Marketing Automation Strategies for B2B SaaS Marketing Leaders

B2B SAAS marketing comes with a unique set of challenges. On one side, there are more chances of repeat sales and upselling. On the other hand, there are limited buyers in the market.

To help CMOs and their teams, Marketing Automation solutions like Marketo and Salesforce Pardot have come up with a variety of user-friendly features to drive automation strategy. Given below are some marketing automation strategies which can be detrimental to the successful execution of your marketing campaigns.

?1. Defining marketing process aligned with available resources: Each organization has a set of resources and objectives. It’s a thin line to walk on where you need to do the right things at the right time and the right place under the limited resources. The strategy should be to make sure that they bring out the best of the available resources using Marketing automation solutions. Resource allocation is not just referred to as human resources here, but it also includes marketing budget and available technology. For example; if we do not have video production capabilities then we need to either hire them or we should not include videos as a part of the overall marketing plan. Each marketing cycle should bring improvement to the revenue engine consistently.

?2. Focus on the objective rather than the technology: Many B2B SAAS companies focus too much on automation solutions rather than understanding the real objectives behind bringing the automation into the marketing function. The successful ones do not divert from the objectives of improving lead stages, maximizing lead scoring, and effective lead nurturing. It doesn’t matter if you are buying an automation tool from an established brand or a newcomer. What matters is how it is improving your marketing function each day.

?3. Focus on saving time for the marketing team: Our main objective to have marketing automation should be to minimize the turnover rate and time of our marketing teams. This can be achieved by eliminating manual tasks and empowering the team by giving them access to simplified automated tools and dashboards. If this is implemented properly, marketing teams will be able to focus more on critical tasks without sweating on small things.

?4. Play with tags to devise a campaign: Leveraging tags to structure our programs can lead to ultimate success in marketing automation. These tags are available in many automation tools and allow the marketers to design the programs based on a tagging system that includes geography, product/solution area, offer type (blog, case study, datasheet, etc.), and objective (acquisition, awareness, cross-sell, etc.).

?5. Use webinars to cut the clutter: There are so many B2B SAAS companies working over their fortune in the market and it gets very difficult to stand tall in the open market. For your brand, it is very important to use webinars to cut the clutter and attract potential leads frequently. A scalable and repeatable webinar process gives you an out-of-the-box solution to frequently hit your leads with great content and make it easy for your audience to subscribe to the series or a single event. Marketo is the automation solution that integrates webinars as a tool successfully and gives an edge to the marketing campaign.

?6. Testing for success: A/B testing is the most important strategy you can implement seamlessly through a marketing automation tool. A/B testing allows the marketer to run various campaigns at the same time and can find out their effectiveness in real-time. Testing helps you fine-tune your emailers, social media posts and can get back with a detailed analysis of what parameters have performed well in a series of campaigns. The best-performing practices can be blended to bring the best out of the campaign for your brand quickly.

?7. Upsell using Lead Scores: Lead a score is an approach in marketing automation where you assign a value to your lead based on every interaction you had with them and ultimately weighing your lead with these scores to find out the expected value of the deal. In B2B SAAS marketing, deal size matters since there are limited numbers of players in the market. However, organizations can achieve more value per deal if they put the lead score mechanism in place properly. They can win negotiations using lead scores which will ultimately increase the average deal size significantly.

8. Assigning intelligence to lead nurturing: Each raw lead carries a significant economic value. To extract maximum value from a lead, B2B SAAS marketers invest in advocating their product through lead magnets. This process is known as lead nurturing and can be optimized using marketing automation. By setting up triggers on specific actions, marketing automation tools help the sales team convince the lead for the subscription. A well-researched and structured lead nurturing process helps in two ways. It can increase the lead conversion rate significantly and can push the lead faster towards the subscription in the lead funnel.

?9. Use different message streams: Lead nurturing strategy works well with marketing automation. But it also needs a holistic approach by utilizing various content marketing tools like webinars, user manuals, case studies, white papers, videos, fact sheets, datasheets, etc. Videos are the hottest tool in the market right now and many marketing automation tools have built video integration capabilities. This strategy works every time because leads typically have their own choice of content types and if served properly, subscriptions are just a few blocks away.

?10.?Track ROI to raise the bar: Return on Investment (ROI) is an important matrix that gives insight into the effectiveness of the marketing campaign. If our ROI on investments is not satisfactory, we may need to revisit the board to redraw a strategy. It is the most important matrix to assess the progress of the campaigns and can help improve output consistently. Marketing automation tools give access to dashboards that give real-time information regarding the ROI matrix.

?11.?Create a persona-based customer engagement process: Marketing automation tools allow the marketers to get a deep insight into the leads. This includes their behavioral aspects, preferences, where they come from, and their socio-economic indicators. Modern-day marketers understand the preferences of their leads and meet them in a like-minded manner. This helps in increasing the overall conversation rates significantly.

?12.?Ensuring data hygiene and consistency: Our leads originate from various sources like paid, organic, and direct campaigns. However, it is important to maintain data hygiene by eliminating data duplication and data redundancy. If data hygiene is not maintained, we may face leakages in our lead funnel. Data hygiene and data consistency are also important to achieve maximum output from lead nurturing.

?13.?Understanding funnel value and reporting- It’s important to Make sure you have the right setup for full-funnel reporting and focus on what delivers the maximum value. Understanding the economic value of the leads at each level of the funnel is very important and its reporting is equally critical for the senior marketing team. At each funnel level, the lead nurture strategy changes according to the economic value. Hence marketers need to treat leads differently at different levels by keeping a tab on funnel dynamics.

?14.?Get more insight using Data visualization and Dashboard tools: Marketo comes with a perfect tool for the marketing team for data visualization. B2B SAAS marketing is a complex process since it has many strings attached to it. Data visualization helps in quickly understanding the trends. This paves the way for quick course correction and preventive measures at scale if required.??

These strategies can be helpful for any CMO while designing their marketing automation strategies. However, one must also remember that over-engineering also leads to less control over things. Hence, a CMO should thoroughly research their business objectives, challenges, and bottlenecks while devising a marketing automation strategy.?