3 Reasons Why B2B Companies Are Adopting Marketing Automation

On average 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation and more than half of B2B companies (58%) plan to adopt the technology.¹ What about everyone else?  How can you scale and grow your organization without marketing automation?  The answer is, you can’t.  If you want to grow quickly and effectively, you need to have both a sound strategy and the software to make it happen.

Why invest in marketing automation?  Here are three reasons to consider.

1. It makes you more efficient

Most B2B companies we work with have small marketing teams but big marketing goals.  More website traffic, more conversions, more leads, more, more, more!  How can you achieve such lofty goals with such a small team?  Even if they are the most effective marketers, there is a limit to how can be done manually.  To really get the most out of your marketing department you need to build a proper strategy and then implement a marketing automation tool to help you execute against it.  Once you start building out workflows with well timed, action-based triggers, your emails will deploy when they are supposed to without being dependent on someone’s schedule.  You can pre-build welcome emails for new customers, you can build content-based nurture campaigns to help guide prospects down the funnel, and you can build automated thank you emails with other targeted content offers after a person engages with a piece of content or converts on your website.  Once the journey is mapped out and the content is set you can schedule everything to go automatically, freeing up your team’s valuable time to build the next campaign or to manage something else.  Ultimately, with the right software you can execute an aggressive marketing plan with reduced staffing costs since you are no longer relying on things to be done manually. 

Another way that a marketing automation tool improves efficiency is by integrating multiple channels.  Building a landing page for a key promotion and tying organic social posts, email campaigns, paid search and social all to the campaign you can easily align your efforts.  Software like HubSpot or Marketo also allow you to continuously A/B test without investing in heavy manual analysis post-test.  Gone are the days where you had to send out two variations of an email or post two variations of a landing page, run your campaign and then analyze and adjust for future.  Now, thanks to software, you can create your two variations, press send and have the two versions go out to the first 10% or 15% of your list and then deploy the rest automatically against the version that performed better.  This improves your campaign results immediately and gives you valuable insights into your audience. 

2. It helps you increase revenue

Revenue is the top priority for all of our clients.  They want more leads from marketing so they can sell more.  But top of funnel leads aren’t always ready to buy at the time you engage.  Just because you meet someone at a trade show and they love your product or service, it doesn’t mean they are ready to purchase. With marketing automation, you can repurpose content to nurture your prospects down the sales funnel to get them primed for the sales.  Because you are keeping your brand top of mind and positioning yourself as a true industry leader, when the time comes to make the purchase, they will come to you. 

With marketing automation, it is also easy to run strategic cross sell and up-sell promotions because you’re continuously building the contact records for your prospects so you can leverage the insights to target the right prospect with your promotion, ultimately driving more revenue.

The other great part of leveraging a marketing automation tool is that you can truly qualify the leads before you pass them to sales.  By moving them along the sales process and measuring their engagement with your content you can pass them along when they are ready, ensuring that sales is spending their time with the right people and ultimately increasing sales.

3. It helps you improve reporting

So often we are asked how to determine what tactic to use or what channels to leverage to promote their content or events.  Should they invest in a pre-show sponsored email or should they do paid LinkedIn ads?  The absolute best part of using a marketing automation tool is that it pulls all the data together and allows you to easily attribute your success to the right source. 

Now that you understand the importance of marketing automation, read our 2019 B2B Marketing Benchmarking Study and find out if you are leading or lagging with your marketing efforts!

References:

1.  https://www.emailmonday.com/marketing-automation-statistics-overview/