Scaling your marketing efforts in a fast-paced digital landscape to consistently attract and nurture leads can, at times, feel impossible and overwhelming. That’s where B2B demand generation automation comes in.
Demand generation, when it comes to B2B marketing, can be thought of as strategically building awareness and interest in a company’s products, services, and solutions amongst its target audience.
That said, automation tools can help with the streamlining and optimization of countless repetitive tasks across the entire demand generation process. They handle everything – right from attracting new leads through targeted campaigns to even monitoring user behavior and nurturing them with personalized content. This allows businesses to redirect their attention to other aspects of marketing strategy conveniently.
Let’s read about the best automation tools for B2B demand generation in 2024.
How to Choose the Best Automation Tool for B2B Demand Generation?
When it comes to selecting business automation tools for B2B demand generation, there are innumerable options in the market to choose from. However, this same abundance can make it a daunting task for businesses to pick the right tool that will help them reach their marketing goals.
Here are some important factors to guide this choice:
- Functionality: Different automation tools for demand generation achieve different goals. Businesses must tally the features and functions of a tool against their pain points. they must decide what exactly they want to use it for.
- Ease of Use: A user-friendly interface is crucial for adoption, and companies should ideally opt for a tool that is easy to use and can be put to work quickly and effectively.
- Integration: It’s imperative that the tool seamlessly integrates with the existing CRM, marketing platforms, and other critical software being used. This helps shape a unified view of a company’s leads and overall marketing efforts.
- Scalability: One of the most relevant prerequisites for picking the best automation tool is its scalability. It must be able to grow and adapt alongside an expanding business and offer flexible plans to support long-term growth.
- Cost: Businesses can decide if a tool is worth its price by measuring its cost against its functionality and the potential return on investment (ROI) in terms of lead generation, customer acquisition, and the economy of time.
4 Proven Automation Tools for B2B Demand Generation
Here are four well-known automation tools for B2B demand generation that businesses can choose from:
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most in-demand marketing software applications, partly because it comes with a set of integrated tools to enhance B2B demand generation efforts.
Key Functions:
- Managing Leads: Other than optimizing landing pages to attract new leads, HubSpot also records visitor information to monitor user behavior and enhance conversion. This is done by triggering automated actions to nurture leads, like sending personalized welcome emails or directing potential users to targeted campaigns.
- Content Marketing: HubSpot has a built-in platform for content creation that helps with publishing high-quality content to attract and educate the target audience. It also has SEO tools to optimize content for search engines, increase visibility, and attract organic traffic.
- Performance Analytics: HubSpot comes with tracking tools to judge the performance of marketing campaigns across different channels, thereby providing insights into what’s working and what’s not.
2. Semrush
Semrush helps automate a very important aspect of B2B demand generation: market research. This allows businesses to focus on making data-driven decisions, whether for strategy development or campaign execution.
Key Functions:
- Research and Analysis: Semrush helps analyze not just a company’s own data but also data collected from its competitors’ website monitoring. This helps identify their top-performing keywords, backlinks, and content strategies.
- SEO and Content Marketing: Semrush comes with an SEO writing assistant and an on-page SEO checker. It provides real-time SEO recommendations that ensure pages are optimized for relevant keywords and search intent.
- Advertising and Social Media: Semrush helps identify relevant and high-value keywords used in paid search campaigns. It also helps gain insights into platforms and ad formats leveraged by competitors for display advertising and approaches used by them to refine their social media presence.
3. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder specializes in automating lead identification to increase the chances of conversion. This allows businesses to dedicate more time and effort to nurturing leads.
Key Functions:
- Website Monitoring: Leadfeeder automates the initial stage of lead identification by uncovering hidden leads. It offers behavioral insights by revealing the specific pages website visitors have engaged with, the duration of their visits, and their journey through your site.
- Lead Filtering: Leadfeeder can also create detailed filters based on relevant criteria like industry, company size, location, pages visited, and time spent on the site. To further optimise this automation, businesses also get the option to assign scores to the leads filtered.
- CRM Integration: To automate the syncing of new leads and their activity data, Leadfeeder enables seamless CRM integration. Thus, businesses can do away with tedious manual entries and remain updated in real-time.
4. Unbounce
Unbounce is known for its specialization in creating optimized landing pages without any coding. It leverages AI to design and execute high-performing campaigns in very little time.
Key Functions:
- Landing Page Creation: Unbounce offers a highly intuitive page builder that helps businesses optimize landing pages without any coding experience. Professionals get to choose from a library of page templates pre-designed for different use cases.
- Conversion Optimisation: Unbounce also comes with A/B testing tools that compare the performance of different versions of the same landing page to determine the most effective one based on conversion rates.
- CRM Automation: Businesses can use Unbounce to nurture workflows as it connects with popular CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce to automate lead data transfer.
Final Thoughts
Demand generation is an indispensable part of business strategy, especially in the initial stages of a marketing funnel—awareness and consideration.It’s worth noting, however, that investing in automation tools for B2B demand generation isn’t only about efficiency but, rather, also about gaining a competitive advantage.
Having selected a tool for demand generation automation, companies also need to make sure that these tools are well-optimized in their usage. A brilliant strategy to optimize automation tools for B2B demand generation is to make them work together.
Through integration, businesses can create a unified workflow in which these tools take care of lead capture and identification, email automation, social media advertising, SEO and content marketing, behavioral research, performance analytics, and everything else that leads to the highest conversion rates.
