What are B2B marketing automation tools?

B2B marketing automation tools allow marketers to automate marketing tasks and plan, coordinate, and measure the performance of marketing campaigns.

Specifically, B2B marketing automation tools help identify, track, and gather leads. There are B2B marketing automation platforms for every size company from small businesses to large enterprises.

According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers say converting leads is their top priority. 

Tasks that benefit from B2B marketing automation tools

• Web analytics – Gather insight into how your marketing assets perform.
• 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 your posts during optimal times. 
• Digital advertising – Track the results of your paid media campaigns.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – Bolster your content marketing efforts by optimizing your web content and SEO metadata and improving your positions on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
• Content marketing – Track and analyze marketing content to understand what content resonates best with leads and prospects.
• 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

1. HubSpot
2. Marketo
3. Salesforce Pardot
4. Oracle Eloqua
5. Responsys

Benefits of using B2B marketing automation tools

• Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing efforts.
• Automate time-consuming, repetitive tasks.
• Spend marketing resources on qualified prospects.
• Measure the effectiveness of different marketing channels.
• Improve access to measurable results through increased data collection. 

Challenges to using B2B marketing automation tools

• Sales and marketing teams must commit 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, customized marketing content can limit the effectiveness of these tools.
• Tools can be costly to manage and maintain.
• Automation tools can easily lead to the creation of overbearing and messy data.

Learn more about marketing automation tools

• Marketo’s Marketing Automation Definition
• Pardot’s Marketing Automation Definition