Business to Business Marketing Strategies: Making the Case for Marketing Automation
by Andrew Millar
Want to decrease marketing overhead? Increase overall return on investment? Generate more leads? Marketing automation is a business to business marketing strategy that is streamlining marketing departments and increasing profits for mom & pop stores to Fortune 500 companies. Marketing automation for business to business marketing is creating an easy, stress-free system to keep in touch with leads and prospects and work them down the funnel to sales, allowing marketing departments to increase customer service and leads. Consider launching your marketing plan to new heights with marketing automation.
Making Business to Business Marketing Easier
Big businesses like Amazon and Target use marketing automation to nurture customer relationships and guide consumers to interact with their company. In fact, according to Pardot, a quarter of business to business Fortune 500 companies are already implementing a marketing automation plan. Businesses that implement a plan also have a higher conversion rate from their leads than those not using automated processes.
Business to business marketing is a time consuming and often difficult process. Generating meaningful leads can take up entire days. Building a relationship that converts a lead to a sale can take even longer. Marketing automation allows businesses to reduce the amount of time spent pounding the pavement and more time increasing the business’ presence. Personalized emails, lead specific information, and valuable discounts for needed services can go out at the click of a button or be scheduled, keeping current customers engaged and potential customers interested.
Where Marketing Automation Can Fall Apart
While marketing automation can increase the effectiveness of your business to business marketing, business owners’ plans can become counter effective when marketing automation is treated like a quick fix, one-time investment. Marketing automation only is as good as the plan the business develops to implement it. If a business doesn’t have a strong marketing plan currently, it may be a better plan to implement a strong marketing plan rather than sinking money into automation. If a business doesn’t understand what converts for their company, automated marketing will only amplify those losses.
While automation reduces the overall responsibilities associated with lead generation, it doesn’t eliminate them. Businesses still need to hone their automation marketing to maximize their conversion rate. Even with marketing automation, keep testing and keep optimizing.
Building an Automation Roadmap
To prevent experiencing the drawbacks from a poorly implemented marketing automation program for business to business marketing, business owners should develop an automation roadmap to guide their business through the implementation, the training, and the continued tweaking. Marketing automation software is only as good as how it’s applied to a business, how well staff are trained, and how well its implementation is tracked and improved. Businesses need to develop their own roadmap to determine what software to use and how it will be applied to the business.
An honest assessment of which marketing automation will best serve your needs is the first step to developing a road map. There are various marketing automation systems available. Simple systems like Mailchimp may be just enough automation to boost overall sales. More inclusive plans like certified Hubspot partner Sheffield Media Group offer a one-stop shopping experience for businesses to fully automate and help develop business goals, including ongoing tracking of those goals. Businesses need to commit to learning and engaging with marketing automation for maximum results.
Business to business marketing doesn’t have to be an in-house endeavor. Marketing automation can free your marketing department to increase your customer base and customer service all while nurturing strong leads from prospects to sales. When implemented mindfully, business to business marketing can be vastly improved by marketing automation.