What is marketing automation? How can it drive growth? Here’s what startups should know about B2B marketing automation and its benefits.
What is marketing automation? Does your startup need it right now? Whether you’re an early-stage startup or primed for series-B funding, you should be using marketing automation. This technology saves time, streamlines marketing, and drives sustainable scaling.
Key Takeaways:
- Marketing automation is an essential B2B tech tool for startups of any stage.
- It simplifies workflows, saves time, and fuels growth.
- Automation empowers sales and marketing to work smarter.
What Is Marketing Automation and What Does It Do?
Marketing automation is a technology that automates tasks. Some platforms, such as HubSpot, Active Campaign, and Keap, offer multiple automation features. This technology reduces the time spent on tasks like sending emails, updating CRM data, and segmenting customers. It also enhances marketing by:
- Informing campaigns with business intelligence for every buyer journey stage
- Triggering remarketing based on propensity to convert
- Using artificial intelligence to better understand each customer and trigger personalized interactions at scale
Other secondary automation tools focus on one area of marketing:
- HubSpot automates social media marketing through the CMS Hub. Schedule posts, create social analytic reports, and update multiple social networks from one platform.
- HubSpot also automates email marketing through sequences, allowing you to spend less time following up and more time on the important stuff. Watch a video that explains HubSpot's Email Sequences here!
- Dialog Tech automates voice marketing with tools like phone surveys, conversation analytics, and in-call scoring.
- Calendly automates scheduling. Instead of spending time emailing prospects and customers to set an appointment, this tool prompts your contact to schedule a time, updates your calendar, and automatically sends reminders.
How many tools should your startup invest in?
Explore full-featured marketing automation tools first. A comprehensive tool will streamline marketing workflows and enable customization at scale. Fill holes in your workflow with secondary tools as needed.
Why All B2B Startups Need to Implement Marketing Automation
Fast growth isn't possible without marketing automation software. How will your startup nurture leads when you’re generating ten times your current lead count? How can you deliver hyper-personalization at scale? How will you know which leads are ready to convert from the hundreds you have in the pipeline?
Marketing automation tools let you automate many tasks involved in lead nurturing and marketing optimization. As a result, you can scale from one dozen leads to one thousand leads and deliver a personalized experience without sacrificing quality or investing more time and resources. You also have tools in place to continue delivering relevant messaging to existing clients, which helps build loyalty and boost client retention. This frees up sales and marketing to meet with prospects and better serve clients.
- Emails are sent automatically based on where your leads are in the sales funnel.
- Important metrics are analyzed for you. Some marketing automation tools will also generate reports.
- With an all-in-one platform, functions such as lead scoring and A/B testing are automated, making it easier to prioritize leads and refine marketing campaigns.
Marketing Automation Directly Drives Growth
Marketing automation platforms are purpose-built for growth. They streamline fundamental tasks such as lead management and landing page creation, empowering sales and marketing to be more efficient. There are other important benefits of marketing automation that can help a startup grow faster:
- Higher email marketing ROI: Automated, personalized emails generate 320 percent more revenue than non-automated ones.
- Holistic view of leads and prospects: Use real-time data to learn what truly interests your buyers, what motivates them to buy, and which channels and marketing messages resonate with them. Feed this information back into your marketing to create a more effective strategy.
- Boost upselling: Use personalized post-purchase emails to recommend additional products based on a customer’s history and interests. Fifty-eight percent of marketers use marketing automation to upsell.
- Higher lead conversion rate: A Forrester study found that B2B marketers using marketing automation see a 10 percent increase in qualified leads in the sales pipeline. Use your data to learn which prospects are more likely to convert and which ones should be prioritized.
The Right Tools Deliver the Right Insights
Implementing marketing automation isn’t just about increasing efficiency. It’s also about working smarter.
With a good tool or the right mix of software, you gain a complete view of what’s going on at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Track website traffic, social media engagement, form conversions, email open rates, prospect engagement, and post-purchase engagement.
Integrate marketing automation with customer relationship management, and your startup has the tools, data, and insights to deliver a “customer of one” experience to all customers. Data-driven business intelligence highlights opportunities for growth and reveals your startup’s strengths and weaknesses.
It’s also useful for demonstrating business success to investors. Let investors log into your platform so they can see how effective marketing and sales are. Generate reports to show current and projected results. Instead of spending time preparing data and presenting it to investors, let your technology do the work for you.
B2B Marketing Automation Is Powerful Today – What About Tomorrow?
Automated marketing gives startups a big push forward. This technology drives more sales, makes hyper-personalization possible, and delivers business intelligence that can fuel yet more growth.
As marketing automation developers integrate more advanced machine learning and AI capabilities, expect platforms to become even more powerful in the future. With AI, automation tools will go even deeper into understanding each customer and predict behavior more accurately.
Not sure where to get started with marketing automation and creating a high-performance tech stack? We can help. Schedule a meeting today.