Marketing automation: what is it and what does it mean to your B2B SaaS?

You’ve invested time, energy and money into developing a great product or application and promoted it through your website, but have you invested in utilising the data you’ve collect from your marketing campaigns to engage with your customers at every stage of the buying process?

In recent years B2B SaaS companies have significantly increased their focus on the data that the Internet provides them about their customers.  They have evolved their marketing strategies to include the power of social media, blogging trends, electronic newsletters and content specific advertising, to name a few.  But, how do they achieve this and why are they spending their valuable time and effort on marketing automation?

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation allows companies, of any size, not only to integrate all their online tools, such as email marketing, landing pages, online forms, sales CRM and blog into one single powerful platform, but to also run complex marketing campaigns and connect with their customers in a highly personalised way.  It allows your business to automate individual and tailored communication with your customers without manual intervention thus saving time and money, shortening sales cycles, prioritising leads and optimising marketing campaigns.

How does Marketing Automation work?

A staggering 451% increase in qualified leads has been reported (by The Annuitas Group) through the use of marketing automation to nurture the experience of prospects.

Successful companies transform their data into campaigns that are personally focussed on the individual rather than blasting generic notifications.  In fact, Amazon has been using this winning strategy for many years, however the recent introduction of Marketing Automation systems means that a team of programmers and data miners are now no longer required to achieve these same results.  The automation of targeted marketing and the ability to analyse website visitor data has become available and affordable for even the smallest of businesses.

1. Automated Personalized Email

Let’s look at emails for example, does your company send the same generic email to all of it customers?  Lead nurturing emails and the development of relationships with customers has had proven success with best-in-class companies using it 2 x more often than less successful companies (68% vs 27% according to EmailMonday). These companies focus their marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing them with information and answers they really want, rather than the information they think they want.  Through automated tailoring of emails to clients your company can provide the right information at critical decision points, creating a unique buying experience and contacting them at the moment they are ready to buy. For SaaS companies it is also a great way to help both sales and marketing deliver different content at each stage of the buyers journey, such as sending case studies when customers are in the consideration stage to help them convert, as well as providing an onboarding series for new customers to help retain them.

2. Lead Identification, Analysis and Filtering

What about all the data you have regarding customers or potential customers obtained through your website that we mentioned earlier.  Marketing Automation tools will analyse the vast amounts of data your website receives and transform it in into credible leads converting to sales.  Additionally, that information can be used to engage with your customers based on their online user behaviour, such as where they click and what motivated them to click there.  The system will map every interaction your customer has online with your company, such as visiting a page, completing a form, or downloading a brochure, and engage with them personally at each interaction (also known as a ‘trigger’). These details can be fed into a list of top leads via a point scoring system, and when the lead reaches a certain score it identifies it as ‘hot’ and this is the point where it can be contacted by a member of your sales team.

3. Dynamic Web Content

Additionally, the information about visitors to your website can be automated to seamlessly transform your web landing pages based on the visitors’ interests and attributes.  These tools allow you to build powerful landing pages and dynamic web content, with very little need for programmers or developers and you will not need to modify your existing website!

4. Powerful Reporting Analytics

The analytics dashboard of Marketing Automation systems, goes one step further than Google Analytics in that it shows end-to-end ROI of individual customer accounts, right from when they first visited your website, through each campaign conversion, right up to the final sale, even if it happens weeks or months later, making marketing managers and departments directly accountable for revenue growth. It can project the expected value of the pipeline and the total lifetime of the customer, so you can forecast future performance.

5. Customer Relationship Management

Integrating all your marketing efforts with a CRM system is the driving force behind any Marketing Automation strategy. WIth a CRM you can collect, manage and review all your customer data in one place, and utilise this information to trigger campaigns to send the right information at the right time to the right customer, helping to attract, activate and monitise more customers in a shorter space of time.

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

When considering marketing automation solutions it’s essential to understand the key benefits and what to expect from the tools.  As the growth of social media continues, in parallel, automated targeted marketing continues to evolve, as such the features and tools available in these solutions continue to advance with the scope of progressing far beyond improving productivity by automating repetitive tasks undertaken by a marketing department. It can reap additional benefits some of which include:

• Saves time and staff resources
• Marketing process optimisation
• Increase qualified leads (both SQLs and MQLs)
• Reduce sales cycles
• Improves customer retention and builds relationships
• Improve efficiency, for example you can create multiple campaigns in advance and schedule them for automatic publication
• Maintains consistency – through automation of posts on Facebook, tweets, blogs, etc. all sending the same campaign message
• Improved accountability and demonstrate ROI

As marketing automation continues to mature the competition does as well. Today there are many solutions and companies available to meet your automated marketing needs and a few of the top leaders include Marketo, Hubspot, and Pardot by Salesforce, all of which focus on B2B, but there are also many new systems entering this rapidly expanding market for a more cost-effective price.  Whichever system you use for your SaaS depends on your stage of growth and the goals you want to ascertain, so if you have any questions, just send me a message and I’ll be happy to help point you in the right direction.