Should your B2B SME be using marketing automation?

It’s been around for many years now, but what exactly is marketing automation, and should you be using it?

In simple terms, marketing automation is a software platform that allows you to stimulate, capture and nurture leads online. There is now a full array of suppliers offering different versions. They’ll often contain a combination of email marketing, content marketing, database and segmentation tools and the ability to automatically trigger communications, based either on time or an action that a prospect has taken, like visiting a particular website page.

A typical marketing automation funnel might look a bit like this;

1. Marketing stimulus – For example a paid LinkedIn campaign offering access to an eBook on a relevant topic
2. Landing Page
3. Sign-up via online form
4. Content becomes available
5. Added to CRM system
6. Followed up with a series of personalised communications, either time based or due to an action. E.g attending a webinar.
7. Nurture process continues until at buying stage

Where marketing automation gets really useful is when you have a high number of prospects that you’re targeting, and even more so if they’re across multiple sectors. In this instance you can then create separate funnels which are specifically tailored to that particular target audience or sector.

1. Generate high quality leads

Overall if your content and target audience are aligned, you’ll be able to create some high-quality leads. Although, the key elements of this are actually content and target audience so not inherently down to the marketing automation tools, they do provide the opportunity to communicate at the right time.

2. Fail fast

By this I mean making changes is pretty easy and straightforward therefore your able to test, learn and tweak as you go along, allowing you to refine your approach.

3. Better segmentation

When dealing with multiple prospects you’ve got the ability to segment multiple times, even due to actions taken, e.g. downloading and eBook or visiting certain landing pages.

4. Reporting and ROI

One of the best things about marketing automation is the ability to see which contacts are in your hot list, meaning that they’ve interacted multiple times and are the warmest prospects on the list. Due to this it’s very easy to attribute activity with sales, giving you a more accurate view of ROI.

5. Cost effective

When originally introduced, marketing automation was designed as an enterprise solution. As times have gone by these tools have been made available to SME’s and prices have reduced. Although it’s now a more cost-effective option, don’t underestimate the cost of implementation, content creation and designing an inbound marketing funnel through the platform.

There are a few things to be aware of if you wanted to go head and implement marketing automation into your business.

1. Can I get rid of my marketing team?

Some people do have the impression that by introducing marketing automation you therefore don’t need marketing people. Fortunately for me this isn’t the case. It’s true that once up and running it can work as an independent nurture machine for a bit, but it does need continual reviews to ensure you’re still getting the results you need. If you’re low on content, that’s another thing to consider, you won’t get very far with no content. The biggest input is the time and investment of setting up.

2. Deliverability

I’ve found that deliverability can also be an issue with some platforms and when targeting certain sectors. This is the same as if using a standalone email marketing tool, you’ll never got 100% deliverability. Although there is not much that you can do about this, you do need to be aware not all your emails will get to their intended destination.

3. Scale

Marketing automation does allow you to scale up your marketing efforts, but it’s most effective if you’ve got a high number of prospects to target. If, on the other hand you really want to target 20 specific local businesses, marketing automation is likely to be overkill for your requirements. Not to say you can’t use the same principals, but from a time and cost perspective you’d be better off taking a manual approach.

4. Implementation

I’ve mentioned previously that it does take a reasonable amount of effort to get a marketing automation platform off the ground and working. If you think this approach could be beneficial to your business, take some advice and see what additional support you might need, there’s nothing worse than investing in some shiny new tech and then not knowing how to use it to its full potential.

Overall, I certainly think it can help B2B SME’s to scale up fast, by nurturing prospects into more of a buying mode, or at least open to having a face-to-face conversation to find out more. If you’ve got a large potential target market of prospects, it’ll also save you a massive amount of time. If you’re targeting multiple sectors it will also allow you to handle this added level of complexity, by enabling you to send more relevant personalised content.