Heading into 2021, progressive marketers working at B2B companies still remain frustrated with their lead generation efforts and marketing ROI, yet ironically are too entrenched in approved internal strategies to step back and look for ways to further embrace marketing automation to improve marketing ROI.
As a result, most B2B marketers do not see the consequences of inaction when it comes to further layering marketing automation into their sales and marketing operations. Further more, not able to see how lack of further implementing progressive and effective marketing automation trends has a negative impact on a companies growth rate.
With 48% of Marketers using Marketing automation it is one of the 4 most popular methods to create personalized customer experiences. – House of Marketing “Yearly Marketing Survey 2019” (2019)
To stand-out in a sea of competitors, you will need to pay closer attention to these constantly evolving B2B automation trends if your company wants to stay at the top of their game and ultimately increase marketshare.
You’ve probably heard a lot about growth hacking. While your company wants to grow, there is only so much you can do in the hours you have each day. One of the things that can help you achieve more without having to give up precious hours of sleep is automation.
B2B companies are a little behind when it comes to automation, so if your company gets started, it is much more likely that you will have your potential client’s ear.
Since you won’t have dozens of competitors vying for your prospects attention, this is a critical time to get out in front of them with old fashioned proactive helping customers, so they stay customers for longer periods of time.
Top B2B Marketing Automation Trends to Implement
Learning new strategies, technologies, jargon, and information can be an overload to the brain. Your company can’t help but to learn these automation trends or find an agency that knows how to make them work for your company. We understand how important it is for B2B companies to start implementing these strategies right away.
1. Improved Sales & Marketing Alignment
Leveraging marketing automation not only benefits your marketing team, but also your sales team.
For instance, your sales team members can drip feed persona-driven content and sales enablement materials across the buyers journey or further refine the sales ready messaging in your sales playbook alignment between sales and marketing teams.
According to Nucleus Research conducted Marketing Automation drives an impressive 14.5% boost in sales productivity. Proving the effectiveness of marketing automation, this study that revealed sales productivity grew by 14.5% when automation software was used. And this isn’t at the cost of increased resources, but in fact the opposite – the same report also found that companies using automation benefitted from an average 12.2% reduction in marketing operational expenses.
2. Extreme Personalization
If you’ve been browsing social media and noticed ads that have “read your mind,” then you are more familiar with advertising automation trends than you might know.
Once a website or marketing platform has dropped a cookie in your web browser, then can have precise insights into how you engage with their content and marketing channels.
Marketing automation isn’t only about the autoresponder these days. Autoresponders are so 2000s. Automation is now being used to gather data on ideal targets in order to build better relationships.
Customers say they are more likely to buy from companies that take the time to recognize them by name, take note of their preferences and send them offers that are genuinely helpful.
Account-based marketing is very specific marketing that is executed based on the information known about the people that will be reached with the campaign. Account-based marketing is especially helpful for companies that are targeting a very specific target audience that is high-value to their company.
3. Live Video
More growthNow that most platforms allow for live video, B2B marketing is using live video to capture more attention.
81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool — up from 63% over the last year. (Hubspot)
People are more likely to stay and engage with videos when they are live than when they are prerecorded videos.
When you allow viewers to interact with live videos, you can learn more about what they want and how they want to consume content. The data you will draw from doing these videos can help you shape other marketing strategies and get your content out in front of more people.
4. End-to-end Integration
Customers have choices when they are engaging with a brand. Marketing automation is advancing to give consumers what they want. What consumers want is a consistent experience.
They want to know that brands are talking to them in a sincere way that they can depend on. According to Gartner Research when you have at least four channels that your campaign is going to do better than campaigns that only use two digital channels.
While using more channels is important, it is also important that you remain in sync and that is where automation comes in. While it can be difficult to stay on track by yourself, automation gives you an extra set of hands, and it feels like there are more hours in the day.
Your goal should be to create a customer experience that is predictable and dependable. When you use automation, your company is able to do just that.
5. Content Marketing & Automation
All marketers know how important a B2B marketing automation strategy factors into the effectiveness content marketing is but sometimes keeping everything straight can be confusing when it comes to implementing marketing automation best practices. When you are using marketing automation, you can make your content more effective and get more reach. More reach means that you have the potential to gain more leads which then in term lead to conversions.
When you are implementing your content marketing strategy, you will be able to gather data from your viewers that will allow you to retarget them and market even more effectively. Retargeting is a very effective way to use content to communicate and eventually convert.
Understanding your potential client’s buyer’s journey will allow you to put out the kind of content that they need as they are going through the decision-making process. People are continually searching for information as they go through various stages of the buyer’s journey so having automation to help you communicate with them is a necessity.
5. Refining User Experience
When B2B marketing is done properly, the user gets a great experience. User experience is one of the most important parts of what automation does to help your company. Automation shouldn’t be distracting so knowing how to implement the strategies properly is key.
Mapping the customer experience (53%) and use of personalized/dynamic content (51%) are deemed the most effective tactics for optimizing marketing automation. – Ascend2 “Optimizing Marketing Automation survey” (June 2018)
Effective and profitable B2B Marketing automation plays an important part is ensuring that your lead or customer sees the right information at the right time. When you take it a step further and implement content personalization within your workflows, then you can start serving highly niche messages to particular buyer personas at each stage of the buyers journey.
An untimely email with irrelevant information and lack on personalization can cost wreak havoc on your ability to generate and nurture a repeatable flow of high quality leads and cause problems for your campaign.
Drip email campaigns are one of the things that are common, but with marketing automation, you can choose to send a different email to different segments.
For instance, if one person opened an email and another person didn’t then you would send a certain email to one and another email to the other. If you send the same email to both of them, the conversation may be disjointed.
As you are gathering data, don’t gather data for the sake of gathering it. Make sure you are gathering it so that you can better market to your target audience.
Conclusion
Understanding how marketing automation works and is moving forward in the B2B community is important as you grow your company. Top B2B marketing agencies help growth-oriented B2B companies with their strategies so they can get the results they need.
Contact our team together to get further information on how our company can help you increase your leads and sales through inbound marketing.
