Short Summary
Digital marketing automation is a smart method of automating business processes and workflows to achieve better results. Learn how to grow your B2B business with a few automation tools of the trade.
Introduction
The digital marketing environment has seen massive growth in the past few years. Thanks to technology, marketers can keep up with the challenge and are adapting to the new modalities of modern marketing. With the use of marketing automation tools for B2B businesses, marketing campaigns and sales activities are improved, allowing business owners to maximize efficiency while increasing revenue.
The most modest definition of automation is that it streamlines and simplifies some of the processes involved in running a business. The truth, however, is that it does a lot of wonders in the modern marketing industry. It is a catalyst to make businesses grow.
If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the perfect time to learn how to grow your B2B business with the help of marketing automation.
What Can You Automate In Your Business?
No matter how small or big a business is, you need to learn how to be productive to succeed. You need money to grow your business, but other resources are essential, like time and effort. If you have exhausted all of your monetary resources to put up your business, you must learn how to maximize what little time and effort you have to make it big. Marketing automation can help you out in realizing this.
Using marketing automation tools for B2B businesses makes it possible to perform more work even with limited resources. To be more specific, here are the following areas that you can automate to be successful in your quest on how to grow your small business:
1. Project Management
With a way to automate the different business processes, you are able to improve the efficiency of your team for project management. You can easily work on general business functions, like making sound marketing decisions based on data-backed insights. You can also minimize inefficiencies, errors, and compliance errors by standardizing workflows.
2. Finance
You need to be smart with your approach when working on the financial aspects of your business. It is crucial to get accurate data between reports to reduce errors. While it is possible to do everything manually, you also increase the risk of committing mistakes. This can be remedied by using automation tools to do repetitive tasks, like invoicing or printing shipment receipts.
3. Customer Service
Creating a good impression is important when you are running a B2B business. With automation, you rest assured that customer engagement is improved with the best marketing strategies. Even with little to no human support, queries are answered using chatbots. This allows you to reserve your team’s time and energy for more complex problems.
4. Marketing
Marketing takes most of the bulk of your business, especially if you are new in the business. There are simply too many tasks to do, strategies to start, and campaigns to launch. By automating the different processes, you can attend to every marketing need and expect the best results out of your efforts. Marketing attribution, for example, is an essential part of any marketing campaign. It is only by automation that you can do the activities involved in attribution, like data gathering and analysis, without sacrificing other important tasks.
How to Grow Your Business With Marketing Automation
1. Content Marketing
One of the main challenges of marketing when you have a B2B business is the lack of content to work with. The audience is hungry for information and you need to feed this hunger to be relevant. Keeping them informed about your product is the reason why you need to do content marketing. It is a must to keep them posted about new products, promotions, or other relevant stuff about your brand.
a. Renderforest
Since you need to create content to grow your business, you have to do it like a pro. Renderforest is a design tool that lets you create graphics, animations, videos, mockups, and presentations for your marketing campaigns. With it, you can create amazing promotional videos to introduce your products. You can also make tutorials about how to use products properly. It is also great as a website creation tool so you can design a website following SEO protocols.
b. Vloggi
Video content is more interesting than plain text. But if you are a B2B business, producing high-quality videos can be a bit challenging. Vloggi is one of the solutions to this challenge. With Vloggi, you can collect videos from the audience and create a library of user-generated videos that you can reuse with their consent. It is an innovative way to encourage customers to share their experiences with your brand. You may also use it to do market research about what is trending and not in your industry.
c. AI-Writer
It is easy to get lost in a sea of competition, especially when you are just starting. The pressure to create plenty of marketing materials is high because you need to saturate the audience with your brand. If you are loaded with work, you can lighten the burden by using AI Writer to generate accurate and unique content. You only need a headline and it automatically creates quality content that you can post right away. By increasing efficiency in content generation, you can save time and spend more of your hours improving other aspects of your business.
2. Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing is a tried and tested strategy that always works to your advantage. It is an innovative method of following up leads with promotions and more information about your products and services. The problem with this strategy, however, is that you need to be very careful with what you send. Promotional emails can easily be mistaken as spam and you do not want that if you want to reach out to your leads.
a. Bigmailer
BigMailer.io is the perfect email marketing solution for digital marketing agencies that manage multiple brands and emails in one place. With BigMailer.io, you have access to an easy-to-use platform with smart workflows, exceptional ROI, and powerful features like A/B testing, triggers and automated workflows to make your email marketing campaigns more effective.
The platform makes it easy to create and manage beautiful, professional emails that your customers are sure to enjoy. You can quickly customize the design of your emails with the drag and drop editor, add stunning visuals such as images and videos, and personalize content for each customer segment.
b. SendInBlue
More than an email marketing management tool, SendInBlue provides the best support to grow your small business into a stable and lasting venture. It is an all-in-one marketing platform to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships. Create beautifully-designed emails and send them at the right time using the Sent Time Optimization feature. this ensures that all emails that you send get noticed and will be acted upon by the receiver.
c. Apollo.io
One of the best tools to use when you are launching an email marketing campaign is Apollo.io. What it does is provide you with qualified leads to communicate with. It takes away the stress of lead generation and lets you go straight away to communicating with those leads. It has a search optimization feature so you get to have leads that align with your target demographics.
3. Instant Image Processing or Design Templates
When you are going to delve into digital marketing, you have to expect that you will be dealing with plenty of images. Photos are great to use in marketing campaigns because they can add a layer of aesthetic quality that no other graphics can. With photos, however, you need to make a lot of processing to prepare them for design use. These tools are great if you find the need to do photo editing or use photos for a design but do not want to pay heaps for it.
a. Removal.AI
When it comes to image preparation, nothing beats Removal.AI in terms of functionality and affordability. Its primary purpose is for photo background removal but it has plenty of features up its sleeves. Thanks to its simple yet intuitive photo editor, you can remove backgrounds in an instant plus do further enhancements without leaving the tool. Aside from doing photo editing tasks such as cropping, adjusting brightness and contrasts, etc., you can also do something as complex as changing photo backgrounds. You can easily swap the discarded background for a better photo like a pro.
b. Designstripe
Producing illustrations for marketing your small business is not a simple feat. Aside from having to think of inspirations, you also need to have the skills to create illustrations. With DesignStripe, however, creating illustrations from scratch is possible, even with zero design skills. It has a library that is full of free illustrations to find inspiration. You can choose an illustration and simply customize it to fit your design specifications. What is great about it is that you can create branded illustrations fast and easily. You no longer have to worry about thinking what to post next to impress your viewers.
c. Kittl.com
It can be tiresome to create designs from scratch. This is very evident in B2B businesses that usually have a small team working on the creatives. Kittl is a useful tool to create designs for several uses, such as logos, posters, cards, labels, and social media posts. You can choose from the templates library and personalize it to create stunning designs.
d. Flexitive
Not knowing how to grow your B2B business is not an excuse to be incompetent in your marketing skills. You have to work double time especially if you need to launch campaigns on different channels. But adding more time to do marketing is good, it is not a smart way to doing it because it can leave you exhausted to do more important stuff. The best approach is to use automation tools, like Flexitive. This tool is specifically made to automated the creation of different design variations that you will need to do marketing across platforms. It has advanced responsive design technology so your designs look perfect in different channels, sizes, and formats.
4. Social Media Scheduling
Social media is a great platform to grow a small business. Many people are using social media to connect with other people. But social media has evolved into more than a place to connect. It has become a marketing playground for small to medium enterprises because they know that social media is where people at. You just need to make sure that you saturate your profiles with plenty of content to entice followers and keep them abreast of your latest campaigns.
a. Socialbee
Managing social profiles is a lot of work. You need to constantly come up with ideas for new posts and also do the actual posting of content. While the tasks sound easy, they require a lot of time. This can pose a problem for B2B business owners who usually do not have a lot of extra time on their hands to do social media marketing. The solution is a social media management tool like SocialBee. It is an effective tool to create posts and keep a social media calendar. You can schedule ahead of time when certain content is to be posted. It can also be used to publish on different platforms in one go.
b. AgoraPulse
Keeping your social media campaigns organized is one of the keys to making a social media marketing strategy successful. AgoraPulse is a neat tool to manage your socials with its many publishing, monitoring, and team collaboration features. It has a unified social inbox so you can manage all incoming messages, comments, and reviews from your socials in one place. You can use it to discover trends within your industry and also get insightful analytics about your marketing performance.
c. Missinglettr
Missinglettr is the perfect solution for busy marketers looking to maximize their content distribution with minimal effort. It offers intelligent automation, ensuring users have maximum reach and engagement when it comes to promoting their content.
Using Missinglettr’s drip campaigns, marketers can ensure they are consistently reaching their audience with fresh post ideas and relevant content. Not only this, but the automated scheduling makes it easy to create content, save time and resources, and allow you to focus on other areas of your business.
5. Revenue Analytics
Doing revenue analytics is a smart way to connect your marketing to your pipeline and ROI. It is an effective method to know which strategies are working and which ones need o be replaced or improved. The process, however, can be tedious as you have to deal with a huge amount of data. This is why the best approach to doing revenue analytics is by using a marketing attribution tool.
a. Dreamdata
Unlike any other revenue analytics tool, Dreamdata is not complex to work with. It can automatically reveal the revenue-generating performance of all marketing activities in your pipeline and across channels. Aside from allowing you to get a glimpse of every detail in a campaign, it also helps you improve the overall customer journey. This is done through Dreamdata’s powerful features that give you sound insights about the customer experience.
6. Team Productivity
Managing business processes can be difficult, even for small businesses. The challenge is even bigger for B2B business owners because they cannot afford to hire a huge team to do the different processes. This is why productivity tools are a must when you need to increase productivity but only have a handful of employees or a very small team to work with.
a. Text Blaze
If you are looking for ways how to grow your small business but don’t have an idea about where to start, you can try having Text Blaze in your tech stack. It is very useful when you do a lot of communication with customers. Text Blaze is a versatile tool to speed up typing processes, like replying to comments, sending out emails, or when typing out marketing copies. It works by allowing you to create typing templates, called “snippets”. You only need to type the shortcut and the whole text from the saved snippet will substitute the shortcut. What is great about it is that you can share the snippets with other members of the team. They can also edit the snippets so you can improve them together.
Conclusion
Learning about how to grow your B2B business using marketing automation is a small but sure step to getting it right in the modern marketing era. It is a strategy that unlocks a lot of potential. Not only does it make your life easier in the day-to-day business operations but it is what you need to make you aware of your performance in both marketing and sales departments.
By knowing how to automate your small business, you get to make the most out of your investments. You can reach the customers better, improve your products, and reach a broader customer base without spending more money. In fact, with automation, you get to save a lot of money, time, and effort in promoting and managing your small business. In a nutshell, you get to grow your business by implementing this technology.
