B2B Marketing Automation

Putting customers at the center and picking them up at every touchpoint of the customer journey is the goal of every company, regardless of the industry. The biggest difference between B2B and B2C marketing lies in the target group. This results in a different approach to (potential) customers. You don‘t want to convince individuals, but entire companies, from business to business. Find out now how you can ultimately achieve this, what B2B marketing automation means and which marketing automation tools we can recommend to you.

Marketing automation is often mistakenly confused with lead automation or email automation. But there is much more to it. Marketing automation pursues the goal of communicating with potential customers, or more precisely their buyer personas, in as individual and targeted a manner as possible. It may seem like a trend that classic B2B communication is shifting more and more into the digital space. But beware: this is much more than just a trend. Sooner or later, you won‘t be able to avoid automating your marketing activities if you want to remain competitive. With this shift from offline to online, the possibilities of automated and digitized marketing are also increasing. 

Definition Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation refers to all software solutions that automate marketing processes and consist of the functions of database, web controlling, communication, workflows and CRM-synchronization. The systems make it easier for marketing departments to plan, control and evaluate extensive marketing campaigns. 

Advantages and potential challenges 

Marketing automation in B2B has many advantages for you, but also brings a few challenges. These can, of course, vary depending on the area of application. We show you the most important points at a glance! 

You can see right away that the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. Moreover, the challenges mentioned are rather to be regarded as common issues when introducing any new software in a company. Disadvantages of the respective software are of course to be considered individually, because no software is 100 percent error-free.

You can cover the following areas through B2B Marketing Automation and implement them with the appropriate tools.

• Automated marketing campaigns
• Lead automation
• Automation email marketing newsletter
• Web2Print, digital services, online marketing
• Landing page management and maintenance
• Integration of CRM, ERP, sales tools, etc.
• Tracking, reporting, controlling
• Data collection, data maintenance, data transfer

We would now like to introduce you to a corresponding tool for implementing these application areas – our favorite, the B2B marketing automation solution Marketing Cloud Account Engagement from Salesforce. We would like to pay particular attention to the event marketing functionality in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

As the leading cloud-based CRM solution for companies of all sizes and industries, Salesforce offers an optimal system for managing customer relationships. With the help of a large portfolio of cloud products and numerous tools, work processes can be conveniently optimized and all data can be bundled centrally. This not only facilitates effective work across different departments, but above all allows you to focus fully on what matters most: the customer.

With its Marketing Cloud Account Engagement marketing automation CRM solution, Salesforce also enables marketing automation in the B2B sector. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is a digital B2B marketing tool that makes your campaigns more efficient, increases conversion rates, and delivers better-qualified leads to your sales team. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement cleverly develops interest with personalized, targeted content and increases the efficiency of your ROI analyses.

Core functions of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Lead scoring and lead grading

With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, leads can be classified as more than just hot or cold. The tool offers you an automatic lead qualification system. This is called Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Scoring and Grading. The score of a prospect (a person who has provided you with their email address either via a form or a data import) indicates how interested they are in your product or service. The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Grade tells you how well this person meets certain criteria that you have previously defined. This system helps you gain more insight into your leads and personalize your communication with them.

Lead Capturing – Forms

Lead capture forms help you convert visitors to your website into prospects. Forms are extremely important for marketers. If you use them correctly, you can leverage the full potential of your prospect database. With a landing page form, you can collect data from potential customers, convert anonymous website visitors into prospects, and then contact them in the next step. You can use these forms, for example, as registration forms for offline or online events, or to provide digital content such as white papers.

Automation tools

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers four basic elements for automating your website processes: completion actions, automation rules, page actions, and segmentation rules.

Completion Actions are automated system responses triggered by specific elements in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. When a prospect triggers a specific action, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement performs the automated response you want.

Automation rules simplify complex, recurring tasks and optimize your workflow. If desired, automation rules run in the background and in real time to make changes to prospects.

Page actions are one of these automation features. Here, automated responses are triggered based on the prospect‘s behavior on your website. Please note: Cookies must have been accepted beforehand and an email address must be available!

Segmentation rules allow you to create a one-time list of prospects based on specific criteria. For example, you can add all prospects with the job title “CEO” to a list to contact them in the next step.

B2B email marketing

Increase the effectiveness of your email marketing with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement! The core feature of this tool allows you to effectively plan and send personalized emails to thousands of prospects. You can create email templates and send autoresponder emails automatically, for example after a specific action. Of course, you can test every email, newsletter, and webinar reminder beforehand. This way, you won‘t make any mistakes. Afterwards, you can view open rates, engagement, link clicks, and much more. You can also create lists for the respective target group of your emails. With just a few clicks, you can add the list and schedule your email for the desired time. Then you can sit back and relax.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Studio

At the heart of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Studio – an intuitive marketing automation tool that lets you send follow-up emails, create logic-based nurturing campaigns, and test scenarios to see how a prospect might navigate the path.

It may sound complex, but it‘s actually quite intuitive. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Studio offers the ability to send emails to a list of prospects, see how the prospects interact with the emails, and then respond differently depending on how recipients interacted with each email in the drip. A drip is an automated sequence of messages that can change based on logic you create. This allows marketers to create automated programs that engage prospects at every step of the customer journey.

We have already thought one step ahead for you. Building on the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Sales Cloud solutions, we have developed a module with ready-made Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Journeys, email templates and much more. Thanks to a wide variety of templates, you no longer need to set up workflows and processes for webinars and fairs yourself. With our module, you get predefined functions for your marketing automation. So, you are ready to go even faster! At the same time, you benefit from our experience, on the basis of which we have developed the module for you. 

And this is how it works 

The customer registers for a webinar or fair, for example, via a landing page. In the course of this, the person is assigned to a list. This list is found at the beginning in the so-called customer journey (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Studio). In Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Studio (where the customer journey is set up), additional email templates and other elements are stored as phases that the customer then goes through. This means that once the person is in the customer journey, they will automatically receive emails (invitation, reminder, credentials, follow up, further content like whitepapers or blog posts, etc.). In addition to the benefits of marketing automation, contacts are automatically assigned a value (based on the person‘s interest) and passed on to sales. So, the process is seamless to the sales team as well and you can focus on pure marketing efforts.

Marketing automation is currently gaining significant momentum, especially in medium-sized businesses. A functioning and well-established marketing automation in the B2B area holds enormous sales potential. In any case, a marketing automation tool such as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can only bring you advantages, as we already explained at the beginning of this article. The internal qualification and training of your employees, like so many things, takes time. This is where well-planned change management is needed! Nevertheless, the question should not be whether to choose a B2B marketing automation solution, but when to do so.