What Is Marketing Automation & What Can It Do For Your Business?

According to Ascend2 data, 91% of businesses say marketing automation is somewhat or very successful in helping them achieve their marketing goals. This includes everything from maximizing efficiency to improving personalization, lead quality, conversion rates, and more.

But how can marketing automation benefit your business? Let’s kick things off with a marketing automation definition before exploring its use cases, benefits, and best practices.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the process of using software to automate laborious marketing activities, such as email campaigns, social media posts, SMS messaging, and ad campaigns. This is alongside behind-the-scenes activities like demand generation, lead scoring, and marketing data analysis.

Marketing automation helps you automate your B2B sales funnel from top to bottom, driving efficiency and cost-effectiveness. But it’s more than just a time-saving solution—it’s a powerful strategy that helps you generate more leads, optimize marketing campaigns, and nurture customers to conversion.

What does automation mean?

To accurately define marketing automation, it helps to understand what “automation” means.

Automation is the use of technology and machines to perform tasks with minimal human intervention. It can be leveraged to streamline all kinds of business operations across industries, from simple, repetitive tasks to complex business processes. 

For example, a healthcare organization might use automation tools to book appointments and update patient records. Supply chain and logistics companies can implement inventory management tools to track inventory levels and generate forecasts with minimal human intervention. 

In customer service, chatbots can be used to resolve customer issues faster on a 24/7 basis. Accounting might use automation technologies for data entry and payment processing.

Essentially, technology can be integrated into every corner of your business, but there’s one area where automation truly shines—B2B marketing.

How does marketing automation work?

Marketing automation platforms are designed to automate marketing activities, such as sending emails, posting content, and scoring leads. To do this, they create “workflows”; a series of predefined steps that dictate how the software should execute tasks according to specific user behaviors or conditions.

There are three key building blocks of marketing automation that you ought to know: 

• Triggers: Triggers define the event that initiates the automation workflow. For example, the trigger for a welcome email campaign might be when a prospect signs up for your email newsletter. 

• Conditions: Conditions are pre-defined rules set by you that define the characteristics required for an event to be triggered. They also determine which action the software should take depending on which conditions they meet. This makes them an essential component in designing personalized customer experiences.

• Actions: Actions describe the automated task executed by the software. For example, if someone signs up for your email list, the software might send them an automated welcome email containing a discount code if the conditions are met.

Marketing automation platforms are typically integrated with AI. This enables them to analyze and make decisions based on big data with continuous adaptability. AI in B2B marketing is typically used for complex data analysis, where it can uncover customer behavior patterns and trends, segment audiences, and target them with personalized messages.

What is an example of marketing automation?

Now you know the theory behind automation, let’s take a look at the strategy in action with some marketing automation examples. 

Imagine that a new lead has just signed up from your email list to access your gated ebook. Here’s how you might use different marketing automations to nurture and convert them:

• Welcome email: Once the lead has filled out your form, you send an automated welcome email thanking them for joining, complete with a link to your downloadable ebook.

• Segmentation: Marketing automation tools segment the customer based on the specific page they converted from or which ebook they downloaded, along with their firmographics. They’re added to a segmented list with other prospects that share the same characteristics or interests.

• Email nurturing: You send a series of automated nurturing emails to everyone on the segmented email list. These emails could contain links to relevant blog posts or an invitation to your webinar that covers the subjects they’re interested in, for example.

• Data analysis: Automation tools track the email campaign’s performance by collecting lead engagement metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and soft conversions.

• Lead scoring: Leads are automatically assigned a score based on their engagement levels and behaviors. For example, if they click your email links or attend your webinar. The automation tool notifies you when a lead’s score increases and/or they express purchasing intent, signposting them as a qualified lead.

• Sales follow-up: Qualified leads are automatically handed over to sales, where sales teams can automate outreach and follow-up messages to drive conversions.

These are just a few examples of marketing automation. There are lots of other automation strategies that you can use within your B2B funnel, such as website tracking, retargeting, and even chatbots.

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

There’s a reason why the same Ascend2 study we mentioned earlier found that 59% of businesses are increasing their marketing automation budgets. In fact, there are lots of reasons. 

Let’s take a look at the main advantages of marketing automation to see what it can do for your business:

Increased efficiency

Perhaps the most obvious and immediate benefit of marketing automation is that it eliminates repetitive tasks from marketers’ workflows. This means they can spend more time on strategic and creative initiatives. 

For example, manually designing and typing individual emails drains productivity. With automation tools, marketers can set up an email series that triggers at certain points in the customer journey, such as when they subscribe to your email list, engage with specific pieces of content, or sign up for your webinar. 

These emails can be sent at scale. This maximizes efficiency and empowers marketers to focus on strategic, revenue-generating activities like optimizing campaigns for conversions using data. 

Generate demand and high-quality leads

51% of marketers say that increasing brand awareness is their top priority, according to a report by VIB. 

Their second highest priority? Generating more high-quality leads.

Lead generation and demand generation tools can automate various tasks along the B2B marketing funnel to improve the volume and quality of leads.

For example, you have SEO automation, which can perform tasks like keyword research, content optimization, and SEO performance reporting. This helps you rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs), match search intent, and access key performance insights to generate demand.

Website tracking tools like Leadfeeder by Dealfront automatically collect firmographics and contact details from customers who visit your website, unmasking hidden prospects. From there, lead scoring automation can use your pre-defined criteria and behavioral analysis to pinpoint high-value leads.

And we’ve barely scratched the surface. 

There are lots of demand and lead generation tools that can be used to automate top-of-the-funnel marketing activities, from customer relationship management (CRM) systems to social media schedulers and landing page optimizers. 

Nurture leads more effectively

Nurturing leads down the sales funnel requires continuous, consistent interactions. B2B companies in particular are tasked with supporting lengthy B2B buying cycles with a continuous stream of content and communications. 

Trying to do this manually can quickly become overwhelming. With automation tools, marketers can interact with leads regularly across channels to build long-lasting relationships.

Automation tools can collect behavioral data from every customer interaction; website visits and page views, email opens and clicks, social media engagement, ad views, and more. 

Marketers can use this data to craft valuable content for different channels and automatically distribute it according to set schedules and customer actions. 

Content can be distributed automatically via email, social media, search engines, and more. This consistent communication keeps your brand front and center in your customers’ minds, demonstrating reliability, establishing trust, and easing prospects down the funnel.

Personalize customer experiences

Marketing automation unifies customer journey touchpoints. With access to rich, real-time customer data, you can segment leads and deliver tailored content that aligns with customer needs, pain points, and motivations at exactly the right time.

Let’s say that a lead reads your article on landing page optimization. You could nurture them via email by suggesting similar articles or sending them an exclusive invitation to your webinar on the topic. Or, you could show them search and social media ads that reflect the content they engaged with.

And you can do it all without having to manually track and initiate these interactions. 

Increase conversions

After increasing brand awareness and generating higher-quality leads, increasing conversion rate is the third most important priority for many marketers. 

Marketing automation directly increases conversions. It helps you create consistent, personalized experiences that smoothly guide leads through your funnel. 

For example, you can manage and score leads more accurately to hone in on the right customers at the right time, using comprehensive customer profiles to target them with relevant, personalized, and value-driven messages.

You can even re-target website visitors who bounced with tailored ads and content across different channels. This can be taken a step further using Promote by Dealfront, which re-targets every decision-maker in the company with relevant ads (rather than just the individual who initially viewed your website). This maximizes awareness and interest to expedite conversions.

Align sales and marketing teams

Sales teams rely on marketing to pass over high-quality leads. And, marketing relies on sales to successfully convert these high-quality leads into paying customers. This can only be achieved when the two teams work in synergy.

Sales and marketing automation seamlessly integrates disparate tech stacks to deliver a unified, 360-degree customer view to both teams. This access to shared, real-time customer profiles and data insights keeps the two teams on the same page and empowers collaborative decision-making. 

Optimize budgets and resources for increased ROI

Manual processes require significant labor and resources. By automating repetitive marketing activities, you can expedite these tasks without needing nearly as much manpower, reducing labor costs and freeing up resources. 

These resources can be allocated towards more strategic, high-value activities, such as personalizing experiences and creating thought-leadership content. This optimizes resource use, boosts return on investment (ROI), and amplifies profitability.

Scale your processes

Marketing automation is inherently scalable. A small business with a hundred customers can effortlessly scale automated operations to support their needs as they grow to acquire thousands—or millions—of customers. 

Unlike manual processes, it doesn’t require resource increases or disruptive process overhauls, keeping teams productive and profitable in the face of growth.

Enhance data insights to optimize strategies

With the power to collect real-time data across all your channels and automatically generate reports, marketing automation tools provide you with a big-picture view of your customers, strategies, and performance. 

What type of content are leads engaging with, or not engaging with? Do they drop off at specific points, such as during your email nurturing campaigns or after your sales outreach? 

Marketing automation can uncover patterns, trends, and relationships in data to help you quickly identify opportunities for improvement, optimization, and growth.

How to set up marketing automation services and solutions

Implementing marketing automation is quite straightforward—the right platform does most of the work for you. 

However, there are key best practices to follow to ensure that the solutions you implement offer the most value to your business:

• Align solutions to your business goals: Do you want to improve content creation to generate more demand? Refine your email nurturing strategy to retain more customers? Increase the quality of marketing-qualified leads? Every solution you pick should support a clear business goal. 

• Identify key tasks to automate: Which tasks would benefit most from automation? Evaluate all the activities carried out by your marketing team and prioritize the ones that drain the most resources and productivity.

• Map your customer journey: Automation shouldn’t solely support your business needs—it needs to support the needs of your customers, too. Map out all your customer journey touchpoints to identify points of friction and implement solutions that create smooth transitions for leads as they travel from touchpoint to touchpoint. 

• Take advantage of free trials: Most providers offer free trials or demos of their platforms. They give you the perfect opportunity to play around with the interface and explore all the features to see if the solution is the best fit for you. For example, Dealfront offers a  14-day free trial—no strings attached—that lets you try out the platform for yourself.

• Train teams to get the most out of tools: AI and automation tools are only as effective as the people wielding them. Offer training to help your teams not only navigate and use the solutions, but leverage them to their full potential so they deliver maximum value.

• Perform continuous monitoring and analysis: Are your automations delivering results? Collect performance metrics like engagement KPIs, cost per lead, conversion rates, and more, to determine the effectiveness of your marketing automation strategy. Take advantage of the data collected by automation platforms to make strategic adjustments and improvements.

Common marketing automation mistakes to avoid

Every new technology you implement comes with its risks, and marketing automation is no exception. Luckily, the challenges of implementing and using automation can be avoided if you know what they are and how to navigate them. 

So, let’s take a look at four of the most common mistakes and some tips for avoiding them:

Failing to create a comprehensive strategy

Every marketing automation strategy needs a well-thought-out plan to ensure that it’s implemented in alignment with unified goals. Without a clear strategy, you may end up with tools that serve no value, misaligned teams, hoards of useless data, and a poor ROI. 

So, don’t just blindly follow trends. Take the time to develop a detailed strategy that aligns with your goals, pain points, touchpoints, and customer needs.

Over-automating processes

Automating too many touchpoints erodes personalization and authenticity. This can lead to disaster in a landscape where building genuine human connections with customers is crucial for conversion and loyalty. 

If all your messages are automated, they can come across as generic and mechanical, making customers feel like just another number. Or, if all of your posts are scheduled, it can lead to you posting content that’s inappropriate or insensitive to current events, which harms your business reputation. 

B2B marketing strategies benefit from automation, but nothing can replace the human touch. Only implement automation into processes where it’s truly needed. And, make sure that your automations complement, not replace, human interaction and intelligence.

Losing your brand voice

This is a common problem for businesses that automate content generation and customer communications. 

Automating content creation allows you to deliver more content for customers and connect with them more frequently. However, when used uncritically, it can lead to you producing masses of generic, robotic, and unengaging content.

In other words, content that’s completely devoid of a distinctive, humanized brand voice. This is an instant turn-off for potential customers, who will question the authenticity and credibility of your brand. 

To avoid this problem, be strategic with your use of automated content. For example, you might automate transactional messages but manually write promotional messages. Or, maybe you use automation for SEO and content strategizing, but you manually write all your content to retain your brand voice.

Failing to monitor and optimize automations

Some businesses view marketing automation as a set-it-and-forget-it strategy, which simply isn’t the case. 

Customer needs and preferences are constantly evolving alongside the digital landscape they shop within. If you don’t continuously monitor and optimize automations, they’ll grow more inefficient and ineffective over time. 

For example, your automated lead scoring system might accurately gauge lead interest and purchasing intent now, but what about in a month? Three months? Six months? Your scoring rules should be analyzed and customized in response to changing behaviors and strategies.

This goes for all of your automations. Continuous monitoring and optimization allow you to swiftly spot problems and adapt automation strategies to meet dynamic customer needs and business goals.

Grasp the benefits of marketing automation with Dealfront

To access all the benefits of marketing automation, you need multi-functional tools. With Dealfront, you don’t just get a one-trick solution, you can access a suite of marketing tools designed to automate key points in your B2B funnel. 

Monitor which content pulls high-value leads to your website with real-time metrics, and use this data to optimize B2B marketing campaigns. Track and analyze your website visitors and send their profiles straight to your CRM. 

You can even automatically qualify leads according to behavioral and firmographic filters, and gauge buying intent in real-time. And, automatically re-target key decision-makers at exactly the right moment with personalized, relevant messages.

Want to know more about how Dealfront can automate your marketing operations? Explore all of our solutions or try them out for yourself in a 14-day free trial.