More and more B2B companies are creating digital mixes to achieve their marketing and sales objectives. A digital mix can include blogs, social networks, video channels and/or websites. But simply using these platforms isn’t enough. For maximum marketing ROI, you need to have processes in place to help you organize and understand which elements are effective and which are not. Then, via metrics, you can quickly determine which steps should be executed next.

That’s where marketing automation comes in. With such a solution, you can combine all necessary data into one easy-to-manage platform, enabling your marketing team to succeed faster with fewer risks. To illustrate, let’s look at a few ways marketing automation can help with a digital B2B marketing mix:

Campaign Design

Deploying a digital mix can be time-consuming, which in turn can leave you less nimble to react to and account for incoming data. A marketing automation solution can simplify your campaign design process, decreasing the time and resources required for optimal campaign design, through features such as:

  • Sophisticated segments and lists
  • Email integration
  • Integration with CRM systems
  • Landing page optimization and development
  • Integrated analytics

Lead Scoring

Although still growing in adoption, lead scoring has become invaluable in qualifying leads from digital marketing mixes and delivering those leads to sales.

A formalized lead scoring process gives each lead a score which will decide its next path – lead nurturing or on to sales for engagement. But the process of manually scoring leads without an automated system can be a drain on time and resources. To boost productivity and increase responsiveness to “hot” leads, marketers should automate the process of managing and scoring leads.

Marketing automation systems can score leads quickly based on demographics, attributes and behavioral data, either increasing or decreasing the score based on the lead’s recent web activity. Based on these scoring criteria, the lead can either be sent off to sales or kept with marketing for additional nurturing. Be sure to carefully choose which lead criteria are most important to your company — and that sales and marketing agree on those criteria.

E-mail Marketing

Targeted email marketing is a powerful and extremely effective way to connect with prospects and current customers. Through email, marketers can employ various strategies such as discounts, content offers and newsletters to keep audiences informed and able to raise their hand for select offers.

Email marketing becomes even more powerful when integrated into your marketing automation system. In conjunction with marketing automation, you can create email campaigns with simple design interfaces and built-in personalization, send triggered multi-step emails with added tracking capabilities, and have the ability to split test emails.

In this case, split testing, also known as A/B testing, means two different versions of an email – for example, one may have a different subject line or call to action than the other. This type of testing allows you to gain insight into which subject lines create higher open rates or which landing pages generate more content downloads.

Digital marketing mixes definitely can help marketers engage and attract more leads. But with these mixes comes an added need for organization and management to ensure that your marketing resources are producing proper ROI. Marketing automation software enables B2B marketers to enjoy a system that helps them manage and nurture the leads they spent so much time generating.