5 Key Benefits of Marketing Automation for B2B Businesses

For decades, businesses have been looking for ways to be more efficient and effective, yet some marketers still spend countless hours manually sending follow-up emails and sorting through data. The good news is that marketing automation can help to greatly simplify and automate these types of repetitive marketing activities.

In recent years, we’ve seen a significant increase in the use of marketing automation among B2B businesses. In fact, 92% of marketers are investing more time, resources and budget into marketing automation integration—and 23% are automating their content delivery. By streamlining repetitive tasks, marketing automation ultimately allows marketers to shift their focus to more creative, strategic projects that require a human touch.

Here are five key reasons why your B2B business should incorporate marketing automation into its digital marketing strategy in 2021:

1. Elevate & Automate Your Existing Workflows

Are you looking to improve productivity rates within your company? Or, maybe your team wants to minimize human errors and improve accuracy. By using rule-based logic, workflow automation leverages technology to automate manual sales and marketing activities.

Some of the best processes to automate are repetitive and tedious tasks, such as email follow-ups, social media posts and data management. Plus, these workflows can be triggered by a variety of different actions, including content downloads, abandoned shopping carts or event registration.

Automating workflows can help you:

• Save time on repetitive tasks;
• Create streamlined communication across the organization and to customers;
• Minimize human errors and potential risks of inaccuracy;
• Increase staff productivity; and
• Take your existing manual workflows to a new level.

Workflows occur when trigger actions are completed. For example, many companies set up a workflow that sends out a welcome email to new email subscribers. Once a subscriber’s email address is added to the database, the marketing automation system recognizes this action, triggering a workflow that sends out the welcome email. A best practice is to follow this eight-step process for automating email workflows.

Because workflows save employees a great deal of time by eliminating more tedious to-dos, it’s been shown to significantly boost employee productivity, increase lead generation and improve accountability across businesses.

2. Develop Channel Agnosticism Using Marketing Automation Software

One of the greatest benefits of marketing automation is that it allows your company to be channel agnostic. Simply put, channel agnosticism means that your channels matter less than the journey your customer goes on with your company. With technology constantly evolving, there’s the expectation that brands are available 24/7 on various media platforms. On the flip side, prospective leads and current customers receive information from various sources.

As a business, you want to be available when and where it’s convenient for your customers. Without a marketing automation tool, this could be very costly and time-consuming goal to achieve. However, today’s marketing automation platforms are integrating multiple channels and devices to build comprehensive customer profiles and make channel agnosticism easier than ever.

Because there’s no preference for where or how leads and customers interact with your company, your focus is instead on making sure the information reaches your target audience, which ultimately increases customer interaction and boosts sales. Channel-agnostic companies can communicate with their audience through a variety of channels—such as email, social media or web chat—that are equally prioritized with team members who can quickly assist customers.

3. Discover Scalable Platforms That Allow for Long-Term Growth

It’s often difficult for marketing teams to maintain personalized responses and give leads the one-on-one attention they deserve. Whether you are trying to grow your business or target a niche audience in your contact database, the scalability of marketing automation maximizes your marketing tactics to drive long-term growth for your business.

As companies continuously grow, it’s easier for automated systems to be scalable than humans. Investing in technology platforms like marketing automation offers a cost-effective way to take your business to the next level.

4. Automate Your Lead Generation Processes

Marketing automation software scores leads and contacts according to their sales readiness. Plus, it allows for better visibility, higher quality leads and automatic follow-ups. These are just some of the ways marketing automation can boost your lead generation strategy.

Once your company starts generating a steady flow of qualified leads, the marketing automation software can consistently update their sales readiness scores and continue to nurture the leads by sending out content based on where they are in the buyer’s journey—ultimately resulting in higher conversion rates.

5. Generate Measurable ROIs for Your Marketing Strategy

Business leaders and other important decision makers want proof that your marketing strategy is worth the company’s financial investment. This requires access to measurable and objective data that supports the budget.

For many marketers, the idea of investing countless hours each month pulling data is a nightmare. Luckily, many B2B companies are optimizing marketing automation to streamline this process and, in turn, drive revenue. Marketing automation systems track data and analyze ROI to make data analysis a more simplified and efficient process—allowing your business to maximize its marketing efforts and boost sales. In fact, Forrester found that B2B marketers implementing marketing automation saw a 10% increase in their sales pipeline.

If you’ve been looking for a way to improve efficiency rates, generate higher-quality leads and boost your ROI, investing in a marketing automation system could significantly improve your digital marketing strategy in 2021.