Marketing Automation Basics for B2B SaaS

Marketing is a complex, multifaceted job, and it can seem overwhelming when you’re just getting started. Fortunately—even if you’re the company’s sole marketer—you don’t have to go it alone. Technology provides numerous opportunities to automate your marketing process.

Here, we’ll discuss marketing automation, what it looks like, and how it can work for your SaaS business. 

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is using software to execute marketing activities. While marketing software, such as HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, can’t do the whole job for you, it can streamline many monotonous tasks that don’t require your direct attention. This increases efficiency, lowers stress, and decreases costs.

When you automate marketing, you also have the opportunity to personalize each customer’s experience. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. This helps you find new customers, develop your relationships with them, and turn them into evangelists. 

You have to employ automated marketing strategically, however, or risk depersonalizing the experience entirely. For instance, many marketers believe they can use marketing automation to generate new outbound leads, but this is rarely the case. Automated marketing strategies are more effective for inbound leads—people already looking for what you’re selling. Your marketing automation needs to go hand-in-hand with your hands-on work in order to create a fulfilling experience.

Common Uses for Marketing Automation

Broadly speaking, marketing automation serves the following ends: tailoring the customer experience, nurturing leads, and/or automating workflows. “Recommended For You” sections of websites, emails reminding people what they left in their cart, and personalized email newsletters are all examples of marketing automation.

Let’s break down some common tasks marketing teams can automate. 

Emails

Emails are one of the most common uses for marketing automation, and for good reason. Without it, marketers can spend hours on emails. Not only are email newsletters important, but so are a variety of other email-based marketing tactics.

However, it’s important to practice moderation with your email automation. Ask yourself: how many irrelevant emails do you get from a company before you unsubscribe from their mailing list? Don’t buy an email list and send advertisements to random people. Even if you’re focusing on inbound leads (which you should be), don’t overuse your mailing list.

You’ll want to be strategic about your email marketing. Besides regular newsletters, here are some common and effective ways to send someone an email:

• Welcome emails for new users or mailing list subscribers.
• Sending out customer feedback surveys.
• Sending alerts when a premium subscription is about to expire.
• Notifying people about a new software they might be interested in.

You’ll notice some of the examples we just listed involve something specific to the customer. Automating your emails not only allows you to send out emails to predetermined people at a predetermined time, but some marketing automation softwares can help in the process of customization.

For example, you can set up a drip campaign—a series of emails meant to deliver information in pieces—and set up each email to send to whoever didn’t respond to the previous email. This way you can foster potential customers, but you also prevent sending repetitive emails to those who responded faster.

Social Media

While automation can’t write your social media content for you, it can help schedule posts, report data, and even suggest ideas. Automating these tasks can help free up valuable time for interacting with your audience and developing content, therefore, creating a more efficient workflow. 

Many social media automation tools allow you to schedule and time your posts, so you can achieve ideal engagement. You can also use these tools to schedule posts in bulk. This way, you don’t have to manually upload every single post to every single platform.

Social media automation can also be a valuable resource for gathering data and doing research. Social listening tools allow you to monitor what people are saying about your brand across platforms and consolidate all that data into one place. You can plug in certain words, phrases, and hashtags to monitor, and the software will pool that data. This is extremely useful when you need to know the impact of your brand, what people are saying about it, and where it should focus next.

Additionally, you can use these tools to determine how specific content and campaigns perform across different platforms. You may find your audience interacting with video content less often on Instagram, while your YouTube audience prefers five-minute videos over fifteen-minute videos. This information will help you fine-tune your content to the platform you’re using, rather than posting the same thing on all platforms. 

Automation tools can even provide content curation by searching the information you’re monitoring to determine what sorts of posts your target audience prefers to engage with. You can use that curation to share content more tailored to your audience as well as evaluate your own posts against others. 

There’s also the option to monitor all your social media from the same dashboard. These tools, such as HubSpot’s Inbox, consolidate all your mentions, replies, and direct messages into one place so you can easily reply to your audience across all platforms. Though this may seem like a small benefit, the seconds you spend tabbing between social media pages can add up, and being able to do everything from a central location can drastically improve your efficiency and consistent messaging.

If you’d rather not interact with some DMs, however, you can always choose to employ a chatbot. While chatbots are more common on company websites, there are some designed to work on third-party chat clients. Using these chatbots, you can set up automated replies to your most frequently asked questions or customer support inquiries and allow the chatbot to send a reply. Use this with caution and employ a well-executed strategy because chatbots become frustrating to your prospects or customers when it fails to address their needs or inquiries. 

Website

We mentioned earlier how marketing automation can help customize the online experience. This often works by using browser cookies to track people’s behaviors—what they click on, their path through your site, what they buy, time spent on pages or modules, etc. Not only do automation tools gather this data for you, but they can also use this data to customize the experience for your customers. 

Based on how your visitors interact with your website content, these automation tools sort contacts into segments and deliver the most relevant information. Moreover, these cookies allow customers to save their place in your website. Cookies are what allow browsers to remember someone’s login info, their location settings, what’s in their cart, etc. 

This custom-tailored experience means customers are more likely to find products they want to purchase instead of searching your whole website, and this ease of access removes barriers along the customer journey.

Examples of Bad Marketing Automation

Unfortunately, many marketers believe automating their process can make it entirely hands-off. While it can certainly make the process less hands-on, it’s extremely important to remember that no technology can replace the human touch. For example, a chatbot with no humans to take over when it can’t answer a question will quickly lead to the user’s frustration, and who can blame them? It won’t take long to realize they’re talking to a bot, which could lead them to feel like your company doesn’t care about their questions or issues. 

Additionally, you should watch out for any marketing automation that provides inadequate data. Without the context quality, data can provide, your marketing automation will have very limited usefulness. If all you know about an email is that someone clicked on it, then that isn’t very helpful. If you know who clicked on it, what part of the email they clicked on, and how long they read the email before clicking, then you have the building blocks for honing your strategy. 

When it comes to social media, you also want to stay clear of buying likes, followers, clicks, and other forms of engagement. Though there are numerous reasons why you should stay away from these bots, the most important to your marketing strategy is that it will actually hurt you in the long run. Most social media platforms’ algorithms are based on multiple forms of engagement. If, for example, you buy subscribers on YouTube, you’re only paying for the subscriptions. This means they won’t engage with your content further. When YouTube sends your videos to their test audience, a significant portion of that audience will consist of bots. Since these bots don’t do anything but subscribe, they won’t like, comment, or even watch the video. This tells YouTube’s algorithm that it isn’t a good video, and it doesn’t forward that video to other people’s sub boxes. 

Examples of Good Marketing Automation

The best marketing automation exists as part of a broader marketing strategy. It doesn’t exist to do your job for you, just to make your job more efficient and impactful. To implement marketing automation effectively, you’ll want to implement it in multiple channels. Don’t just automate your emails, but consider how it can help with social media management, advertisements, your website, and beyond.

You’ll also want to focus on inbound leads — people who are already looking for what you’re selling — and build automation strategies to add value, nurture, build trust and support them on their buyer journey. We’ve already discussed how “cold-calling” someone’s email address is ultimately ineffective, so it makes sense to extrapolate that to all forms of marketing. Consider: when was the last time you clicked on an irrelevant banner ad? Part of that was probably because you weren’t looking for whatever the ad was selling. People aren’t as likely to see an advertised product and think “I need that” as they are to realize they want something, then go looking for it.

How to Use Marketing Automation in Your SaaS Business

If you have a low average customer value (ACV), your company may have more of a need for marketing automation. The cost of traditional marketing may cost more than the customer it brings in is worth. As we mentioned previously, you can’t simply plug some data into marketing automation tools, hit send, and expect it to do all the work for you. In order to effectively utilize marketing automation, you’ll need to formulate a strategy.

In broad strokes, you can create that strategy by deciding on a lifecycle funnel, determining which metrics to measure at each funnel stage, map your ideal customer journey, and set up your automation tools and workflows. Your lifecycle funnel is the way your audience transitions from the first contact to becoming a customer or deciding not to buy.

There are numerous models for lifecycle funnels, so make sure to research which one will best serve your company. You may decide to use different funnels for different customer segments, or one general funnel for all your customers. It’s worth noting that the former is generally much more effective than the latter.

Next, you’ll want to decide what data to track at which points in the funnel. If your first funnel stage is awareness, for example, you may decide to track unique website visitors, social media engagement, or best-referring channels. Be sure to pick metrics you feel will be the most helpful at each stage. 

Once you’ve compiled that information, you’ll want to map out the customer lifecycle. Ask yourself: how do customers go from first learning about your product to making a purchase? You’ll want to take note of their goals, touchpoints, and feelings at the various points on the map. This will help you determine what you need to automate, and at what points you need to automate.

This is when you build your marketing automation workflows. This is the most complicated stage, but also the most important. You’ll need to connect and integrate automation tools, map events into your marketing automation platform, and test the system to ensure everything works perfectly. You’ll want to outline each workflow automation you plan on using—including every action that triggers an email or other response—before you begin plugging them into your tools.

Once your marketing automation is fully set up and working, you’ll find a wealth of data and possibilities at your disposal. This information will help you optimize your customer experience, streamline your marketing process, and increase your efficiency. While it’s critical to remember marketing automation can’t do all your work for you, it’s an invaluable asset when integrated into a fleshed-out marketing strategy. 

Work smarter, not harder. 

At Revvy, we specialize in marketing automation and help businesses strategize and execute their campaigns. Please reach out if there's any questions or anything we can do to help.