Marketing Automation Best Practices for B2B Businesses

Streamlining, Automating and Measuring for B2B Businesses

Assembly lines are all about efficiency. So is Marketing Automation

– Simply put, the old approach of mass marketing, trade shows and buyer?s lists have lost their appeal to B2B buyers. Today, the majority of business buyers rely on the Internet, organic search and social media to make buying decisions.

Marketing automation technologies provide companies the tools to streamline, automate and measure marketing activities and workflows, which make operations more efficient and fuel revenue growth.

Here are several Best Practices that can enhance your B2B marketing automation efforts.

1. Map Your Lead-to-Revenue Flow

Evaluate your lead-to-revenue flow from the moment a visitor views your website or otherwise comes into the sales pipeline. It will clarify what aspects make sense? for marketing automation, as well as the blueprint and rules that marketing automation can follow. This requires you look at the process from the buyer?s perspective and capture all the trigger points that shape Leading routing. This includes:

• Content Strategy
• Lead Planning
• Lead Qualification
• Lead Nurturing
• Lead Routing
• Lead Analytics

The process will also help you identify deviations from standard procedures.

2. Deliver Valuable, Targeted Content

One of the primary benefits of B2B marketing automation concerns the ability to deliver a meaningful message to your targeted group, at the right time, through a variety of channels– publisher sites, blogs, social media, mobile and email. It is important to understand the buying cycle and providing content tailored to the stage in the buying cycle.

Once you develop buyer personas, and the problem they must solve, you have what you need for positioning and messaging and delivering targeted, relevant contact at the right time? to build a powerful marketing automation approach.

3. Design Effective Forms

To capture Leads, you need a toolbox full of marketing and sales tactics, including making your forms short and easy to fill out. Forms that require a lot of information will turn off many people and reduce your capture rate. If you offer papers, videos or webcasts, request only basic contact information.

Some other best practices for marketing automation component include:

• Avoid asking for mailing address if you do not mail materials. If you primary follow-up is through email, do not ask for a phone number.
• Make landing pages compelling with easy-to-fill? forms that motivate? prospect to provide their information.
• Do not assume the Lead wants to make a purchase now, but give them a? form for further contact.

Focus one Call- to-Action at a time, such as a free video or whitepaper download. This will avoid distractions that can reduce Conversions.

4. ?Employ CRM to Align Marketing and Sales

The CRM system collects critical information, marketing generate leads and track prospect and client behavior. Your sales team acquires important information from the market and leads regarding their needs. Marketing automation and CRM allows the continual integration of this critical data to help you respond effectively to the core mission of satisfying customer needs.

You can create custom fields for Calls-to-Action, develop custom reporting insights to keep campaigns organized and accessible or send alerts with actionable information about Leads, such as ?download paper on XYZ,? to a salesperson.

5. Make Lead Scoring Simple

Assign point values to activities and characteristics?attributes typically associated with prospects that have a greater probability of Conversion?to enhance your marketing automation efforts. Avoid using too much data because it obfuscates more important information and makes it difficult to separate suspects from serious prospects.

Here are some suggestions for developing your scoring system:

• Identify your buyer persona.
• Isolate buying cycle and buying signals.
• Score each step, task or buying signal according to its relative value.

The sales staff should use the system to guide their day-to-day actions.

Automation doesn’t necessarily mean taking the human element out of tasks, like content development, lead scoring and social media – but rather streamlining these systems and measuring each for optimal success.

There are many marketing automation software options available for the B2B business. If you’re in the market for marketing automation, you can request a free demo of one of the most popular options, HubSpot:

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, call-to-action mapping and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and traditional media allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.