These 3 B2B Marketing Campaigns Will Help Inspire Your Brand

There are so many boxes to check to deliver a successful B2B marketing campaign. Your outreach must be engaging, personalized, and responsive on any type of platform in real time. The expectations can be overwhelming. That’s why marketers across industries are looking to marketing automation technologies to pick up the busywork and free up time for them to innovate.

Marketing automation lets you automate business processes, personalize content and experiences, and track customer engagement. Automating your marketing and sales engagement helps you attract more leads, close more deals, and ultimately helps your business grow.

Let’s take a look at how marketing automation can improve virtual events, webinars, and email performance. Along the way, we’ll show how three companies are using marketing automation to reach customers in real time. 

Read on to learn more about the secrets to their success and get practical tips you can apply to your own marketing strategies.

Use marketing automation to drive record attendance to virtual events

Driving attendance to virtual events is hard. The best way to start is to use previous customer data to choose the best promotional channel for your campaign and then personalize your content to reach your target audience. 

That’s what fintech company nCino did in 2021, when it transformed nSight, its annual, in-person user conference, to a completely virtual format.  

With a targeted, personalized approach to attendance and engagement, nCino drove more than 2,000 event registrations to its interactive online experience. 

Its marketers used a mix of customer data to identify email as the best promotional channel for its campaign. They then used Salesforce marketing automation tools to create, manage and personalize an email campaign based on each subscriber’s role and interests. With email automation technology, nCino tailored pre- and post-event messages with product information to keep registrants engaged. 

Two ways you can improve virtual event attendance 

• Invest in marketing automation tools that use your CRM data so you can serve relevant content and offers. 

• Review B2B marketing campaign analytics to prioritize channels with the biggest impact potential.

Amp up webinars with a B2B marketing campaign

One of the benefits to digital marketing is there is no limit to the amount of content you can create, or how often you choose to deliver it. Consistency is the key in any B2B marketing campaign strategy, because it builds interest and trust between customers and the brand. 

Your marketing technology stack can help consistently deliver content to customers at scale. 

Multinational specialty chemical company Sika scaled its webinar strategy using a robust marketing technology stack powered by video conferencing and automation.

Sika used the video conferencing tool Webex to run webinars in more than 20 countries across the Americas. It used Salesforce marketing automation to promote the events and send tailored messages to each audience segment.

Engagement data flowing between the two systems was tracked in Webex and automatically added to the Salesforce marketing automation system in real time. The automation tool saved time for Sika’s team because they didn’t have to manually enter the data from interactive Q&A sessions and audience polls, and duplicate records were reconciled automatically. 

Data was also used to activate post-event campaigns targeted to every registrant, even if they didn’t attend.

The result: Sika went from hosting one webinar per quarter to hosting 60 to 80 per week. 

Two ways you can improve your webinars

• Customize programming to address audience pain points within their industry and role, then target your promotion accordingly.
  
• Align with sales at the beginning to make reps your best advocates.

Make email stand out with automated personalization tools

You’ve probably heard that trusting your gut won’t steer you wrong. However, that won’t work when creating an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, which is a targeted approach to a B2B marketing campaign in which marketing and sales work together on a select group of accounts that represent higher potential to convert into customers. 

WebPT is a rehab therapy software platform that provides electronic medical record services for more than 80,000 healthcare professionals around the country. The company used a strategic partnership between sales and marketing to launch its ABM success. 

With the marketing team’s influence and support, WebPT vetted prospects before they entered the pipeline. Marketing then used a combination of automation tools from Salesforce and the Terminus ABM platform to automatically share campaign lists with first-party intent data, which is customer engagement information collected first-hand from internal resources, across all digital properties.

This helped the team see the content people were consuming, such as email banner engagement and web file downloads. Access to this type of data helped WebPT identify priority accounts and discover next steps to cultivate them with more customized content. 

WebPT sent 50,000 emails as part of its ABM strategy. That’s a lot of emails! To get the best results from its email promotions and minimize errors, WebPT developed a targeted approach to its email campaigns by adding customized signatures to its communications. 

WebPT grouped email signatures by department, and email banners were auto-selected based on which department was managing the send. Automation software was a key to its campaign success because the software automatically changed email signatures based on which department was sending the email, and helped the teams save time and cut down on email mistakes. 

With a targeted approach to account selection, thanks to first-party intent data and its use of marketing automation tools for its promotional email banners, WebPT saw an increased click-through rate of 2.4% and over 450,000 email banner impressions. 

Tips to boost your email performance

• Lock arms with your stakeholders to address obstacles with internal partners. This helped Web PT’s marketing team provide solutions that matched their colleagues’ goals.
  
• Launch and test new features internally before going live.