Are you getting enough attention to keep you sailing strong, or are you fighting against the currents without the right tools?
Other businesses won’t know about your company or trust you if they don’t know you exist. You need to prove your value, show your company can be trusted and captivate interest. Companies are able to do this by marketing their products and brand to the companies they want to work with. You can improve your reach by implementing marketing automation. Here’s three reasons why:
1. A Stronger Approach Towards the Key Decision Makers
Business to business marketing automation is often overlooked as a marketing tactic only for B2C companies. However, B2B companies are struggling to reach their key decision makers. Forrester Research reported that 2 out of 3 marketers say identifying key decision makers is their top challenge. Automated B2B marketing helps companies to keep content working the pipelines.
Think of automated marketing like the sails on your ship. While you could manually row your boat with sales reps working round the clock, you could take a great load off with sails. Your sails, or automated marketing, offers a flow of content that snags the wind and moves the ship without as much time and effort wasted. Businesses who initially board your boat are able to move through your sales funnel smoothly, with little or no interaction from a direct sales team. When your sales team is reserved for the harder jobs and more difficult questions, your company is able to work more efficiently and accommodate more customers.
2. Marketing Automation Improves Marketing Jobs
It’s important to understand that automated software makes the process of posting, emailing, tracking and reporting easier, but it does not make the marketer obsolete. The marketing professional is still needed to establish a strong, strategic and well-defined course. But marketing automation makes that job faster. Eliminating the unnecessary busywork leaves more time for brainstorming, creating and crafting content.
3. Craft More Relevant and Diverse Content
Don’t get caught into a bad habit of email blasting a list of not interested contacts. You waste valuable time and burn potential leads when content is irrelevant, sloppy, unwanted or spammy. Instead:
- Require your entire contact list and all future contacts to opt-in to a list for receiving content and send a thank you email as soon as they sign up for content from your company
- Segment your lists so that different types of leads are receiving appropriate types of content (don’t send new leads the same content as loyal customers, etc.)
- Revisit your marketing goals and send out highly-targeted content to very select audiences – never send out generic content or blast general messages to your whole list
- Use resulting analytics to inform your sales team of which leads they should reach out to and what has prompted interest for that specific decision maker
- Continue to send content to specific contacts with intelligent marketing based on their behavior
- Establish customer engagement campaigns for your loyal customers to achieve higher retention rates and improve your marketing ROI (keeping loyal leads is more cost effective in the long run then solely chasing new leads)
- Use your marketing automation to build stronger relationships with your decision makers, individually nurturing those connections over long periods of time without spending a lot of time personally working with each lead
Are you starting to see how important marketing automation is to the B2B company? So, raise your sails and stop fighting every wave the hard way. If you need more help, we would be happy to provide you with a compass to get you where you need to go.