Best Marketing Automation Software for B2B in 2024

B2B marketing automation software solutions bridge any gaps in operations and ensure that all the stages of workflows are enacted. In the right hands, it is a reliable assistant for highlighting unique selling propositions, connecting with captive audiences, and adding enticing context to selling. This leads to increased revenues and improved ROI rates. Furthermore, you can forge meaningful relationships with your customers.

Marketing automation may bear the capacity to impart convenience in workflows and shorten or eliminate low-level tasks, but its adoption might pose a challenge, especially for people who are not accustomed to handling sophisticated digital solutions. And this unfamiliarity costs time and money, both of which could have been dedicated to promotions and nurturing leads. However, should automation be leveraged properly, its benefits improve businesses operationally and revenue-wise.

As such, there is a quick way to get familiarized with how B2B marketing automation software and make it work for your business without costing you any money: taking advantage of free trials, demos, and free plans. Demos provide a detailed overview of a product’s major features through useful demonstrations. Free trials, on the other hand, let you experience the product and learn how to use functionalities like building workflows and automating tasks for a limited time. Meanwhile, a free plan affords you ownership of the software, which means you can use it for the long haul should you find its functionalities instrumental for your operations.

The good news is most top-tier platforms have demos and some furnish onboarding procedures by which users will be assisted in learning how to properly leverage each functionality. This eliminates any confusion surrounding the software and underscores its value, which serves as assurance when electing to upgrade to a paid plan. The ideal course of action is to avail of the free trials, demos, or free plans of the products with the highest ratings. You can start with the best B2B marketing automation software on the market: Freshmarketer, HubSpot Marketing, monday.com, Marketing Creatio, Omnisend, Unbounce, EngageBay, and Mobile Text Alerts.

Marketing automation software is a flexible and scalable solution, which is why businesses of all sizes stand to benefit from it. At the end of the day, optimization raises a company’s operational value and eventually increases returns. However, while the need for automation is close to universal in the marketing space, the manner in which it is utilized in various business scales is profoundly different. After all, an organization’s needs tend to shift as its operations expand.

To illustrate a clearer picture, we’ve fleshed out scenarios that stress the need for B2B marketing automation software for each business scale:

• Small businesses looking to establish a better marketing system. Small businesses and startups tend to start with barebones operations, gradually improving as they gain more ground. Marketing is a part of this and automation can do wonders for budding operations. B2B marketing automation platforms enable them to simulate then improve on their marketing process, streamlining routine tasks and pain points in previous workflows.
• Medium businesses aiming to nurture leads better. Some mid-sized firms have a constant need to increase conversions since the competition is stiff at this scale. Integrated marketing automation systems help here. Many platforms have solutions that carry or integrate with CRM systems. When leads have been funneled, they are segmented by the platform and have their customer journeys mapped out and automated. This greatly increases operational efficiency.
• Large businesses that require better marketing intelligence. Large enterprises already have sophisticated marketing initiatives in place. Automation is still highly relevant, but it might find a bigger use for the powerful analytics engines that marketing automation platforms are equipped with. After enterprises simulate their marketing workflows on the system, it generates highly detailed reports that measure the performance of past and present strategies. This empowers them to vastly improve on their marketing initiatives thereafter.

• Freshmarketer: One of the leading B2B marketing automation platforms for streamlining most marketing processes and offering insights into customer behavior.
• HubSpot Marketing: A dynamic marketing automation system that enables users to manage various forms of marketing content and raise conversions.
• monday.com: A multifunctional tool that unifies marketing automation, task management, sales, communication solutions, and portfolio management into one platform.
• Maropost Marketing Cloud: A powerful marketing automation system that maps out customer journeys and enhances multichannel engagement.
• Marketing Creatio: A versatile marketing automation tool for nurturing leads and building and automating marketing campaign workflows.
• Omnisend: A flexible marketing automation platform for optimizing and automating multichannel marketing workflows and improving lead capture rates.

While B2B marketing automation software solutions are all used for building and automating workflows, they diverge when it comes to the features surrounding automation. Some systems are dedicated marketing solutions that offer a variety of integrations for flexible use while others relegate automation into a module of a bigger system, say, a project management platform or collaboration software. Another major difference is in deployment along with the implications for each deployment type:

• Cloud-hosted marketing automation systems. These platforms afford universal access and do not require clients to update them or spend for maintenance. As such, many of the systems that come with free plans are of this deployment type.
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing automation systems. Typically, these platforms are exclusively maintained, updated, and hosted by the vendor. So that the vendor can recoup the charges, the platform often comes with monthly fees.
• On-premise marketing automation systems. These platforms, covered by a single license, tend to have complex setups and sometimes require hardware installations. Platforms belonging to this type are normally the priciest.

Even though the features surrounding automation tend to differ, many of the leading B2B marketing automating software solutions share a host of commonalities. These features collectively optimize marketing workflows, help nurture leads, boost the marketing reach of users, raise conversions, and increase returns:

• Email Marketing. Many marketing automation platforms enable users to assign leads into groups and cue the system to automatically send targeted emails to groups or multiple individuals in one go.
• Online Marketing. Automation platforms empower marketing campaigns by allowing marketing managers to include, sequence, and schedule posts for various promotional channels into the workflow. These include social media, blogs, email, and apps.
• Lead Generation. Some platforms have built-in CRM features while others integrate with reputable CRM systems to enable marketers to touch base with more potential customers.
• Lead Management. Most top-tier platforms allow you to classify leads and apply specific marketing strategies per group, with an automated workflow branch often dedicated to each. This helps when promoting different product lines to their respective segments.
• Reports and Analytics. Leveraging analytics, most platforms generate highly detailed reports that quantify various aspects of campaign performance as well as other important factors such as conversion rates and revenues.
• Resource Management. The leading systems enable managers to plan, schedule, and allocate company assets such as funds, technology, equipment, and manpower. This feature covers all the needs for a campaign’s various stages, including materials for on-ground events.
• Social Marketing. This feature is a staple of marketing automation solutions since it taps into the massive social media audience. It automates scheduled posts for various social media sites and sends reminders concerning paid ads or posts that need to be boosted.
• Landing Pages. Upon generating leads, marketers need a standalone webpage that potential customers will visit to sign up or purchase products. This is called a landing page, and many B2B marketing automation platforms carry this feature.
• A/B Testing. Also known as split testing, this feature enables marketers to segregate the market according to their chosen factors, from demographic variables to perceived preferences. This can determine the results of campaigns or prototypes on test markets, presenting information on factors like click rates, site visits, and drop-offs.
• Mobile Optimization. Most people use smartphones, which is why this feature comes with most marketing automation platforms. It enables users to use the platform on their mobile devices.
• API. A lot of automation platforms are structurally configured as API systems. The reason for this is API frameworks allow users to customize integrations with other apps and adjust them according to the exact needs of marketing operations.

Using a B2B marketing automation system comes with countless benefits, and perhaps the most prevalent one would be operational efficiency. Since it enables managers to plot out and automate the marketing workflows, many low-level tasks will be annexed by simplified versions of bigger tasks while some recurring processes will be performed automatically by the system. Besides this, a marketing automation platform has other equally significant benefits:

• It enforces consistency in your marketing strategy. Leveraging a marketing automation platform results in consistency because the workflows built in the system serve as the backbone of all marketing tasks. It shows your staff the sequential order of stages and tasks. Moreover, the software automatically performs certain tasks like calculations, data migration, scheduling social media posts, sending emails, and the like.
• It helps you to build meaningful relationships with customers. Using a marketing automation system leads to a deeper understanding of your customers’ preferences. How so? The software can group people together based on demographical and historical data. It also generates reports that show the campaigns, products, and deals that certain groups prefer. As such, you would know how to satisfy your markets better.
• It maximizes your assets. A marketing automation system lets managers plot out the people who will work on every stage of the workflow as well as the amount of work each individual is set to take on. Those left with light jobs can be tasked to work on other aspects of marketing like logistics, coordination with suppliers, and the like. This enables your office to adopt a utilitarian approach to marketing and other related activities.
• It saves you time. Marketing automation systems optimize operational workflows, simplifying complex tasks, eliminating a lot of manual work, and merging smaller tasks with larger ones. With the processes shortened, you will have more time on your hands.
• It saves you money. Since marketing automation platforms promote operational efficiency, the budget allocations will be more exact, thus reducing or eliminating unnecessary expenditures. Plus, by being on top of work procedures, you will see how much manpower you need for each campaign. The likelihood of hiring too many people will plummet.
• It thoroughly quantifies the performance of campaigns. All marketing automation systems worth their salt are equipped with powerful analytics engines, capable of measuring the various aspects of campaign performance. But the reporting does not stop there. The systems also track the performance of previous campaigns so you can plan the upcoming ones better.

• More Developed AI. The use of AI has come a long way, from simply powering chatbots and scanning data to the flexible intelligence tool that it is today. Currently, it’s being leveraged for marketing and content creation, and its uses will further expand in the near future.
• Omnichannel Solutions Will Become the Norm. The rapid advancement of digital technology calls for expanded reach online. As such, many business and marketing tools often have omnichannel solutions for communication, and these would likely become staple features in newer platforms.
• Increased Relevancy for Predictive Lead Scoring. Not everyone shares the same buying propensity, thus more information is necessary to properly qualify the needs of customers based on demographics and their consumer behavior. Predictive lead scoring supplies that information and its reports act as references for marketing strategies. With this, it’ll be leveraged by more platforms.

Despite its high value to marketing operations, marketing automation software solutions are not without their shortcomings. And at the center of its potential issues is the unfamiliarity with using a sophisticated digital solution, especially one that touches on all areas of marketing and brings forth sweeping changes. To give you a clearer picture, here are the exact possible concerns:

• Limited Adoption. It’s one thing to marvel at marketing automation software’s capabilities, and it’s certainly another to reconfigure your entire operations to accommodate the software’s sweeping workflow changes. This is why some users only end up utilizing surface-level functionalities like content management and mass mailers.
• High Costs. Any sophisticated piece of technology comes with hefty costs, and B2B marketing automation is no exception. Sure, there are platforms with affordable plans on the market, but drastically shifting workflows could lead to more expenses.
• Content Shortage. A properly utilized marketing automation system vastly increases efficiency that users might eventually wind up running out of content to post on various channels. This underscores the need for well-planned, well-defined campaigns. Luckily, a lot of platforms also have solutions to achieve those.