What are B2B Marketing Automation Tools?

B2B marketing automation tools allow marketers to automate marketing task, plan, coordinate, and measure marketing campaigns and it’s performance. Specifically, B2B marketing automation tools help in identifying, tracking, and gathering leads. There are B2B marketing automation platforms for every size company from small businesses to large enterprises.

70% of marketers say converting leads is their top priority. (HubSpot, 2017)

Here are some activities where how B2B marketing automation tools help marketers:

• web analytics – gather insight into how your marketing assets are performing
• email marketing – create personalized emails and run A/B tests to improve results and manage email marketing campaigns,
• social media – track your social presence and schedule optimal times to publish your posts
• digital advertising – track results of your paid media campaigns
• search engine optimization (SEO) – Improve your content marketing efforts by optimizing your web content and SEO meta data and improving your positions on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
• content marketing – track and analyze marketing content to get insight into what content resonates best with leads
• lead management – track, score, prioritize, organize, and nurture your leads
• landing pages – Create personalized landing pages to gather more leads
• purchase intent notifications – Set up purchase intent alerts when certain leads or accounts show purchase intent or interest in your marketing content or campaigns

Top B2B marketing automation tools

• HubSpot
• Marketo
• Salesforce Pardot
• Oracle Eloqua
• Responsys

Benefits when using B2B marketing automation tools

• improved marketing effectiveness and efficiency,
• automation of time-consuming and repetitive tasks,
• spend marketing resources towards marketing to qualified prospects,
• ability to measure different marketing channel’s effectiveness,
• improved access to measurable results through data

Challenges when using B2B marketing automation tools

• sales and marketing teams must be committed to adopting new processes and cannot revert back to old practices
• tool onboarding and employee training processes can be time-consuming and complicated
• lack of quality or customized marketing content and campaigns
• tools can be costly to manage and maintain
• easy to create overbearing and messy data

Learn more about marketing automation tools

1. Marketo’s Marketing Automation Definition
2. Pardot’s Marketing Automation Definition