We all know from personal experience that audiences today tune out irrelevant information. It's not only that attention spans are shorter. As a consumer yourself, you know that your attention is a valuable commodity. You expect the companies you deal with to earn access to it.

Your B2B buyers are in exactly the same position. They're extremely busy people with lots of demands on their time. They're looking for someone who not only understands their needs, but can become a partner in helping them to solve their problems.

That's where inbound marketing comes in.

Instead of wasting precious resources on uninterested audiences, inbound focuses on people who have shown an interest in your business’s products or services.

Inbound marketing creates a framework that focuses your attention on proving why you should be the top choice for their business over the competition. It helps attract your ideal customers, gives them reasons to engage, and reasons to love doing business with you.

Thanks to technology, it has become easier than ever to set up efficient and streamlined inbound marketing strategies. It’s why 82% of marketers plan to invest in technology components in some way during 2022.

With marketing automation and the right inbound marketing strategy, you can create the unique and frictionless customer experiences B2B buyers want. Combined, they drive lead generation and qualification. They help to retain and expand your accounts. And they create brand advocates from your customers.

Why is Marketing Automation Important to Inbound Marketing?

Marketing automation is the technology that drives your inbound marketing strategy.

It goes further than automating repetitive tasks and streamlining your marketing machine. Yes, marketing automation can save you time. It can help you to be more efficient and target a wider array of channels. But, more important - marketing automation tracks interactions across the whole customer journey and provides greater insight into your audience.

It's that insight that takes your inbound marketing strategy to new heights. With it, you have the data to experiment and iterate. You can refine your targeting, expand your brand’s reach, attract new customers, and engage with customers on a deeper level.

Implementing a fully realised inbound marketing strategy requires you to have marketing automation software that, at a minimum, allows you to:

• Set up dynamic landing pages and lead capture forms.

• Track interactions across all marketing channels for lead scoring and qualification.

• Centralise customer and account information for your team to access easily.

• Create SEO-infused valuable content.

• Automatically segment your leads, and set up mailing lists and workflows.

• Generate analysis and reports for your marketing and sales teams.

Marketing technology can take one of two forms. You might choose tofind a stack of tools that will work well together, perhaps creating integrations with other third-party software.

Alternatively, there are integrated marketing automation platforms. These provide the majority of the capabilities you need to run and track your digital marketing from one centralised space.

When doing your research, make a note of the integrations available. Also pay attention to which social media platforms are included, as well as any limits on the plan.

Let’s look at how you can apply marketing automation to the three stages of inbound marketing.

Marketing Automation for Attracting Audiences

The buyers' journey starts with a person who is looking to solve a problem. Like most people, the first thing your buyer does when they have a question is to start searching.

By creating relevant content, your company can be in the right place at the right time. Use search and social to provide answers that help them to understand the issue more fully and start framing solutions.

Keyword Research Tools

How do you make sure your content can be found on search engines? By doing some keyword research.

Using keyword research tools helps you discover the search phrases and questions people are using. The data can tell you what keywords people are using depending on their search intent. You can also discover the search terms your competitors are ranking for.

Your research can provide much-needed assistance if you’re struggling to come up with relevant content topics. You can uncover new topics and spark ideas to develop your content strategy around.

Content Calendar

Creating valuable, search optimised content once in a blue moon isn't going to shift the dial on your inbound marketing strategy. To have an impact, you need to be creating and promoting your content on a regular basis.

A content calendar provides your marketing team with a plan for doing just that.

An editorial calendar serves two functions. First, it helps your team to plan out their marketing campaigns and schedule social media and blog posts.

Search engines favour outlets that frequently update with high-quality content. Using a content calendar helps your team to stay ahead of the curve and to establish the consistent posting schedule the algorithms prefer. They can spot gaps more easily, and use automation to repurpose existing content to fill out your campaign schedule.

Second, a content calendar provides a hub for co-ordinating the actions your team needs to take. From developing content ideas, to moving a post through the production process to publication. Having a central place to manage all of the people and tasks involved in content creation keeps your team's projects on track. It also increases your team's chances of meeting the high-quality expectations of potential customers. 

Social Media Management

Marketing automation can also help with social media marketing. We've already seen how you can centralise the management of content production and scheduling. This applies to social media scheduling too, removing the need to hop between accounts to get full visibility of your activity.

Social media amplification tools help your team to increase the reach and impact of your content. One way of doing this is to use AI to automatically generate social posts and images from your blog posts. You can also set up notifications to encourage employees to share and interact with posts when you publish something new.

The key to any successful marketing effort is listening to your customers' voice and reflecting back what they want to see. It's an area where many brands struggle. A unified social dashboard helps with social listening.

Tuning in means you can start initiate contact with your audience by answering questions and addressing issues. The goal should having in-depth conversations that build brand loyalty and provide more precise insight into improving the customer experience.

Marketing Automation for Engaging With Visitors

The same marketing automation tools that help you attract customers also help with engagement. At this stage, your potential customers are researching and evaluating solutions. They want to know if your offer matches their needs and requirements.

They also need to build a business case. B2B buyers often work within a team of buyers, or have multiple stakeholders to answer to. Part of your job is to answer the teams' questions and help your contact become an advocate for your business internally.

Engaging Content

There are lots of ways to get someone to give you their email address. The standard is to offer valuable content, but you need to consider what format will encourage your customer to engage.

Interactive content provides another option. Calculators and quizzes help your visitors to answer their own questions and improve their knowledge. Provide a basic level of detail on completion, with an invitation to sign up and find out more.

For example, a recruitment consultant could provide a calculator helping companies and candidates to determine salary ranges based on experience and location.

You can also use chatbots and online booking forms to open a dialogue.

Identify every point at which your customer has a reason to give you their contact details and make the most of them. Use progressive profiling to capture different details and build your profile each time they register for something new.

Lead Capture

Tracking customer interactions across your website and social platforms creates a wealth of information. Setting up opportunities for customers to go one step further and provide information does so much more.

Your CRM centralises all of the data from across your online platform, and makes it easily accessible to your sales and marketing teams.

When everyone has a better understanding of the customer, everyone wins.

The data you collect is useful throughout the customer journey. It points sales toward high-priority leads and provide the insights that help to seal the deal. It also allows you to map buyer personas and segment your audience for better targeting and personalisation.

Email Marketing

There's a reason why every company is so keen to get your email address. Email is essential to any digital marketing strategy.

Email can pull off a lot of different marketing tricks.

For one, it's a great way to inform contacts about other content available through other marketing channels. You can point them towards a new blog post you've just uploaded. You can let them know about a video series available to watch on YouTube. Whether this content is openly accessible or exclusive to subscribers, you can tailor your recommendations based on what you know about your customer.

Automation helps you to personalise your emails further, for example by:

• Autogenerating a personal greeting that uses the contact’s name to address them.

• Send out online event invites based on a user’s time zone, and follows up depending on whether they attended or not.

• Using supplemental information about their industry or interests to fill out the body of the email.

• Adding contextual CTAs, for example after a customer makes a purchase or signs up for a newsletter.

Benefits of Dynamic Content

Many marketing automation platforms allow you to generate dynamic content on emails, landing pages, and web pages easily using a simple editor interface. Dynamic content adds an extra level of personalisation to your online presence based on user data.

You can update the copy, images, and call to action (CTA) on your landing page depending on the reader's industry. For example, your landing page might serve images of medical personnel if your visitor works in the pharmaceutical industry. But if your prospect is from a creative agency, they see graphic designers.

You can also change elements in an email campaign to take the user's interest in your offering into account. A lead's interactions wmight suggest they're interested in the convenience your solution offers. Another might be more concerned with technical specifications. Dynamic content allows you to speak to the needs of both of these people in the same email template.

Automation Workflows

Marketing automation allows you to visualise the buyers' journey and create workflows that guide prospects towards conversion.

Map out the paths your customer can take and outline how you can help them at each step along the way. Use workflows to create a conversation and help nurture a deepening relationship. As your knowledge of the customer grows, you can deliver messaging that is more relevant, triggered by actions they take.

You might set up an automation to trigger a series of emails offering content related to a prospects' interest in a particular service page. From the customer's perspective, they're receiving great customer service and more information relevant to their needs. From yours, you get to delve deeper into their requirements and understand their level of interest based on subsequent interactions.

Throughout the process, use marketing automation to keep track of each prospect's level of interest in your company. Lead scoring will help your teams to understand when a lead is ready for a sales conversation. The marketing automation platform can even trigger notifications to sales reps when that threshold is reached to prompt them to take action.

Marketing Automation for Delighting Customers

The first purchase made by a customer represents your first opportunity to turn them into loyal repeat consumers who rave about your brand.

Generating an enthusiastic response can pay off when your customers become your biggest advocates. Encourage them to spread the word about their positive experience in the online business community.

Marketing automation helps at this stage of the inbound process too. Understanding what motivates different buyers helps you curate unique experiences that help them feel more connected to your brand.

Onboarding and Implementation

The onboarding process sets the tone for your future relationship with a customer. Focusing on customer satisfaction and success at this stage can ensure customer retention and expansion of the account down the road.

Look for opportunities to drip feed content that helps to orientate and educate new customers. This could be as simple a setting up a welcome email sequence for new customers. You could provide links to a knowledgebase on their purchase. You might choose to go further and create an ongoing programme of customer education with regular webinars and a customer community.

Tracking for Insight

The information you collect throughout the inbound marketing process should inform how you follow up with customers. Collecting data so you can manipulate people into doing business with you is creepy. But using that data to provide a better service and experience is a win-win for everyone.

The CRM capabilities of your marketing automation can identify your most enthusiastic customers. Reward their loyalty with VIP treatment. Encourage them to spread the word by offering outstanding service (and maybe a referral code).

It's simple. If your company has an upcoming event that aligns with a customer's interests, send them an invitation and reminder as the date approaches. When they attend, send them a note of appreciation. If they're unable to make it, thank them for their interest and offer them a replay.

Do what you can to show you appreciate their support. Don't leave renewals to chance - send service reminders and invite them to book in to ask any questions they might have. You might be able to reward loyalty with a discount, or early access to new products and services.

Look for opportunities to tell existing customers about your other services. To you this is a cross-sell or an upsell that expands their account. To them, you could be saving them a job of researching just the solution they needed.

And don't forget - continually interrogate the data to find areas of improvement in your inbound marketing strategy. Add more of what's working and put low-performing efforts under review.

Better Inbound Marketing With 1827

Marketing automation is critical to every stage of your inbound marketing strategy. You can target your audiences, craft unique user experiences, and increase loyalty among your customer base.

Learn more about how we can help your company achieve its marketing goals. Book in for a conversation and a demo of our marketing automation solution.