Many B2B businesses struggle to keep up with rapidly evolving market trends—including automation—resulting in ineffective marketing and sales strategies.
What Is Business Automation?
Business automation employs advanced technologies to simplify business processes and functions across an organization, thereby minimizing human intervention as much as possible.
In the world of B2B, most routine jobs that used to involve tedious effort and a lot of resources are now easier due to the use of marketing automation, sales enablement software, robotic process automation (RPA), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and artificial intelligence (AI).
The results of automation can be transformative.
Case in Point
Impact Networking, a managed IT services provider, shares a case study of Marathon Health as a success story.
The nationwide healthcare network faced overwhelmed and understaffed marketing and sales teams, risking millions in pipeline revenue.
However, it transformed its efforts by adopting an omnichannel approach that integrated customer data across platforms for a seamless, personalized experience and leveraging AI-driven tools like conversational email. Those tools enabled the company to orchestrate targeted ads, direct mail, and personalized email journeys tailored to specific buyer personas.
Within two months, Marathon Health generated $4.5 million in net new pipeline revenue. By mid-2021, it achieved $66 million in net-new pipeline and a 211% increase in in-market buying growth.
Marathon Health's success demonstrates how business automation can drive scalable growth.
Why Do You Need to Automate Your Business?
A automation is not optional; it must be done to improve business and employee performance, according to a Harvard Business Review article, "How Automation Drives Business Growth and Efficiency,"
For B2B companies, automation offers flexibility and scalability, enabling your business to handle increased workloads and adapt to changing market conditions without sacrificing efficiency.
Automation reduces human errors by accurately managing repetitive tasks and delivering consistent results.
By standardizing processes, it removes inefficiencies and improves operational efficiency.
Automation helps boost employees' morale by removing their focus on mundane tasks and giving them meaningful work.
It improves communications and collaborations with partners, suppliers, and customers, helping to build stronger relationships and increase overall productivity.
How Business Automation Directly Supports Marketing Efforts
Automation has a significant impact on your marketing initiatives by streamlining processes, improving personalization, improving content distribution, and providing real-time analytics.
Here's how business automation directly supports marketing efforts.
More Resources for Campaigns
Automating email marketing, lead nurturing, and social media posting eliminates the need to hire additional staff or spend time on repetitive work. That allows you to invest in more important activities, such as refining campaign strategies, optimizing performance, and improving customer engagement.
A software company, for example, might set up automated workflows to send informative emails, build trust with leads, and enable its marketing team to focus on content creation or campaign performance analysis.
Improved Personalization
Automation helps you create personalized experiences at scale by analyzing customer data and boosting engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. Epsilon research finds that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands offering personalization.
You may segment your audience by previous interactions, demographics, and buying behaviors to send targeted and relevant emails.
By understanding their interests, behaviors, and purchase history, you can create engaging content and design customized offers to improve conversions, which makes your campaigns more effective than generic ones.
Better Content Distribution
Fully 95% of B2B customers view content as a critical marker when evaluating businesses, according to Demand Gen Report. Yet, 27% of B2B marketers lack a documented content strategy, according to the 13th Annual Content Marketing Survey (2022) from MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute.
Using automation tools, your marketing teams can preload content calendars, set posting times, and publish with just a few clicks.
Thus, they can consistently, accurately, and efficiently distribute content across platforms to reach the right audiences at the right time while maintaining a consistent brand presence.
Real-Time Analytics
Ascend2's The State of Marketing Automation 2022 survey found that 35% of marketers identify improved data and decision-making as a top benefit of automation.
With tools and methods like key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards, website analytics, and unique URLs, you and your marketing teams can access high-quality real-time data, such as conversion rates, engagement statistics, and profit margins.
Those insights help measure marketing effectiveness, adjust strategies on the fly, plan future campaigns more effectively, and allocate budgets more efficiently by pinpointing the most profitable tactics.
Key Benefits of Business Automation
B2B businesses can gain notable benefits through automation:
- Improved resource allocation: According to BestPack, automation cuts operational costs by up to 90% and allows you to invest more in innovation, market growth, and customer experience
- Better data for smarter decisions: Automation provides real-time data visualizations and evidence-based insights to help managers and teams make decisions based on facts, not guesswork.
- Increased time for strategic work: By eliminating repetitive tasks, your sales team gains more time to focus on building relationships and closing deals through business automation.
- Faster lead response times: Automating lead scoring and data enrichment allows your sales team to quickly respond to prospects. Data from Vendasta shows that replying within the first minute can increase lead conversions by up to 391%.
What Needs to Be Automated for Better Results?
Automation can enhance efficiency and drive better outcomes across various critical areas.
HR and Payroll
Automating your HR and payroll boosts efficiency, saves costs, and improves employee satisfaction. For example, payroll automation systems handle pay calculations, tax deductions, and direct deposits, saving time and reducing payroll errors. They also aid in payroll compliance by processing and filing paperwork on time.
Customer Support
Support automation enables B2B businesses to scale without increasing headcount. You can instantly understand and resolve customer inquiries by leveraging natural language processing (NLP).
Automated chatbots address frequently asked questions (FAQs), while self-service portals provide helpful resources, freeing employees to focus on strategic tasks and build authentic connections.
According to data cited by HubSpot, 68% of customers are willing to spend more with companies offering excellent support.
Email Marketing
Automated email marketing empowers your teams to track and engage with hundreds or even thousands of leads simultaneously. Customizable workflows, rules, and criteria allow them to send targeted emails to prospects and customers and foster more personalized interactions.
For B2B marketers, automation simplifies lead generation while strengthening client relationships. Sales teams benefit, too, with instant meeting or appointment setups, improved response rates, and faster deal closures.
Project Management
Enterprises should establish a structured process for initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing projects. Next-generation project management software solutions help smooth routine tasks, improve transparency, and allow real-time monitoring.
Those tools include tracking task due dates, reassigning tasks, and enabling team collaboration. You can also access comprehensive project audit logs for better oversight.
Those capabilities enable your teams to complete projects on time and within budget while identifying and resolving inefficiencies and bottlenecks that could hinder project success.
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Business automation is the key to unlocking scalable growth in B2B marketing and sales. You reduce costs, improve personalization, and boost operational efficiency by automating email marketing, lead nurturing, and content distribution.
Automation helps utilize resources wisely, eliminate errors, and improve communication and collaboration within teams and networks.
It boosts employee morale by removing mundane tasks and enhances customer journeys with personalized, timely experiences. Beyond marketing, automation supports HR, payroll, customer support, and project management.
Don't let outdated tools like papers and spreadsheets hold you back. Embrace business automation to propel your business toward faster, smarter, and more efficient success.
More Resources on Marketing Automation
Three Keys to Successful Marketing Process Automation Implementation
Seven Marketing Automation Campaigns That Should Get You Promoted
