Smart B2B businesses understand that buyer behaviour has changed. They know that marketing effectively in today's climate means creating better content and using marketing automation software to automatically nurture larger, more predictable pipelines of sales enquiries.
Your B2B buyers are intelligent and empowered by instant and 24/7 access to information. They start researching well before the point of purchase to become hyper-informed – and they don't want to engage with your sales people until they really have to (if at all).
Marketing automation is the science (and art) of helping informed buyers through their journey – using software to understand their behaviour, serve them appropriate content and automate processes to further engage them.
Success requires the creation of specific digital content (emails, web pages, blog posts, videos and whitepapers, for example) for specific types of buyers at specific stages of their buying journey.
Streamlining the delivery of this content by defining and then automating workflows and processes saves time and money and improves the customer experience.
Businesses can now define processes and workflows to:
help your team provide a better service to customers during and post sale.
A typical B2B marketing manager is managing upwards of a dozen different systems for attracting, engaging and delighting customers. It's not unusual to find a B2B marketing manager juggling:
Employing so many individual systems can create a number of problems:
By defining your marketing processes and skilfully creating content for your target customers you can use marketing automation to:
Marketing automation software helps you by:
Marketing Automation joins up disparate systems to provide valuable insights about your customers' and prospective customers' behaviour; which website pages they visited, which blog posts they read, which emails they opened, which social media posts they responded to and which white papers they downloaded.
You can use this information to trigger workflows and automatic processes.
A simple example; a customer opens a marketing email and clicks a specific link before downloading a white paper. Your marketing automation system can be programmed to send a relevant follow-up email message with further information. It could detect that the follow-up email was opened and then schedule a timely call for a sales person to follow up a warm lead.
Your marketing automation system is helping your prospective clients through their buyer's journey 24/7 and delivering warm prospects to your sales team.
Alternatively, your customers could be opening emails, visiting key web pages, reading blogs and downloading white papers and your team may never be able to join the dots to reveal the picture of a customer whose behaviour screams, "Help me buy!"
No marketing automation system comes with a free marketing strategy. It is impossible to automate processes that don't exist, so many companies need help to become automation-ready.
Becoming automation-ready means you:
Becoming automation-ready is a journey. Intergage is here to help you become ready and to guide you through that process.
Marketing automation requires strategy, planning, software and content.
If you'd like to find out more about working with a digital marketing and marketing automation specialist like Intergage, call us now for an initial discussion or a demonstration of the power of marketing automation.
If you would like more information first, download the our introductory e-Book below.