6 Game Changing B2B Marketing Automation Examples

If you've been paying attention to the massive shift from traditional marketing efforts to digital marketing, you'll notice that marketing automation is one of the primary drivers for business leaders looking to take their marketing game to the next level.  In fact, the marketing automation market is projected to reach over $9 billion by 2026 according to the Marketing Automation Global Market Report 2022.

B2B Marketing automation used correctly can be an extremely valuable method to help businesses create more web traffic and leads, which ultimately helps to increase revenues, all the while reducing redundant activities and/or unnecessary headcount. 

If marketing automation is a new frontier for you, it can be difficult to understand what options are available to you and what tools and strategies you should be considering, as well as the associated benefits one can gain from marketing automation tools and strategies.

At first glance, it may sound a bit complicated but the reality is that most marketing automation systems today are quickly deployed and easily managed and fairly light on the wallet compared to the future returns you can anticipate in the months and years ahead.  

Before digging into the 6 real life examples of B2B marketing automation tactics, a good working definition is in order.

In simplest terms, B2B marketing automation allows an organization to automate their marketing processes. It helps to generate leads, follow up with prospects and nurture them through the buyer’s journey. It also enables B2B marketers to personalize their messaging in order to effectively engage with a wide range of audiences.

B2B marketing automation includes tasks such as scheduling social media posts, designing email campaigns and tracking website visitor behavior. It can even be used to identify high-value customers and uncover new markets.

All in all, B2B marketing automation is a key asset for organizations looking to expand their reach, increase efficiency and maximize insights into their customer base. With the help of B2B marketing automation, B2B organizations are able to make the most of their limited resources and drive engagement with relevant customers.

Simply put marketing automation is a way for you to automate repetitive task by leveraging software and become more effective and efficient in your marketing efforts. 

If you're committed to growing your business revenues and slashing time spent on repetitive task B2B marketing automation software and services is something you should highly consider.

6 Game Changing B2B Marketing Automation Examples

Let's learn about the different types of automation strategies available to help drive web traffic, leads and revenue with B2B marketing automation.

1. Automated Chat

Web chat has been around for a long time, however the days of having to deploy an actual person to monitor and respond to requests is no longer a good use of time or money.

Even if you outsource this function it's still more expensive than having software automate this capability.

And there is no getting around chat. In fact, more than 40% of web visitors expect your website to have some sort of chat capability so they can ask questions in real time. If you can't provide the answers right away, your competitors likely will.

Here's the good news, there are many great chat solutions available today that will allow you to quickly enable live chat on your website without having to pay for a person to monitor it.

Take for instance, tools like HubSpot offer modern chat software that allows for powerful automation capabilities, such as being able to respond to general questions, route inquiries to the proper channel or schedule future sales meetings, are just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible with a HubSpot's chat features.  

Whether you have an overburdened customer support team or you desire to increase the number of lead conversions on your website, chat automation can be a great automation tool that reduces repetitive task and delights customers and prospects.  

Another great use case for chat can be found with the concept of a "conversational landing page".

Traditional landing pages contain an embedded static form that most web visitors are accustomed to interacting with. The reader exchanges their name and contact details in exchange for something of value, oftentimes expecting a sales call as a result.  

Readers look at the static, non-engaging form and make an initial judgement call as to whether or not they are going to submit their required information knowing they may be bombarded with spam and unwanted sales calls.  

A conversational landing page, leveraging chatbot capabilities, encourages interaction with the reader which feels more like a conversation.  The giving and receiving of information in real-time is much more powerful than a static form promising something in return.   

2. Website Visitor Outreach Automation

If you have a mature website you may have great web traffic, however if readers do not engage with your forms, chat or decide to pick up the phone and call you, this anonymous traffic is of little value, right?

Fortunately not all is lost with website monitoring software like Zoominfo integrated with CRM applications such as HubSpot.

With Zoominfo's WebSights tool you can create reports that will analyze the web traffic of specific pages and provide you the names of companies coming to those pages. 

Zoominfo's workflow tool will then run this list of companies against your search criteria and only pick out the companies and contacts that meet your "ideal customer profile" (ICP) and then automatically export them into your CRM. 

Once these newly imported contacts/companies hit your CRM, you can automatically trigger workflows to prospects that have have been visiting your website with relevant and timely messages based upon their web behavior.

Being able to send a timely sequence of relevant emails, SMS text, social media outreach (e.g. LinkedIn) and phone calls after a prospect visits your website is an amazing way to generate new leads that otherwise might not have been created since they never converted on your website.

In this scenario outlined above you can automate the entire process with the exception of the Business Development Reps (BDRs) making the follow up phone calls as part of the sequence workflow. 

This powerful tactic does a great job at converting anonymous traffic into new sales cycles.  You've already invested the time and money into driving that organic web traffic why not fully monetize it with website outreach automation.

3. Marketing Automation

Let's say you've mastered the art of generating web traffic and your site is great at converting traffic into known leads. 

What do you do with these leads to ensure they take the next step by turning into a sales opportunity?

Or how do you make sure your sales team only focuses on the best leads that have the best chance at closing?

This is where marketing automation (scoring, routing & nurturing) comes into play.

As you are well aware not all leads are created equal therefore you can't treat them all the same. Ideally each lead should fall within a particular category or be scored for further action.

The first thing you want to understand is how good is the lead.

This can be accomplished through the concept of lead scoring.  Lead scoring takes into account both demographic information as well as behavioral data of the lead. 

Lead scoring may look at behavioral attributes such as:

• Email address type - corporate email vs free email - are they a real lead?
• Web pages viewed - pricing pages vs employment pages
• Form submission - what assets have they downloaded?
• Email Opens/Clicks - did their email bounce, do they click on our emails?

And demographic attributes such as:

• Job Title / Department - is this the right persona we want to sell to?
• Company Revenue - is this company large enough to warrant our solutions?
• IP address - can we sell to this company based upon where they reside?
• Email address type - corporate email vs free email

Once the lead is scored you can trigger various internal and external email workflows based upon their score and/or a combination of other factors. 

Here's a simplistic example:

• If lead's IP address is US or CA add 10
• If leads email address is a valid corporate email address add 10
• If lead submits form "x" add 20
• If lead visits employment pages subtract 10
• If lead visits pricing pages add 15
• If lead has title "CFO" add 5
• If lead email address bounces subtract 25

Workflow

1. If lead is based in EST based upon IP address and has a lead score greater than 50 route to Account Executive "John Doe" and assign sequence "XYZ" which contains 6 emails, 2 SMS, 3 Calls and 2 social outreaches over a 6 week duration.
2. If lead is based in Mexico based upon IP address and email address bounced and has a lead score zero update lead status as "disqualified".
3. If lead is based in PST based upon IP address and has lead score of 25 route to BDR "Jane Doe" and assigned sequence "ABC" which contains 12 emails over a period of 6 months.

These are simple examples but the point is with the right tools you can build intelligent and relevant workflows only once and have them run 24/7 not requiring a sales or marketing manager to look at each one before making a decision on what to do with the lead.  

Oftentimes you'll find that when a lead converts they are not ready to buy today, they have only begun their research process, which is common with larger ticket items.

However, in highly competitive industries it will be necessary to say top of mind, sending the prospect valuable insights and content on a periodic basis eventually leading them into a sales cycle. 

All of this can be accomplished using a powerful marketing workflow engine such as HubSpot.

4. Social Media Automation

According to HubSpot, Social Media Automation means:

"Social media automation is the process of using automated tools to improve your social media presence through content curation and scheduling social media posts in advance. Automation tools can help reduce the amount of time spent gathering posts last minute so you can spend more time growing your account by engaging with your audience."

Trying to coordinate the publishing of various assets across multiple social media channels can be quite messy without a centralized tool to manage your social channels and assets.  

This is where automation of social media management can save you tremendous time and bring consistency across your social media channels.

Many of the social media automation tools also have the ability to proactively monitor any mentions of your brand or can alert of you of topics that of interest to you.  

While it's a best practice to have a real person create social media post and respond to comments, having a tool to automate the scheduling and publishing of content across all your channels with detailed analytics in one place is a huge time saver.

5. Automating CRM Data Management

Having clean data is necessary for effective marketing campaigns and as you are aware a CRM database can get messy really quickly.

This is where using B2B marketing automation tools can come in handy. There are numerous data fields you'll want to keep pristine such as:

• Contact Owner
• Company Owner
• Lead Source
• Phone
• City State and Zip code
• Company Revenue
• Company Employee Count
• etc...

Tools like Zoominfo and HubSpot can help you automatically append or update CRM records based upon the rules you specify. These rules can run in the background so that your highly paid BDRs and AEs can focus on on creating leads and closing deals instead of data management.

With clean data your sales and marketing teams can contact the right people at the right time with the right messaging from the right people within your organization. 

6. Buyer Intent Automation

Buyer intent data identifies businesses that have shown recent interests in the products and/or services that your business offers. Buyer intent providers show trends in web behavior and identifies companies that show an increase in online consumption and categorizes this data so that marketers and sales reps can engage with these prospects at the right time with the right message.

There are several vendors in the buyer intent space, at SmithDigital we've had good success with both Bombora and Zoominfo.  Zoominfo is a great option because you can automate the entire process starting with identifying companies and contacts showing specific buyer intent signals and automatically exporting them to HubSpot which automatically enrolls them into sequences based upon their buyer intent signals. When setup correctly this powerful combination of buyer intent data and software automation can scale as high as your budget will afford with little human intervention needed but encouraged to get the best results.

Looking for a competitive advantage?

For business leaders that are considering an investment in B2B marketing automation software and services, I can't stress enough how much of a transformational impact this can have on an SMB sized business literally overnight.  Well, maybe night overnight, but done correctly you could see massive results in short order. To be successful it really comes down to choosing the right technology vendors and the right partner that has the domain expertise you need to be successful.