How to Build the Perfect B2B Marketing Automation Strategy

B2B businesses can benefit as much from automation as any B2C company, and sometimes more so. Automation will streamline and simplify your digital marketing campaigns in areas like social media, lead scoring, email, and lead generation.

You can grow your business with automation by erasing many of the time-consuming tasks your staff busied themselves with.

Before you begin, you must have a B2B marketing automation strategy. Some businesses might find it efficient to embrace several strategies.

Learn the best B2B marketing automation strategies and how to use them to make your business successful in this blog post.

Table of Contents

What Is a B2B Marketing Automation Strategy?

A B2B marketing automation strategy helps businesses streamline their marketing efforts affordably. Often, marketing automation helps businesses scale faster by automating repetitive tasks. In the following sections, we’ll show you how.

9 B2B Marketing Automation Strategies Your Growing Business Needs

Check out these nine B2B marketing automation strategies and best practices to amplify your business growth:

Trigger marketing
Self-nurturing content
Automatic alerts
Chatbots
Personalization
Automated emails
Social media marketing
Lead scoring
Lead management

1. Trigger marketing

When a lead or a potential customer performs an action, such as opening an email, interacting with your chatbot, or viewing a page on your website, that’s a trigger.

Trigger marketing is how your business responds to those triggers.

The primary benefit of this marketing form is timeliness. By reacting to a lead’s behavior as soon as they do it, you can continue them through the sales funnel before they become disengaged.

However, when you think of it, trigger marketing might be one of the most complex types. There are many potential scenarios to plan for. For example, a lead could open an email and click through…but what if they don’t?

B2B marketing automation rids your mind of all those torturous what-ifs.

Creating a trigger email marketing strategy within EngageBay couldn’t be simpler.

Here are the triggers you can select from:

Outgoing calls for any calls your company makes
Incoming calls from leads or customers
Webpage visits for specific pages on your website
Updated contact fields
Order purchases
Abandoned carts
Creation of a new contact
Change in lead score
Note description update by a member of the sales or marketing teams
Double opt-ins through landing pages or pop-up or in-line forms
Opening an email
Clicking a link in an email
Adding a tag to a contact
Removing a tag from a contact
Joining a specified sequence
Subscribing via pop-up
Subscribing via form

Select the trigger and the accompanying action using EngageBay’s simple drag-and-drop automation workflow builder to set everything into place.

2. Self-nurturing content

B2B purchases are investments, and any business wants to protect its investments.

That’s why self-guided research is the norm among B2B businesses. They want to understand what their money will get them, so they’ll pore over your product specs and service features before moving through the sales funnel.

Self-nurturing content is especially valuable, affording a B2B lead the resources they seek to understand your B2B company, what it sells, and your industry as a whole (especially if this is their first time purchasing from your industry).

Knowledge bases, help pages, and resources at the bottom of blog posts are stellar examples of self-guided content, making them a great B2B marketing strategy.

For instance, EngageBay has a detailed knowledge base full of dozens of articles, tutorials, and how-tos that answer our audience’s most common questions. Clicking any blog posts on our website will link you to relevant content and resources to further your reading.

You can rely on automation to recommend content to your prospective B2B customer, guiding them through the rabbit hole of knowledge until they feel confident proceeding with their purchase.

3. Automatic alerts

In the same vein, triggers are automatic alerts. However, alerts don’t solely apply when a lead or customer completes an action. They’re internal and external, allowing you to monitor what your sales and marketing teams are doing.

EngageBay’s push notifications appear on your website, and you can automate them as part of your B2B strategy for free.

That’s right, this is one of many automation services EngageBay provides at no extra charge. Using automatic alerts can elevate retention, increase website traffic, convert more leads, improve your holistic experience, and boost audience engagement.

4. Chatbots

Artificial intelligence has paved the way for smarter, more fulfilling chatbot experiences. It used to be that chatbots only acted as a bridge between the customer and customer service rep, but now they’re like reps all their own.

They can answer questions, provide resources, and share information leads and customers need. Better yet, they can do this anytime, whether in the middle of the night, after hours on a weekday, on a holiday, or during the weekend.

As your B2B business grows, you will have more global customers with mismatched time zones or those who might not acknowledge the same holidays as you. A chatbot allows your customer support team to work seamlessly even when no one is in the office.

Chatbots rely on natural language understanding, pattern matching through Artificial Intelligence Markup Language or AIML, and natural language processing, including dependency parsing, named entity recognition, normalization, sentiment analysis, and tokenization.

Enabling your chatbot is quick and efficient with EngageBay. This free live chat software uses trigger-based automation to message your audience proactively.

In EngageBay’s software, navigate to the left drop-down menu and choose the Live Chat module.

Next, click Bots, then the Create Bot button. Name your bot and choose the associated website URL, such as your company homepage.

You can alter the replies and dialogue, using AI-fed language to teach the chatbot how to respond according to common words and phrases searchers use.

5. Personalization

According to 2023 data from career resource Zippia, up to 80% of consumers purchase from brands that personalize their experience. The data doesn’t differentiate between B2B and B2C consumers, which makes it clear that all customers appreciate personalization.

Personalizing your marketing campaigns is easy with EngageBay. Within the Marketing Bay, select your contacts, then create filters for segmentation. Pick as many filters as you wish to create niche groups.

EngageBay’s B2B marketing automation tool will apply those segmentation filters moving forward as your contacts grow, and you can easily change or modify the segmentation parameters anytime. You can even create custom groups!

Automate your email design using pre-built templates personalized and customized to your audience’s interests and buyer persona.

If you’d rather create your own email templates, that’s doable within EngageBay. Go to the Marketing dashboard and select Templates, then Email Templates.

Next, click the Custom or Create New button, with the former being the right option for building a custom email template.

You’re not left on your own when making custom templates with EngageBay. Use pre-built blocks to position everything into place. Edit any block by selecting the Pencil icon, then change the color, size, or font. Save when you’re finished.

Now, add some personalization to the email content by accessing the Campaigns tab within the Marketing Bay dashboard.

Next, select Email Broadcasts or Sequences, then the Create New Broadcasts/New Sequence option.

This will create a new page with personalization options in a drop-down, such as website URL, phone number, and first name.

Personalize this content, then preview it. When you’re pleased, press Save.

6. Automated emails

Email automation is one of the most valuable B2B marketing automation strategies.

How much time do you spend hitting the send button to stay on top of messages and replies that must go out to your ever-growing audience? It’s too much after a while, requiring more time and manpower than you have available.

You’ve built your digital marketing campaign emails using automation, so why not send them automatically?

EngageBay’s drag-and-drop workflow builder is one of the simplest on the market. It has such a small learning curve your business can have your email automation workflows up and running the same day you start using EngageBay.

Choose which emails your audience segments receive based on whether they respond to your initial email or if you must follow up again, and then continue building from there.

Although email automation workflows can get rather complex, the branching structure of EngageBay’s automated workflow makes it easy to manage from start to finish. You can also count on EngageBay’s email marketing automation tool to schedule emails.

While building your email within EngageBay, navigate to the Confirmation tab. Click the option marked Proceed to Send/Schedule.

Choose Schedule Later, select a date and time for the email to go out, and then confirm with the Schedule button.

7. Social media marketing

With almost five billion global social media users in 2023, you can expect your B2B audience will surely use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Your business must have a strong presence to engage with your current audience and grow your leads. However, with social media becoming such a pertinent part of our daily lives, the struggle is real for businesses to keep up with the growing demand to be chronically online.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for businesses if social media was all they had to contend with, but between email marketing, content marketing, product and service development and testing, advertising, lead gen, and customer retention, social media marketing can sometimes get left by the wayside.

Marketing automation has changed how B2B businesses post and interact on social media. A growing subset of marketing automation tools can write social media posts through the power of AI. You can also schedule social media posts using marketing software like EngageBay and its Social Suite.

Build your most compelling, viral social media posts yet through the Social Suite, finessing them to perfection. When you’re pleased, navigate to the Social Media Scheduler to decide when your posts will go live.

You can access the Social Media Scheduler by navigating to the Marketing Dashboard, then Social Suite.

Pick Scheduler in the drop-down menu, then Queues. Build your post and select Add to Queue, choosing the date and time for your social posts to go live.

8. Lead scoring

Scoring leads is an important qualification, as the practice determines the leads likeliest to convert. Manually scoring leads takes far too much time.

Win back those hours with lead scoring through a B2B marketing automation platform. EngageBay’s innovative leading scoring software includes predictive scoring.

Predictive lead scoring uses current and past data to determine lead viability. Leads receive a positive or negative score based on actions like unsubscribing to your email list or adding a product to their cart.

Machine learning helps EngageBay’s algorithms score your leads instantly so you can prioritize the most qualified.

9. Lead management

A B2B marketing automation software is a valuable tool for lead management. You can build reliable lead gen strategies and maintain your current leads, guiding them toward conversion.

EngageBay’s lead management software doesn’t cost a cent to integrate into your current marketing stack. You’ll save time by automating your outreach and incorporating more personalization that leads respond to.

For instance, you can automate lead distribution within EngageBay. You set the conditions according to parameters like a lead priority (based on behaviors like whether they open or respond to emails), location, time zone, or industry. EngageBay’s software will assign the leads without your intervention.

Lead management automation works especially well with lead scoring. This way, your company can create an effective B2B lead funnel where only the most qualified leads reach your B2B marketers and sales reps.

The rich customer data within EngageBay assists your business in mapping out and defining your sales funnel to increase conversions.

Bottom Line

B2B marketing campaigns must have automation, especially as your business scales and your current solutions take longer than you reasonably have.

Marketing automation software can achieve many everyday business tasks, including lead gen, email marketing, personalization, lead scoring, social media marketing, lead management, chatbots, automated alerts, and trigger marketing.

EngageBay is a premier all-in-one software for salespeople, digital marketers, and customer service reps. Many tools within the software are free and can make a substantial difference in how your business interacts with and sells to B2B clients.