How Marketing Automation is Evolving to Better Suit the B2B Environment
I was researching new trends in marketing automation when I came across this great article on the 7 most popular Marketing Automation Trends. It made me think about all the ways marketing automation has grown and changed just within the past few years. In this post we examine how marketing automation is evolving to better suit the B2B environment.
Its unique ability to tap into the B2B environment and convert more leads has also evolved. The focus of marketing automation has drifted from the power and speed of automation to the necessity of personalization. There is also more emphasis on building lasting relationships and customer engagement.
Creating a Connection
Marketers realized that using a heavily automated process was resulting in a detachment between businesses and B2B buyers. To resolve this issue, marketing automation professionals are now putting more focus on understanding their leads and fulfilling their individual needs through comprehensive lead profiling and segmentation.
Profiling and Understanding Leads
Website visitor tracking software can be used to monitor a lead’s online activity, track their pre-purchasing behavior, and record any demographic information that can be obtained from the lead using online forms and registries. This lead monitoring technology is now an essential component of marketing automation and it is used to develop a complete profile on every lead that crosses paths with a particular website.
Scoring and Segmenting Leads
Another marketing automation trend is extending the benefits of the profiling process by ranking and segmenting each lead. Marketers will compare each lead against a typical B2B buyer and then score them based on how closely their behavioral and demographic characteristics match their existing customers. Leads with a high potential for conversion will be immediately passed onto the sales department and leads that require more nurturing will be segmented into groups based on similar needs.
Personalized Content for Lead Segments
It is too difficult to personalize lead nurturing content for every individual lead, yet personalization is necessary for real engagement. Once leads are gathered into similar groups, marketers can create more relevant and customized content directed at each group of buyers.
Greater Emphasis on Quality Content
The biggest new trend in marketing automation is creating compelling, original, and high-quality content that provides the reader with real value. Content needs to contain more than just keywords to sway savvy B2B buyers. It should also gently guide them in the right direction without sounding like a typical sales pitch.
Marketing automation has evolved to make it easier to track, monitor, and engage B2B leads throughout their buying process. It allows users to understand their leads, score them based on their potential, segment them into defined groups, and nurturing each group using relevant and information content. Changes to marketing automation`s main focus has now given it the power to convert almost every lead the software captures.
