A Guide to B2B Marketing Automation and the 5 Must-Have Platforms

Do you spend most of your time managing complicated, repetitive marketing tasks? Do you want to engage more with your customers, nurture more leads, and boost the marketing team’s efficiency? This is where the role of marketing automation comes into play.

A recent survey concluded that 80% of the respondents have already deployed a marketing automation solution. Most of the survey respondents used one of these tools — Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, SharpSpring, or Act-On.

Automation plays a vital role in the success of B2B business. In B2B marketing, it becomes challenging to craft engaging and personalized digital experiences for each client manually. It requires high precision and personalization, which B2B marketing automation delivers efficiently.

But what exactly is B2B marketing automation? It involves the use of software to automate mundane marketing tasks, such as email marketing, social media posting, ad campaigns, etc. It aims to improve the team’s productivity and create more personalized experiences.

In this article, we aim to provide a list of some of the best B2B marketing automation tools available on the market. Prior to that, let us briefly provide a few B2B marketing automation examples to get a clear idea of what exactly it is.

What is B2B Marketing Automation?

B2B marketing automation is the process of automating and streamlining marketing workflows and processes using digital systems in regard to B2B transactions.

Simply put, it involves the use of software or tools to facilitate everyday, repetitive marketing tasks rather than spending time, money, and effort to perform them manually.

These tools or software allow B2B organizations to invest more time in planning strategies that bring more value to their business. They help them:

• Implement a digital marketing strategy tailored to their unique selling needs.
• Scale up and optimize marketing campaigns.
• Generate and nurture leads at a faster pace.
• Increase sales with personalized messages.

Marketing automation offers multiple benefits to B2B businesses. Some of the major ones are:

• Cost-Effective: Though marketing automation tools require an upfront investment, they are cost-effective in the long run. They eliminate the cost required for human labor.
• Efficiency/Speed: Marketing automation platforms streamline various tasks, significantly saving time and effort. They help marketing teams accomplish more tasks in less time, improving their efficiency and productivity.
• Accuracy: Human beings are more prone to errors. As automation tools are pre-trained or programmed for certain tasks, they accomplish them correctly and accurately. The higher the accuracy, the higher the customer engagement rate and satisfaction.

B2B Marketing Automation Examples

Let us walk you through some examples of marketing automation B2B:

• Lead Generation: Leverage lead generation forms to collect data about customers. Use chatbots on a website to communicate with visitors and convert them into leads.
• Email Marketing: Automate email campaigns and nurture your leads by delivering relevant content based on their behavior and preferences. Set up triggered emails, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, subscription renewal emails, new offers or discount emails, etc.
• Social Media Management: Schedule social media posts across different platforms to be persistent in maintaining your online presence and reach out to new customers.
• Webinars and Events: Automate the registration process for webinars and events. Also, set up emails for the remainder, successful registration, post-event survey, etc.
• Lead Segmentation: Categorize leads into groups based on their engagement level and readiness to make a purchase.

5 Best B2B Marketing Automation Tools to Boost Your Marketing Effort

We have created a list of some of the best B2B marketing automation platforms to help you choose the best one according to your marketing needs.

1. Hubspot Marketing Automation Software

Streamline your marketing activities and boost the effectiveness and number of marketing campaigns with Hubspot’s marketing automation software. Automate your marketing activities and let them execute seamlessly without constant manual interventions.

This B2B marketing automation platform helps you reach out to the target audience with personalized messages through email triggers, workflows, and chatbots. In addition, it helps you extract valuable customer insights and improve the marketing strategy.

Key Features:

• Automate email campaigns to generate and nurture more leads.
• Build compelling emails without requiring coding.
• Set up triggers and actions to send emails to the targeted leads at the right time.
• The visual editor helps you easily create workflows in real time.
• Advanced segmentation aids you in enrolling the right contacts in your workflows.
• Use data from Hubspot CRM to create personalized emails.
• Automate lead scoring, follow-ups, notifications, etc.

Pricing:

Hubspot marketing automation software is one of the features of Marketing Hub. The pricing plan for Hubspot Marketing Hub is available for:

Business and Enterprises

• Professional: $800/mo
• Enterprise: $3600/mo

Individuals and Small Teams

• Free
• Starter: $18/mo
• Professional: $800/mo

2. Adobe Marketo Engage

Do you have lukewarm leads and want to make them spicy? Don’t worry! Marketo Engage is your go-to solution. It is a B2C and B2B marketing automation platform aimed at combining marketing and sales, helping both teams strategize together and work as a single team.

Adobe Marketo Engage is among the largest and most comprehensive platforms to attract, segment, and nurture leads. It assists businesses in gaining effective customer engagement without any unqualified leads. It leverages data and artificial intelligence to streamline marketing tasks and workflows.

Key Features:

• AI helps build and segment customers based on firmographics, demographics, and behavior across different channels.
• Integrated forms enable you to personalize your web pages, emails, SMS, social media, advertising, and events across multiple marketing channels.
• You can launch a campaign automatically and respond with a personalized message to customers as soon as they fill in a form, visit a website, etc.
• Your sales team can easily create intelligent scoring and qualification models across all programs to streamline the lead-to-revenue process.
• Determine which channel or program drove the maximum return by measuring the revenue performance through channels or programs.

Pricing:

Contact the team for pricing.

3. Keap Marketing Automation Software

Keap is a sales and marketing automation platform that performs daily sales and marketing activities automatically. Whether distributing social media posts or sending email drip campaigns, welcome messages or thank you messages, Keap is here to help you.

This platform lets you use preset easy automation or create custom processes to automate the following tasks:

• Send messages and follow-ups to potential audiences.
• Schedule reminders for clients’ booked appointments.
• Automate your sales pipeline.
• Send invoice reminders and thank you emails.
• Close leads.
• Customer relations.
• And much more.

Features:

• Easily capture leads’ information, like behavior, preferences, and likeliness to buy.
• Convert more leads with automated follow-ups.
• Keap’s Zapier integration lets you connect to over 4000 apps and tools to trigger automations.
• The Advanced Automations builder helps you create or customize your sales and marketing processes. With this, you can create advanced nurture sequences, personalization response triggers, and more for predictable growth.

Pricing:

Keap offers three different pricing plans. Subscribe to any of them after a 14-day free trial ends.

• Pro: $159 /mo (for smaller teams)
• Max: $229 /mo (for growing teams)
• Ultimate: $279 /mo (for large teams)

4. ActiveCampaign

Looking for a comprehensive solution to help you create incredible digital experiences for your customers? Try using ActiveCampaign, a unified platform for email marketing, marketing automation, and customer relationship management.

The CEO of ActiveCampaign says, “Smarter automation leads to better experiences.”

With ActiveCampaign, you can connect to every channel you use for your business to interact with customers. By extracting data from email marketing, website, social media, and digital advertising, you can use automation to segment customers, send personalized emails, and schedule marketing campaigns.

Features:

• Integrate with your content management system (CMS), track visitor actions on your website, and follow up with triggered messages.
• Use custom forms and landing pages to collect email addresses, categorize your customers, and trigger automations.
• If you use any other marketing automation tool, you can easily migrate your automations, email templates, sign-up forms, and contacts to ActiveCampign.
• Track analytics to determine what is working and what’s not working for your business.
• Determine which marketing campaigns drive more results.
• A/B test your automations to find the ones that drive more engagement.
• Automate nurturing leads.

Pricing:

ActiveCampaign’s Marketing platform is available in four different plans:

• Lite: $29/mo
• Plus: $49/mo
• Professional: $149/mo
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

5. Zoho Marketing Automation

This B2B marketing automation platform goes beyond automating repetitive marketing tasks. It bridges the gap between marketing and sales and helps you reach out to high-quality leads and harmonize their engagements.

Whether it is lead nurturing, lead generation, lead qualification, web analytics, or behavorial marketing, you can opt for Zoho marketing automation for a hassle-free experience.

Features:

• Automate generating leads using sign-up forms, landing pages, and pop-ups.
• Pull in leads from Zoho CRM and other services through integrations.
• Develop a strong connection with leads by sending them relevant content at each step of the marketing funnel.
• Understand your leads, gain insights into their interests, and offer them the best experience possible.
• Set up lead stages to evaluate and classify potential customers based on their engagement.
• Score leads according to various criteria.
• Dashboards and reports provide insights into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
• Automate multichannel marketing by choosing from a wide range of platforms, including social media, email, etc.

Pricing:

Zoho offers a 14-day free trial. Later, you can subscribe to any of the following pricing plans:

• Standard
• Professional
• Enterprise

The price for these plans varies based on the number of contacts you want to manage. First, select the number of contacts, and the tool will automatically provide the price.

How to Choose the Best B2B Marketing Automation Platform?

While there are a plethora of options available out there, it can be overwhelming to choose the right B2B marketing automation tool. Consider the following major factors while choosing the platform for your B2B business:

• User Interface: The user interface should be intuitive, i.e., the entire team must be able to navigate through the platform and understand workflows effortlessly.
• Features & Integrations: Each platform has unique features that automate certain aspects of marketing. While choosing your tool, ensure it offers the features you seek. Also, it must integrate with your other marketing tools and the CRM system.
• Customer Support: The tools must offer round-the-clock customer assistance so that you can continue your work seamlessly.
• Setup & Onboarding: The tool must be easy to install and set up. Check whether there is any cost associated with onboarding.

Conclusion

This was all about B2B marketing automation and some handpicked platforms to level up your B2B game. The above tools help you implement marketing automation in your B2B organization and significantly save team time, improve productivity, generate more leads in less time, and nurture prospective leads.

Are you ready to embark on the journey of marketing automation for your B2B business? It is important to note that a specific tool may do wonders for others but may not work for you. So, determine your marketing needs and consider the above factors while choosing the marketing automation platform.