you can save time and money for your business and grow profitability at the same time.

 

Let’s have a look at the examples of B2B marketing automation…

 

Example 1. Automating website chat function

 

Whenever a prospect or potential customer lands on your website, this chat function will help them to ask queries and get answers in real-time. 

 

Automating the chat function will take some time at the initial phase but then it will save your time and resources to be present on the website to answer your prospects.

 

More than 30% of your prospects a live chat function on B2B websites. For your customer management team, it will take time to answer all the time, so here comes the marketing automation solutions for the live chat function.

 

Some common techniques help you to automate the live chat function by pre-defining FAQs and common queries in the chat database and answers to them will simply automate this function. Further, Artificial Intelligence will sort, identify the questions asked by your prospects and match them with the predefined queries in your database easily.

 

There are tools which help you to automate the process, we at Evincera provide a service to install a live chatbot for your website.

 

Example 2. Sales triggers and tracking

 

When some of your prospects visit only a limited number of pages of your website, they are only interested in the products and services you are offering more than the knowledge you share.

 

These pages will include price details, product pages and service details etc. they are filled with the commercial information only and these pages are found by your leads after the whole research they drive while buying the products or services like your brands are providing.

 

When your leads or prospects tend to visit these pages, they are really ready to buy and we can identify them as soon to be happening real-customers.

 

Identifying such clients is a part of digital marketing automation.

 

Example 3. New Customer On-boarding

 

Getting new customers through marketing automation is also easy. Here, email marketing comes handy. Creating a content plan for your email marketing campaign will start this process.

 

You can send automated emails to the lists you have with you for this purpose. Guide your new customers and prospects about your products and services and bring them to your brand. After they know how your brand works, they will get to know how to choose your brand as their choice.

 

This example will save your time. How? Suppose you have a stall located in the corner of the exhibition, and your sales reps are demonstrating the products to your prospects, how about automating this process with the marketing automation? You can also couple this automation process with the creative videos you can create at your own facility.

 

Example 4. Lead nurturing

 

Here is a surprising fact: 96% of your website visitors are not ready to buy? How would you try to convert them to your customers that last long?

 

When companies tend to do that manually, they keep emailing and continuously calling the prospects in order to convert them. This has very low chances of success, don’t you think?

 

Again, email marketing comes handy this time. Sending automated email responses and sending your prospects informative marketing materials will guide and educate them to buy your products and thus, letting you save time, money and efforts for the lead nurturing.

 

Example 5. Avoid churn

 

For companies offering products and services on a monthly or periodical subscription basis, churn is an enemy.

 

Churn is what customers do by cancelling their subscription before the renewal.

 

But how marketing automation helps avoid churn?

 

By automating periodical surveys on the feedback of your customers, you can get their suggestions and use them for improvement of your products and services.

 

If suppose, some of your customers are unhappy with the products or services or any of the features you are offering, you can correct them or give them a discount on new subscriptions.

 

This way, automation can save you from your customers leaving you in the middle.

 

Example 6. Social media Automation

 

While social media is a virtual face-to-face communication between you and your customers, you can choose marketing automation to automate the replies and to thank your customers in this virtual world.

 

There are some tools and partner organizations with the major social media platforms to avail you such features.

 

We provide automated social media management services to our clients at Evincera and it’s going pretty well.

 

Example 7. Referral Marketing & B2B Customer Retention

 

For many brands, marketing through referring is the best source to get new leads. We always tend to buy products our friends refer to us.

 

Offering a discount coupon for future purchases when a customer buys from your website or when they refer to their friends is a perfect example of how marketing automation works with referral marketing.

 

You can also promote your referral program with regular email updates and automated text messages to your regular clients.

 

Automation is the future

 

The future of digital marketing is already here which we were talking a few years back and automation will play an important role in the future of digital marketing. Mostly new small businesses and startups are going to get benefited with the marketing automation in digital.

 

If you are a small business with a limited budget and expect boost in your sales for the B2B ways, drop us an email at [email protected] to know how marketing automation will help you in multiple ways.