![complicated flight map](https://www.wordstream.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/b2b-marketing-automation-complex-flight-map-delta.jpg)
As the consumer journey to purchase is becoming increasingly intricate, the B2B customer journey is growing ever more complex. The number of automation tools also continues to grow, and with easy integrations and APIs, the workflow combinations are endless.
As a result, B2B marketing automation can sometimes feel like this:
B2B buyer journey? Or Delta airlines flight map…
In this post, I’m going to cover five easy ways to use B2B marketing automation to keep your funnel thriving. These include:
Here’s how to use your marketing automation tools in tandem to acquire leads, nurture them into sales, and retain clients.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey gauges customer satisfaction and loyalty to a brand. It’s built around a single question: “On a scale of 0 to10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service?” with 0 meaning not at all likely and 10 meaning extremely likely.
But instead of standalone NPS campaigns to track your audience’s satisfaction as a whole. Instead, integrate them into your other marketing automation flows to ask your clients at key points in their journey with your business.
For example, you might set up a trigger for your email client to send an NPS survey message after a particular event. For a B2B business, this could mean:
In addition to the event trigger, include an exit trigger across all channels so you don’t send multiple survey requests to one user.
With this B2B marketing automation strategy, you can
The number of nurture touches required before making a purchase continues to grow alongside the number of communication channels available to buyers.
With up to 20 customer touchpoints to optimize for your customer journey, automated data collection is a lifesaver. In response, marketers are starting to invest heavily in journey mapping techniques.
One key ingredient for journey mapping is intent data. Intent data provides both of topical and contextual information so you can understand not just what topics your prospects are interested in, but also who the prospect is behind that search.
For example, if you’re a B2B marketing agency, you’ll want to understand whether visitors to your website are actual businesses owners or marketers seeking out your services, or entry-level marketing managers or even college students looking to learn more about the industry.
Using a combination of manual and auto-tagging, detailed UTMs allow you to track how a prospect interacts with every touchpoint in your buyer’s journey, so you can collect your own first-party intent data and then use that data for journey mapping. You can also map those fields into your CRM for better lead scoring.
The process of lead to client can take months in B2B marketing circles, since these are typically higher investments and involve a team of decision-makers. Rather than casting a wide net of leads and then working to convert as many of those leads as possible into customers, account-based marketing spends more time upfront carefully selecting specific businesses.
You then create detailed accounts of those target businesses to create hyper-targeted campaigns that oftentimes target multiple roles within that account.
Here’s how to pair automation with LinkedIn advertising for account identification and nurture:
Here are a few examples from Lake One Digital:
It’s 2021 and social media is a powerful B2B marketing strategy. With Facebook lead ads, your prospect completes a form without leaving the platform, effectively removing the need for a landing page and easing the path to conversion.
Here’s how to turn Facebook lead ads into a B2B marketing automation tactic. Use a tool like Zapier to set up an automated workflow that automatically adds the information captured by your Facebook lead ad into your database of choice.
For example, Zapier can add them as subscribers in your automated email platform. From here, they can be entered into nurture email sequences customized according to the campaign from which they came, the creative you used for the original ad, or other criteria on your Instant form.
You can use this micro-funnel to send emails, discount coupons, contest invitations, or anything else.
Our final B2B marketing automation tactic also uses Facebook lead ads. Here, you’ll add a Completion Section to your campaign, which is like the built-in thank you page lead ad form completions. Here you can customize the text and add a CTA button with a URL. Don’t let that opportunity go to waste!
Set the CTA copy to something like “Want to learn more now?” and the button to read “Send us a message!” or “Chat with us.” The target URL can then send an auto-suggested message in the Messenger window. You can take from there, or, if you have a chatbot management platform connected to Messenger, you can prompt a new automated conversation to properly qualify and route the lead.
Marketing messages sent through Facebook Messenger can have higher response rates than those sent through email, and you know that these leads are already interested in your business because they chose to complete your form.
It’s no longer possible to treat B2B marketing automation as too complex to get involved in. There are endless easy ways to implement automated funnels for organic and paid traffic, such as through NPS scores, intent data, lead capture forms, and chatbots. Brands that are slow to embrace technology will fossilize and potentially fail, but those that step up now will thrive now and for the foreseeable future.
Let’s finish off with a recap of these B2B marketing automation tactics:
Gabrielle Sadeh is a digital marketing consultant and cat enthusiast who helps brands share their voices and scale their businesses through powerful digital marketing strategies. You can follow her on Twitter @GabrielleSadeh.
WordStream’s guest authors are experts, entrepreneurs, and passionate writers in the online marketing community who bring diverse perspectives to our blog on a wide range of topics.
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