B2B marketing teams are under more pressure than ever to deliver.
Competition continues to grow at a rapid pace in every industry and sector.
So much so that 73% of marketers (up 19% from last year) expect their company to face increased competition in 2024.
Meanwhile, 67% of B2B marketers expect their technology budgets to grow again this year.
However, bigger budgets tend to mean elevated expectations of increased efficiency and performance.
So, how can marketers fend off their competitors, exceed company leadership's expectations, and ultimately do even more with the same resources as before?
The solution is to invest that increased tech budget in AI and Automation.
But what does this mean, and how can marketers use it to be more efficient?
In this article, we’ll explore five ways B2B marketers can use Automation and AI technology to increase their output and how to measure its impact.
First, though, let’s outline what we mean by marketing automation and AI.
What do we mean by AI and Automation in B2B marketing?
If you’re not careful, It’s easy to confuse AI and Automation with each other or even use the terms as a byword for marketing software.
So, it’s important to understand what we mean by Automation and AI and their role in B2B marketing technology.
Automation helps marketers automate repetitive tasks and processes so they can be completed with minimal human intervention.
This can help marketers improve their efficiency in core processes like lead generation, customer segmentation, and reporting.
As a result, it can also help to reduce human error and free up marketers to think more strategically.
AI is designed to help marketers analyze data and make smarter, faster, and more accurate decisions.
Using advanced machine learning algorithms, AI can understand large datasets, predict trends, or even optimize marketing campaigns.
But that’s not all. Generative AI can also be used to create content for marketing campaigns and is particularly useful for helping with idea generation or initial drafts.
Together, AI and Automation technology are essential parts of the modern B2B marketer’s toolkit, which can be leveraged to increase overall efficiency and effectiveness.
How can you measure efficiency in B2B marketing?
It’s all very well talking about efficiency and effectiveness, but as the old saying goes, ‘what gets measured gets managed’.
So, how can you measure the impact of automation and AI on your overall efficiency as a B2B marketer?
We’ve outlined three methods you could use to measure and manage your marketing efficiency.
Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)
This is a marketing-specific version of Cost/Performance analysis.
It’s calculated by dividing the value of your campaign's results by the total amount you’ve spent on it.
Typically, this is applied to the total gross volume of sales revenue generated by marketing activities, but it could also be used for things like the value of all leads generated instead.
For example, if you spent $100,000 on a marketing campaign and produced $250,000 of new sales, your MER score would be 2.5.
As a rule of thumb, the higher your MER figure, the better, with figures above 3.0 considered healthy and less than 1.0 a loss.
However, this isn’t the only way to look at efficiency improvements in B2B marketing.
Process cycle time
While MER looks at the costs involved and the direct financial contribution they’ve made, this isn’t always possible to measure.
Even if you don’t have access to campaign budgets or sales figures, you can still measure the time it takes to complete a process.
Reducing the time it takes to initiate, execute, and complete a process can be a great way to demonstrate efficiency improvements.
For example, if it takes an average of 90 days to nurture a lead to engage with your sales team, and you use automation to reduce that to 60 days, that process is 33% more efficient.
Task time
Not only can you look at the time savings on a process basis, but you can also take the same calculations to look at individual tasks, like;
- Running a report
- Segmenting customer lists
- Scheduling social media posts
- Adding information against a CRM record
Our examples in the next section will focus on time-saving efficiencies to keep things simple.
This means that even if you can’t access campaign budgets or employee costs, you can still quantify how efficient you can be using AI and automation.
How to market more efficiently with AI and Automation
It’s clear that marketers are under pressure from all sides to deliver outstanding results from their marketing campaigns - and do it while being more efficient than ever.
We also know how to measure this efficiency by looking at the marketing efficiency ratio (MER) or calculating efficiency improvement based on time spent on tasks or processes.
However, we have not yet covered how to use AI and automation technology to improve marketing efficiency.
In the next section, we’ll explore five ways you can leverage AI and automation technology to do more marketing in less time.
1. Content Creation
When creating content for marketing, a huge obstacle for many marketers is a lack of resources.
46% of B2B marketers state that one person or a small group produces all their marketing content.
This overreliance on limited resources can create bottlenecks within your marketing team and potentially missed opportunities if content isn’t supplied quickly enough.
However, to address this perennial problem, savvy marketers are using generative AI to help them speed up their content production processes.
Solutions like SuperOffice’s smart email editor with built-in generative AI can be used to transform the way you prepare new marketing campaigns. It includes features that help;
- Create custom images instantly – enter your prompt for your AI-generated image
- Get AI suggestions for the most fitting CTAs and headings
- Write longer or shorter, and choose your tone: be more serious, friendly, or witty
⏱️Old way: Writing an email campaign would take 1+ hours before generative AI solutions.
⏱️New way: This will take under 30 mins with generative AI, increasing efficiency by 50%.
2. Personalization
No one likes to receive generic marketing messages. They’re inauthentic and usually don’t even speak to your specific pain point.
That’s why 48% of B2B marketers expect to invest more in personalization technology to improve the personalization of their marketing campaigns.
Without the right technology in place to automate marketing personalization, marketers would be faced with spending a tremendous amount of time doing things like;
- Manually collecting data
- Individually crafting marketing messages
- Sending emails one by one
Using personalization technology can put this whole process on autopilot, helping your marketing team to do the following in a matter of minutes;
- Gather and segment customer data
- Use personalization tokens to customize messages
- Send emails in bulk to your entire segment
⏱️Old way: Without automation, this process could take several days - if not longer.
⏱️New way: This can be done in an hour with automation, improving efficiency by 98%.
3. Dynamic Customer Journeys
The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing—instead, it should be a natural experience for your prospects and aligned with their needs.
If you get this wrong, you can alienate your potential customers and drive them into the arms of your competitors.
However, getting this right and creating a customer experience that reflects your customers' desires and expectations can have a dramatic impact on sales and retention.
A fantastic way to achieve this is by creating dynamic customer journeys that present the right information at just the right time based on your users' actions.
SuperOffice has an inbuilt feature that allows you to track individual link clicks and create a series of ‘if this, then that’ rules to produce highly personalized and dynamic workflows.
These ‘click-to-trigger’ actions can take the prospect down a particular path and present them with specific information, or they can activate pre-set actions like;
- Directly update and populate contact cards
- Trigger a follow-up task or appointment
- Flag interest in a product or event
Adding automation like this can enhance the experience for your potential customers and save your marketing team significant time compared to manual actions.
⏱️Old way: Doing this without automation could take 100+ hours to set up.
⏱️New way: Setting up dynamic journeys with automation could be 99% more efficient.
4. Customer Data Management
Using CRM data to create targeted marketing campaigns or perform segmentation and lead scoring can be hugely time-consuming without the right tools.
So much so that 38% of marketers cite customer data management like this as a significant blocker to preparing and launching a marketing campaign.
This is because the complexity and volume of customer data available to them makes it incredibly difficult and resource-intensive to process effectively.
Leveraging AI can help you crunch through this data in seconds, enabling you to segment, score, or analyze your customer data exactly when you need it.
In addition, AI can help you enrich your data by adding further context, insights, or information to create a fuller picture of your prospects.
⏱️Old way: Analyzing and managing data without AI could take 40+ hours.
⏱️New way: With AI, you could manage huge data sets in minutes for 99.9% efficiency.
5. Performance Tracking & Reporting
A typical company uses 15 different apps to handle customer communications. This isn’t very efficient and makes it difficult to track the results effectively.
In fact, 42% of marketers struggle with fragmented systems like this, particularly when tracking and reporting campaign performance.
Moreover, 41% of B2B marketers mentioned difficulties in manually creating unified dashboards to centralize all this data.
This proves that manual tracking and reporting can become hugely inefficient and time-consuming without the right tools for performance tracking and reporting.
With automation and AI in place, though, tracking marketing and performance and reporting on it is a breeze.
Using these tools, integrated within a CRM platform like SuperOffice that handles marketing, sales, and service together means you can automatically do things like;
- Construct and assemble personalized dashboard views tailored for your team
- Compare open and click-through rates year over year
- Identify high-performing forms to optimize and replicate success
This lets you automatically surface this data in seconds and consolidate your customer communication tech stack into one platform.
⏱️Old way: Without AI or automation, compiling this data could take 4+ hours.
⏱️New way: This can be done in real-time, boosting your team’s efficiency by 99.5%.
Of course, leveraging marketing automation and AI to help your marketing teams be more efficient requires the right tools and data.
So, consider how a CRM can help centralize your marketing efforts and use AI and automation technology.
How can a CRM help you improve marketing efficiency?
Your marketing team is under increasing pressure - from boardroom expectations and an ever-growing list of competitors.
While marketing technology budgets may continue to increase, marketers need the right tools to exceed expectations and do more with less.
As we know, thanks to the Relationship loop, marketing doesn’t end at lead generation anymore.
Nowadays, marketers need to work closely with sales and customer service teams to strengthen business relationships across the customer lifecycle.
To guarantee that your marketing, sales, and service teams are all working together to build better relationships, you’ll need a central source of truth for all your customer data.
A unified CRM platform like SuperOffice helps bring together marketing, sales, and service data to create a 360° view of the customer and their experience with your company.
Not only that, but SuperOffice has integrated marketing automation and AI with its CRM to help you do more with less and drive growth across customer touchpoints.
SuperOffice offers several AI and automation features to help your marketing team be more efficient, including;
- AI content creation and image generation options to fast-track your campaigns
- Advanced marketing and personalization options to tailor every message
- Setup automated actions after your customer clicks on tracked links
- Easy to use automation to deliver messages exactly when customers need them
- And much, much, more…
Ready to market your business more efficiently by leveraging AI and automation?
Book a demo of SuperOffice today and learn how we can help you market more efficiently across the customer lifecycle.
