From Complex to Concise: The Shifting B2B Marketing Automation Tools
Chatbots. Automated emails. Social media comments. There are so many ways marketers can use automation to reduce the burden on their time and increase the effectiveness of their resource management.
However, if you have to spend hours configuring every detail of your automation tools prior to seeing any success, that feels like an automation fail. Thankfully, marketing automation tools are becoming more intuitive and user friendly — while packing in more features that matter to modern B2B marketers.
Why Marketing Automation Matters
You can’t do everything yourself. As your tech startup grows, you may hire more marketers and onboard a fractional executive to help guide your growth strategy. But even with an expanded team, it’s impossible to manage every single client interaction manually. If you try, you’ll inevitably make mistakes that can cause damage to your brand reputation.
B2B marketing automation tools help you:
Respond to leads in a timely manner
Achieve a consistent brand voice
Follow up on inquiries, abandoned carts, and other aspects of lead/client interaction
Notify team members when marketing tasks are due
The marketing automation market is set to rise to a value of $8 billion in 2024, with providers leveraging emerging technologies like AI to make tools more user-friendly.
The Ultimate Automation Goal: Intuitive, Innovative, and Unified
The most common uses for marketing automation are emails, social media, and advertising. However, automation also helps marketers track campaigns, manage content marketing strategies, and engage with clients in real-time.
Marketing automation tools that work across various platforms are becoming more necessary as B2B startups focus on omnichannel marketing strategies. Expect to see more automation platforms unifying various offerings via intuitive interfaces that take the headache out of setting automation workflows up.
Providers Delivering the Goods
ClickFunnels is a new platform aimed at businesses frustrated by a lack of online engagement. Their sales video points out that with 250,000 websites being created every day, marketers have to find ways that genuinely cut through the noise. The ClickFunnels platform helps users create digital funnels that prompt buyers from multiple channels through their sales journey, avoiding client/customer overwhelm and reducing the chances for leads to click away. The platform can also integrate with CRM data, shipping, email, and a number of other related marketing resources.
Other platforms that continue to attract new business include HubSpot, Mail Chimp, and Active Campaign. Each has a different focus while offering multiple features, so ensure that whatever platform you commit to aligns with your business and marketing goals.
Final Word
As automation tools evolve, expect more hyper-personalization, AI-powered insights, and increasingly human-sounding chatbots. The ability of tools to adopt your brand voice and messaging and weave it throughout AI-generated responses helps you stay on-brand even when you’re out of the office. For more ways to leverage technology for data-driven marketing, book a 15-minute discovery call with Arch Collective, and let’s find out more about how we can help your startup grow.
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