Automation Nation: How B2B Content Marketers Are Using Automation For Greater Impact

B2B marketing has changed radically in the age of the internet. It is no longer about cold calling businesses or building connections – the work goes beyond to include content marketing, social media strategy, email campaign management, and SEO maintenance. Today’s B2B marketer must be capable of dealing with several moving parts of the marketing machinery.

While there may be several individual solutions to address these challenges, the email marketing apps and SEO management tools you use are simply not enough if they do not work with your other marketing solutions. That’s where automation comes into play. Automation can streamline marketing processes for you and automate operational tasks, allowing you to focus on the overall direction of your efforts.

So, here’s a glimpse of the impact automation can have on revolutisioning B2B marketing for you, and a quick look at a brand that has aced this process.

Automation’s Impact On Your Work Processes

So, how does automation help you? It addresses two critical challenges for you – increasing impact and engaging customers. As a business, you may have also collected a tremendous amount of data from consumers over the years. Automation allows you to use it strategically and streamline your workflows, prioritising every user’s unique needs.

Personalization Through Automation

Without personalization, clients are often subjected to an imaginary sales funnel with irrelevant content. Every action of your prospect provides data points that help you create personalised offerings. Through marketing automation software, businesses can use this data to understand each individual customer’s needs and deliver relevant content at just the right time.

Therefore, by using personalised workflows, you can create a special connection with B2B customers and provide them with precisely what they need. From custom subject lines that appeal to an individual consumer to personalised gratitude offerings, the opportunities are endless.

Automation’s Impact On Content Marketing

As mentioned earlier, B2B marketers today must focus renowned energies on content marketing and its numerous forms – Social Media, SEO, and content distribution. Automating aspects of these tasks helps you prioritise your resources.

Another key aspect of content marketing is the journey you take customers on. Educational and enablement-oriented content can be best delivered when it comes with a narrative, a natural sequence that can be tweaked for each prospect. Automation tools can create personalised micro journeys so that users receive contextual messages at the right time.

Easing the Consumer’s Journey

Your B2B customer is still a client who needs personal care. Essential practices in B2B marketing include tracking customer data as well as their purchase histories. Proactive marketers are also regularly in touch with clients to ensure their satisfaction.

You can ease this process by automating tasks like following up through personalised emails as well as sharing periodic notifications with customers. Services such as automated delivery trackers too can be useful for customers if relevant to your offerings.

Some marketing automation platforms aid you by providing you with scoring systems that can be used to predict the likelihood of a customer making a purchase, helping you prioritise leads.

Measure Smarter With Automation

Finally, automation plays a crucial role in the most important aspect of marketing – measuring the impact of your efforts.

Automation tools can help you assess the performance of your content through core metrics like engagement, visitor rate, and conversions, all on one unified platform. With the insights you gain, you can then tweak your marketing strategy.

Slack: A Brand That Mastered The Art of Automation

The pandemic has meant that the importance of platforms like Slack has only grown in the professional sector. However, it has also spawned a wide range of imitators. Slack stood out by optimising resources, strategically utilising automation, and leveraging each data point they gathered.

Slack started the process by creating organisational reports that would be relevant to their B2B customers. To access the information, users needed to fill out a webform that then sent them an email with the promised report. From the client’s designation, their company, its size, to even a workplace contact number, this form contained invaluable data points for Slack.

Another great use of automation for Slack was their chatbot, which provided potential customers with all the information required to decide whether Slack was suitable for their organisation. By the time a prospect spoke to a Slack employee, they would not only possess detailed brand content, but would also be a near-qualified lead who believed that the product might be a good fit for them. Through these exercises, Slack not only created a simple webform into an invaluable source of leads, but also put into place provisions that prioritised leads with higher probabilities of conversion.

It’s Never Too Late To Automate

So, whether this is your first step into automation or just a move to revise your existing strategies, there are plenty of ways for you to maximise your B2B sales. So, reexamine the tools you currently use, find a partner that truly automates all your processes, and revolutionise how you obtain B2B clients!

Tags: automation, b2b marketing, content marketing, martech