8 Steps to More Sales Opportunities with Existing Customers through Marketing Automation
The term “marketing automation” gets tossed around a lot, but what does it look like in action? If you want to grow sales with B2B marketing automation, these 8 steps will bring you the best results:
8 Steps to Use B2B Marketing Automation to Grow Existing Customer Sales Opportunities
1. Choose an effective marketing automation platform. If you already have a marketing automation platform, evaluate it and replace it if doesn’t meet your growth needs.
2. Identify personalized services and trusted contacts within your company that add value to your customers. These are the services and people that will make customers want to keep working with you.
3. Visualize your existing customer’s journey and create core content for each stage.
4. Position your company as a trusted advisor for your customers’ individual business needs. Educate them on your capabilities!
5. Share easy ways for customers to do business with you!
6. Apply best practices to craft the content into the message formats you plan to use. Email and/or text are the most common messaging mediums.
7. Setup dynamic workflows that will send the right personalized messages to the right customers at the right times.
8. Monitor customer engagement and include automated lead scoring to flag and hand over new opportunities to the sales team.
If this sounds like a lot of effort, it is. Once it’s setup, though, B2B marketing automation saves time and effort and delivers excellent ROI.
Key Benefits of Marketing Automation for B2B Companies
Setting up an effective marketing automation process requires resource allocation.
If you’re unsure whether the investment in time and marketing dollars is worth it, consider these unique benefits:
Benefits of B2B marketing automation for customer retention and increased sales revenue:
Catch sales opportunities you would otherwise miss
Build and nurture valuable relationships for customer loyalty
Stay top-of-mind for decision-makers
Increase customer referrals
Boost the effectiveness and alignment of your sales and marketing teams
Still not sure what marketers mean when they talk about marketing automation? Let’s look at the concrete components of the process.
Components of B2B Marketing Automation Processes
By its nature, marketing automation connects components of your marketing efforts and links them together. These connections empower you to learn more about your customers. In turn, this knowledge improves ROI on your marketing.
So, what are the components that go into a marketing automation ecosystem and what purpose do they serve?
Landing pages: Show dynamic content that changes based on viewer identification and built-in tracking
Blogs: Enable RSS emails and monitor customer behavior that shows their interests and priorities
Email marketing: Track website activity after email clicks and provide dynamic email content based on customer behaviors
Visitor ID: Anonymous web visitors are identified and turned into leads
Analytics and testing: Integrated marketing analytics and end-to-end ROI analysis
CRM: Lead scoring and lead activity alerts based on prospect actions and behavior online
Web forms: Auto-complete and profiling
Social media: Reduced time on repetitive tasks and faster response time to comments and messages
What else would you like to know about how to grow sales with B2B marketing automation? Send us your questions! Connect with us on LinkedIn or Tweet us. We’re always happy to talk.
With over two decades of experience, Parin leads an expert demand-generation agency, StratMg, that helps industrial manufacturing clients achieve unambiguous and quantified organic sales growth across the US, EMEA & APAC.
Parin has built & positioned StratMg to be a value-added marketing services provider that strives to create a culture of quantified sales-driven marketing initiatives leading to sustained business growth through channel management, diversification, new customer acquisition and retention strategies and tactical execution.
