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What is Marketing Automation?

Definition, Strategies, and Digital Marketing Tools

Learn More About LinkedIn Accelerate
Illustration of a computer monitor surrounded by several digital marketing tools.

Organizations looking to boost productivity while saving money on overhead costs stand to benefit from leaning on B2B marketing automation tools and strategies.

 

In this guide, we’ll cover what digital marketing automation is and how it saves teams time and money with efficient processes and tools. We’ll also explain best practices and tools to ensure that B2B marketing automation strategies enhance sales performance and revenue growth.

What is marketing automation?

B2B marketing automation combines strategies, workflows, and tools to help busy B2B marketers streamline individual efforts and sales processes while maximizing digital campaign outcomes. For example, marketers can schedule and automate targeted email marketing messages using integrated customer relationship management (CRM) software and other mail delivery tools to nurture and qualify leads throughout the sales funnel.

Marketing automation is a key tool for marketing teams to leverage to decrease some manual and tedious tasks. Those tasks are still incredibly important to ensure smooth communication and data collection of customers, but by using technologies to automate them, marketers are freed up to spend more time on nurturing customer relationships or tweaking strategies to maximize efforts.

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What are the benefits of a marketing automation strategy?

Below are some key benefits and tips of using digital marketing automation tools and strategies.

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Save B2B marketers time and money

By working with sales operations and IT teams to streamline internal workflows, campaign efforts, and sales activities, B2B marketing teams can save time on repetitive tasks. It frees them up to prioritize more important initiatives such as analyzing and optimizing campaigns, saving the team money and maximizing results. Marketing automation systems integrated with CRM tools can streamline cross-departmental efforts, like tracking what communications have been sent to individual sales prospects or existing customers and when.

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Improve and personalize the customer journey

Collecting customer data across digital marketing channels helps teams send targeted campaigns and messaging at the right time, relative to where a target customer is in the sales funnel or buying journey. A well-planned B2B marketing automation process helps to scale targeted, personalized messages to auto-segmented customers across various platforms (e.g., email, text, social, blogs, and digital ads). Additionally, it helps sales organizations nurture prospects into marketing-qualified leads.

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Boost customer engagement and loyalty

Automatically collect user profile data to help marketers deliver product recommendations on websites and custom blogs or social content. These recommendations can be automatically created and tailored to each customer’s interests. Digital marketing automation can build customer loyalty by consistently providing the best information or resources at the right time. It helps customers get more out of a product or service usage, building positive word of mouth through content sharing and positive reviews and recommendations.

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Different types of marketing automation strategies


Let’s review the different marketing strategies and initiatives that can be automated, along with best practices and tools to consider.

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Email marketing automation strategy

Email marketing automation processes make B2B marketers more productive when nurturing leads that come into the sales funnel via advertising, social media, blog content, website landing pages, email subscriptions, and contact forms. These workflows help to build relationships and loyalty with existing customers while up-selling or cross-selling new products and services.

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Email marketing automation tools and best practices

Customer profiles captured through lead generation campaigns can be auto-segmented based on demographic information shared in a contact form or email subscription sign-up page (e.g., by industry, job title, location, budget, and company size). B2B marketers can then create auto-generated email campaigns for each target audience segment based on this information and their customers’ online behaviors (e.g., when they visit a website pricing page, when they frequently engage with specific content, or if they sign up for a free trial or product demo).

 

Through what is known as drip campaigns, email automation nurtures prospects by sending pre-written, personalized messages throughout the customer journey phases from the awareness to consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.

 

The more a business learns about its customers through online behaviors and engagement with ads, social media, content, and emails, personalized email communications the more it will become easier to make them feel understood and valued.

In addition to CRM software, other email automation software integrations include web analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) for templated copy and graphic generation. Marketers may also use A/B testing software to evaluate different aspects of a campaign’s copy or design. Such tests help determine which emails resonate most with target customer segments and generate the best results.

 

Additionally, deep relationship intelligence tools, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, help B2B marketers learn more about the social media behaviors of LinkedIn users that match their ideal buyer personas. It lets B2B marketers and sales teams personalize and automate unlimited InMail messages as part of the subscription via their LinkedIn profile.

Social media marketing automation strategy

B2B marketers often use social media automation tools to write, schedule, and track non-paid posts, comments, and targeted social media network ads.

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Social media marketing automation tools and best practices

B2B marketers can automate personalized social media ad campaigns at scale using tools like Dynamic Ads to pull in individually populated LinkedIn user profile data like photos, company names, and job titles. This automated advertising strategy allows marketers to customize ads to build brand awareness, drive traffic, and convert more prospects.

 

AI tools are helpful to auto-generate social media posts, ad copy, and creative based on relevant templates and prompts.

 

Social media posts on networks like LinkedIn may be scheduled and automatically sent through free or paid platforms like HootSuite, HubSpot, and Buffer. The same goes for automatically generated and scheduled replies to social media comments on those posts.

 

B2B marketers use account-based marketing (ABM) to target and retarget ads automatically to an uploaded contact or company list of decision-makers at their highest-valued accounts. These ads can be auto-delivered to matched audiences based on a meaningful online brand interaction.

 

With data from a target buyer’s previous interactions with ads, retargeting helps B2B marketers strengthen customer relationships using more specific and relevant social media ad messaging.

B2B marketers can automatically start quality InMail conversations with targeted LinkedIn professionals through a choose-your-own-path conversation ad experience. They’ll drive higher-quality leads into their sales pipeline by using auto-generated qualifying questions within the ad created with easy-to-use templates.

 

Multiple call-to-action (CTA) buttons within the same conversation ad message allow prospects to access the content and offers they want, which could event sign-ups or ebook downloads. Customers can do this using Lead Gen Forms that come pre-filled with accurate LinkedIn profile data. These forms let members put their professional info in with a few clicks, creating a fast and simple lead collection workflow.

 

Again, many of these campaign and social media strategies can be optimized using A/B testing to determine which copy and creative resonates with or converts the most leads and paying customers. Likewise, B2B marketers can integrate their web analytics and CRM tools to capture, analyze, and optimize campaigns based on internal and external customer data profiles and insights.

Content marketing automation strategy

Streamline workflows to share the right content at the right time with valued target customer segments. Content marketing automation is often integrated with email, social media, and digital advertising to boost reach and distribution.

 

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Content marketing automation tools and best practices

The first best practice is to identify content topics and trends, this helps businesses to create or promote specific products tied to certain topics, keywords, or trends for each sales funnel stage. Businesses with a blog or website can look for keywords in Google Analytics to see which ones drive traffic from target customers. B2B marketers can also look at their top trending blog posts in their website analytics software to see what piques their target audience’s interest the most.

 

Keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO) tools such as AHrefs and Moz are helpful at this stage to ensure teams have essential keywords in their content to attract customers. Google Trends is a free tool that shows popular keywords trending online, and this may be helpful for brands to understand where their content can show up in existing search queries.

 

Next, B2B marketers need to create calendars and content creation workflows to regularly craft content and post it online. Popular content creation workflow apps and tools for this stage include Airtable, Asana, BuzzSummo, and Trello. Google Docs is popular for collaborative content writing and editing, and integrates well with those platforms.

 

Many content marketing teams use collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, and Google Meet to stay in contact throughout the process.

Once B2B content marketers post their content on branded blogs, video platforms, or third-party partner and media sites, they are ready to promote it. Social media scheduling and tracking tools mentioned earlier in this guide will be helpful for posting and sharing content.

 

Additionally, consider sponsoring viral content posts on social networks like LinkedIn to maximize reach and engagement with target audiences. Create Native Ads that look like content on partner sites to drive traffic back to a website, blog, or video channel.

 

Use an email marketing automation system to create, schedule, and track campaigns that share relevant content to engage with prospective buyers and existing customers throughout the sales funnel.

 

Other content automation tools to consider include generative AI software, such as Jasper or Chat GPT, to create supporting images, blog or video script outlines, and first drafts. B2B marketers can also use web analytics and A/B testing for tracking and optimizing their top-performing content.

How to track and optimize marketing automation campaigns

Once B2B marketing automation processes, tools, and strategies are set up, marketers often need to track and optimize campaign results to maximize a return on investment. Start by developing key performance indicators (KPIs) to benchmark and measure success.

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Examples of marketing automation KPIs to track include:

Boost sales revenue and/or team productivity by X % annually

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Grow marketing-qualified leads or conversions with digital ads or automated email campaigns by X% each quarter

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Increase year-over-year social media or content engagement and pageviews by X%.

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B2B marketers can track and optimize email and content marketing automation strategy performance using web analytics data from Google Analytics or via deployment tools like Mailchimp or Klaviyo.

They can track social media and digital advertising campaigns using a Campaign Manager tool to measure ROI and optimize results.

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Some automated email, content marketing, digital advertising, and social media campaign metrics to track include:

Conversions

The percentage of people who bought something or completed an action via a social media post, digital ad, email, landing page, or blog interaction.

Engagement

Shares, likes, and comments on social ads, content pages, videos, and social media posts count as engagement.

Pageviews

How many people visited a native ad content page, blog, video, social media company page, or website.

Time spent

This includes the time on a native content page, blog post, website, or watching a video ad.

Bounce rate

How quickly people left a blog, website, or native ad content page after landing on it.

Referrals

Sent to blogs, company pages, web pages, or native ad content pages from other sources (e.g., social media posts, shares, and emails).

Impressions

How many times a digital ad, sponsored or social media post was seen.

Leads generated

This can be from content downloads, email subscriptions, and event sign ups through ads, blogs, emails, social media posts, and landing pages.

Launch a marketing automation strategy with LinkedIn

BB2B marketing automation processes, tools, and strategies help teams maximize results and save money by streamlining repetitive tasks and scaling productivity. This ultimately benefits sales revenue and profitability long-term.

 

LinkedIn offers automated email, social media, and digital advertising solutions that can be integrated with third-party apps and software to optimize campaign results. For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms can be integrated with CRM tools like Salesforce and Microsoft 365 to track and nurture highly qualified leads throughout the sales funnel.

 

B2B marketers can get started with AI-powered advertising campaigns with LinkedIn Accelerate, learn more.

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