How Marketing Automation Improves Every Moment in the B2B Lifecycle

Marketing automation software is not just for building awareness and generating leads. It is effective across the customer lifecycle, creating a scalable system that provides your prospects with a consistently high-quality and engaging customer experience. It is a critical component for accelerating your buyer’s journey, transforming it from a linear funnel into a feedback loop or flywheel.

An effective automation strategy is customer-focused and seeks to build relationships. It helps us to learn more about our audience so we can meet them where they are and provide information that applies to their needs. Doing so reduces friction for the buyer, builds mutually beneficial relationships, delights customers, and turns them into brand advocates.

This builds momentum and draws more people into your brand’s sphere of influence. The result is that your marketing efforts become easier and more efficient. However, to do this, you need to understand the buyer's journey, the jobs your customers need to do, and how marketing automation can help.

Marketing Automation for Customer Reach

This phase (also commonly called ‘awareness’ or ‘discovery’) is where a customer begins a relationship with your brand. 

At this point, customers are searching for solutions to a problem or business challenge they have identified. They need define the issue fully and understand their options for solving it.

From a business perspective, your key objectives are to build awareness of your brand and offerings among your target audience. You want to be visible wherever a prospect looks online when researching solutions.

Marketing automation tools can help you to achieve your goals at this stage of the customer lifecycle in various ways:

• Targeting — Use conversion tracking and integrated CRM data to generate lookalike audiences to target for prospecting.

• Content distribution — Implement automated social media and email marketing campaigns to deliver content tailored to the awareness stage of the customer journey (e.g. outlining the problem, proposing solutions).

• Remarketing — After the initial point of contact, use follow-up ads focused on brand awareness to keep bringing people back to your website. This allows you to continue to communicate with them and build rapport.

Marketing Automation for Customer Acquisition

Once a customer seeks more detailed information about your organisation, they have officially entered the acquisition stage. At this point, prospects are evaluating solution providers. They need to educate themselves on the range of options available to them so they can narrow the field and make a purchasing decision.

As a B2B marketer, your focus during the acquisition phase is lead generation. Think of this like panning for gold. You want to encourage interaction so you can filter out prospects who aren’t yet ready. This means you can concentrate your resources on potential buyers who, with a little personal cultivation, are more likely to become customers.

At this stage, marketing automation tools can help you identify and nurture your most valuable prospects.

• Dynamic personalisation — Automatically generate highly targeted landing pages and emails based on the information you have gathered about the prospect.

• Progressive profiling - Use dynamic fields on lead capture forms to find out more about your prospects so you can communicate with them more effectively.

• Behavioural tracking — Track your interactions across channels (email, social, website interactions) to get to know prospects’ needs.

• Email marketing — Trigger welcome sequences for new subscribers. Point people at this stage towards detailed resources about your product, tailored to their entry point and the information you know about them.

• Lead scoring — The data you gather on your leads allows you to track and score their buying signals. Once someone has reached your lead qualification threshold, you can prompt them to book a call and notify your team to follow up.

• Reengagement campaigns — Use email to follow up with targeted marketing messages automatically when prospects have gone off the boil.

• Remarketing — Target engaged audiences with ads focused on lead generation and product awareness.

Marketing Automation for Better Conversion

This is when your potential customer has decided who they want as their supplier (hopefully you!). Before signing on the dotted line they might need last-minute answers to questions or technical details that might prove to be deal-breakers. They’ll be hyper-aware of your responsiveness and levels of service. They will also want to book demos and contact sales teams at their convenience and be able to make purchases easily.

Your aim at this stage is to achieve the sale by reducing the friction for your customer and supporting them in finalising their decision. You want to ensure they have all the information they need and are delighted with your user experience.

Even though this is a very hands on stage of the customer lifecycle, marketing automation tools still have a role to play:

• Live chat support options — Integrate smart chatbots into your customer service channels. They can quickly answer FAQs and signpost knowledge base content, or forward more complex questions to support reps.

• Lead scoring — Set up alerts to notify your sales and marketing team for immediate outreach when a prospect's behaviour shows they are hot to buy.

• Remarketing — Use targeted information about your hottest leads and high-value accounts to run ads focused on conversion actions. Focus ads on booking a demo, signing up for a webinar, or making a purchase.

• Ecommerce — Make booking a demo or sales call easy with online booking portals on your website. Likewise, offer self-service purchasing where possible instead of forcing people to go through a sales rep.

• Follow up — Automatically serve helpful cart or form abandonment emails with a strong call to action.

Marketing Automation to Improve Retention

The prospect has officially turned into your customer. Congratulations! But your work does not end there. You need to nurture the relationship, so they continue to choose your brand in the future.

From the buyer’s perspective, they want to feel that they are getting the most out of their investment and that they are a valued partner. They want to feel that you see them as more than a one-off sale and will continue to offer exceptional support.

Your goals here are to retain the customer, get repeat business, increase the size of the account, or cross-sell. However, this needs to be done within the context of building a mutually beneficial relationship. Automation can help:

• Customer engagement — Set up continued engagement campaigns across channels that keep building the relationship. Provide recommendations for useful content and new services based on the customer’s behaviour.

• Email marketing — Make use of automation to trigger new customer email sequences to deliver a personalised onboarding process and cultivate the relationship. Build in the information you gathered about the client throughout their journey for an immersive experience.

• Customer feedback - It is important to set up feedback mechanisms to ensure your customers are getting the information they want and need. Automatically email customers inviting them to leave a review or provide feedback about your product, service, or support channel. Use email to update them when you’ve listened and created new resources of services based on their feedback.

• Re-engagement campaigns — Automatically reach out to customers when you’ve not heard from them in a while. For instance, notify them about relevant product updates or invite them to take part in your community.

Marketing Automation to Build Loyalty and Advocacy

The last and ongoing step you need to take is to work to turn your customers into brand advocates who amplify your marketing.

When they feel vindicated in their decision to buy from you, customers want to be rewarded for their loyalty and let other people know about their smart choices. It motivates your customers to get more people involved when that creates additional benefits for them. Think about creating opportunities for community building, shared learning experiences and emphasise the ease of working together using the same tools.

The business goals of the loyalty/advocacy stage are to encourage clients to recommend your organisation. Help them become immersed in your brand experience and encourage them to spread the word about your great services to a wider audience.

How marketing automation tools can help:

• Referral campaigns — Use satisfaction scores and client data to identify and connect with loyal customers who are likely to generate referral business.

• Content distribution — Create content for your post-purchase support communities, hosted on your own self-serve platform or social media. Segment your client based and target tutorials designed to help your customers make the most of their investment.

• Customer engagement - Use email sequences and scheduled social media campaigns to encourage user-generated content and community building.

The Power of B2B Marketing Automation

Using approaches like these allows you to automate much of the customer journey so you can scale your efforts. However, it is important to note that automation is not about losing the personal touch.

While self-service is sometimes the best form of customer service, do it to elevate the relationship, not abandon it. There should always be a simple way to reach an actual person at your company who can help when people need it.

However, when you automate processes to cover the basics, it gives you the chance to go deeper and develop more complex, valuable solutions for your clients. You’re not only able to do this because you have the time. Automation also helps you to inform and educate. This creates a customer who has the knowledge and skills in place to work with you and your products at a deeper level.

Using automation throughout the customer lifecycle can empower your customers and liberate your relationship managers to create more valuable partnerships. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch.