Accelerate the B2B Buyer Journey with Marketing Automation, Part 2
An effective content marketing programme depends on how well inbound channels distribute content and capture user data. In Part 2 of our marketing automation series, we dive into how to get the most from the core elements of content marketing.
In Part 1 of Accelerating the B2B Buyer Journey with Marketing Automation, we introduced the idea of content marketing as integrative and interdependent axes.
In this visualisation, the core elements of content marketing sit along the X-axis, and inbound channels stack on the Y. The call and response, ebb and flow, between the two groups are the lifeblood of an effective content programme.
The four core elements of content marketing are mechanisms for attracting an audience and moving them through the customer experience:
Engaging content for each stage in the customer journey
A focused landing page with one clearly defined goal
Marketing automation to personalise the customer experience
Painless booking to quicken sales
Without these elements, inbound marketing efforts are futile because there is no content to distribute to your audience and no process for capturing information about them. Likewise, without inbound tactics, your core elements exist in an unseen vacuum where no one can benefit from their value.
In Part 2 of the series, we’ll walk through seven ways that potential customers can find you, learn more about you, and start to build a commercial relationship:
Browsing the web
Visiting your own website
Using Search
LinkedIn
YouTube
Social Media
Email
If someone has already visited your site, it becomes possible to show them ads that will encourage them back to visit again. This is remarketing and you have probably experienced it when you have been shopping online. This is an approach which is easily accessible to all businesses and a great way to remind people about your company and for them to discover more about what you have to offer.
As soon as a customer, or a client’s customer, engages with your content they enter your marketing automation pipeline. Marketing automation enables a highly personalised customer experience across organic channels and is one of the core elements of content marketing discussed in Part 1.
Automation platforms also allow for deep personalisation with ads. Just like email segments, user behaviour drives automated remarketing ads. You can use remarketing ads in three ways:
Retargeting Dynamic Lists
Lead Generation
Account Based Marketing
Retargeting with Dynamic Lists
You can use retargeting lists to recommend related content to users who have already taken action on your site. For example, if a user downloads a pdf, that action is noted on a dynamic retargeting list. Every individual action can change the user’s attributes on that list. And every change dictates the next ad they’ll see. No matter the attribute, dynamic retargeting enables an increasingly personalised (and completely automated) ad experience.
Lead Generation
Remarketing for lead generation uses the data you’ve collected in your CRM and retargeting lists to find lookalike audiences. While a dynamic retargeting list brings your current audience back to you with more personalised suggestions, you can also use this information to find new audiences with the same attributes. Marketing automation amasses a vast database of customers and characteristics that you can use to develop high-converting paid campaigns on social media and Google.
Account Based Marketing
Marketing automation and retargeting are especially valuable tactics for an account based marketing strategy. Imagine how much easier a personal outreach program to a target account would be if you knew in advance the exact problems, questions, and services that were of greatest interest. Account Based Marketing (ABM) keeps your firm top of mind for target accounts. And like consumer remarketing, you’re able to see what is most important to the account contact by their engagements with your site, social, and ads.
Remarketing ads are a great way to keep your products and services familiar and relevant. But ads aren’t free. However it’s totally free for you to add promotional messages to your own site, yet few B2B and professional services firms think to do it.
If you have a great webinar coming up, or a brilliant new research report, it’s a good idea to make your own version of a banner ad to promote it on your home page and on other key pages of your site. Done with sophistication, this can greatly help your visitors to discover fresh and useful content that may be the basis of a burgeoning business relationship.
Marketing automation tools capture a steady stream of powerful user data that you can use to build relationships. As a user moves around your website—using the navigation, reading landing pages, searching for topics—the automation tool is capturing all of it. All of these touchpoints are compiled into a user profile that is available via CRM. The more touchpoints that a user has with your business, the more robust that profile becomes.
An individual’s journey through your site is registered as their own personal ‘life of the lead’, and it can tell you a lot about what’s important to them.
This becomes particularly important when you’re preparing for phone calls and virtual meetings with prospects. Gone are the days of pure discovery calls. With user profiles from marketing automation, you know exactly which aspects of your services or products interest your customer the most. You know which formats of content they prefer (e.g., PDF or video), what questions they have, and even how their thought process unfolds.
Paying attention to how people, individually and in aggregate, navigate your site and what they search for can tell you a lot about how they think about the questions they are trying to answer for themselves. Paying attention to this data will create new opportunities to create more relevant content, and reveal ways that the customer journey and be optimised for the visitor and with a view to conversion rate optimisation.
The customer experience often starts with content, and customers usually find it via organic search.
Good content is a blend of being found and being worth finding. To create good content, you must write for humans but remember that a search engine’s bots will have to find you first. If the robot can’t find you, it can’t ferry your article to the eager, waiting eyes of the reader. Luckily, Google’s bots become more sophisticated every day. As long as you’re creating the best content to satisfy a user’s search intent, Google will make sure you’re found.
Long-form content should also be grounded in rigorous keyword research and good on-site SEO. Compare your content with the best out there and strive to create something better. With one piece of high-quality, SEO-driven content, a customer enters your funnel and marketing automation platform, and you enter their trusted sphere of knowledge.
We’ve found LinkedIn to be the most valuable B2B inbound channel.
Paid LinkedIn Ads
There are four types of paid ad options on LinkedIn. Sponsored Content and Sponsored Messaging allow you to engage with a tightly targeted group of prospects directly in their newsfeed or messenger inbox. Text ads can be an effective PPC format. And Dynamic Ads provide potential customers with the most customised personalised experience.
There really is nothing you can’t do with LinkedIn’s search and sales navigator tools. Paid ads on the B2B platform are generally more expensive than other paid social advertising. But the specificity with which you can target users is unparalleled and significantly reduces the risk of wasted ad dollars.
Direct Outreach
The granularity with which you can find professionals on LinkedIn is precisely why direct outreach on the platform can work so well. You can find prospective customers, initiate the connection, and nurture the lead by sharing specific content based on the targeting parameters.
Once you connect and confirm the prospect’s interest in a particular topic or resource, they enter your marketing automation pipeline. From now on, you’ll know what is most important to the customer and be able to reengage them at the most timely moments with the most relevant resources.
Quora
If one of your business goals is to position your brand as a thought leader, Quora might be the most essential B2B inbound channel that you’re not using.
Unlike LinkedIn, Quora is a vibrant forum that’s driven by queries. People ask questions and other people answer them. Every successful business solves a problem that someone else has. Quora offers one of the most direct ways to find people looking for the exact solution your company provides. In a way, the forum offers content marketers the ideal venue to provide value, which is the cornerstone of content marketing in the first place.
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet. Google’s “other” engine makes the platform an ideal inbound channel. While content creation requires something a little different from creating for Google, SEO rules remain the same.
There is a big opportunity for B2B content marketing on YouTube, supporting every stage of the customer journey. Optimise your videos according to platform best practices for ads and organic content and ensure that the video description and tags are also optimised for on-page SEO. These descriptions are really important since they are an important part of what YouTube uses to deliver video search results. Increasingly, the contents of the video itself is used too, so a clear and search-optimised script can really help here.
If you’re publishing content on your website, you should be promoting that content on every channel that you own (and many that you don’t). Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the most important platforms on which you should maintain an active presence. But we know how time-consuming this can be.
One way you can get the most out of using social media for B2B marketing is to automate the bulk of it, leaving your team with time to be responsive and engaged. Automated social media keeps your feed fresh without requiring bandwidth from you. Instead of painstakingly crafting short copy for each platform, automation lets you publish a blog and know that your social channels will promote it well.
Social automation tools can excerpt notable sections from blogs and publish them across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram throughout the year. When your owned channels are consistently posting evergreen content, it leaves you with more freedom for the timing of other campaigns. When you’re not worried about feeding the social machine, campaigns can happen at the optimal time for the topic, event, or partnership.
Once your evergreen content is synced with your content marketing efforts, you can focus your attention to cultivating your presence on the platforms that work best for you.
Marketing automation software took root in email marketing. Audience segmentation is a cornerstone of this inbound channel. Indeed, once you start segmenting, you have endless opportunities to test reengagements. By extracting behaviour characteristics from your subscriber list, you can isolate interests to build complex audience profiles. From there, you can build out email sequences to engage them in the most personalised ways.
Two of the most effective ways to use email for marketing are with dynamic emails and the simple email signature.
Dynamic Emails
Dynamic emails work in the same way as dynamic landing pages. The image, headline, and body text change depending on who is receiving the email. It would have taken a coder many hours to develop multiple iterations of a single email even five years ago. Today, even non-developers can easily set up dynamic campaigns using a marketing automation platform and a WYSIWYG editor.
Email Signatures
You can also use software to automate email signatures to promote new content. It sounds simple but think about how many emails you personally send every day. Now multiply that number by a hundred or a thousand for emails outbound from your business. That’s impressive reach. You can do thing manually, but it makes more sense to automate the process. Software can target which content should appear in a signature depending on factors such as the sender’s job role or to fit the timing of a particular campaign. And it works similarly to social media automation in that you create the settings once and the software creates a promotional calendar based on parameters that you set.
In Conclusion: Develop a Campaign Mentality
The customer journeys described here and in Part 1 of this two-part series show how content marketing, marketing automation, and paid advertising can work together with your own site and social platforms to build customer relationships. The example of gated content used here applies, with only a few changes, to promoting webinars or launching a new product. The important thing is to think expansively, creatively and strategically about your content, how your customers and prospects can experience it, and how it can be promoted.
At 1827 Marketing, we often think about each piece of our client’s content as a mini-campaign in itself. It’s not enough to just have great content if you’re not going to tell people about it, or make it easy for them to find it. This allows us to think through the entire journey of discovery, engagement and follow-up from an end-user’s perspective.
If you’d like to know more about our approach, press the ‘Book Demo’ button below to arrange a call.