One-size-fits-all marketing strategies carried over from B2C seldom translate in the niche world of B2B. Therefore, pursuing communications tools shown to grow sales is an essential part of a cost-effective B2B marketing plan. One such tool is marketing automation. But leveraging this tool effectively takes know-how. Learn how your company can benefit from marketing automation in this six-part series.
Question 2: How Can Marketing Automation Work for Me?
In this industry, we wear many hats as we are consumers, suppliers, sellers, etc. As consumers, we experience marketing automation nearly every day. As product professionals, marketing automation is quickly becoming a larger part of how we engage suppliers. Let’s take a look at the most effective way to use marketing automation to sell more of your products.
Drive Traffic.
First, you need to drive traffic to your site. To do this, you’ll want to rely on organic traffic to drive potential customers to your website. Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your website via a search engine (this excludes traffic generated by paid search ads). For example, below we have a user that has entered “Fuel Dispenser Filters” and decided to click a paid search ad through Google AdWords.
Direct Traffic to Action-Oriented Landing Page.
Once a customer clicks the ad, they are taken to a specific landing page on the advertising company’s e-commerce site. The goal of this page, which includes educational, value-added content, is to help visitors specify which product they need by clicking on content related to that product. Unfortunately, this customer may not place an order on their first visit…
Plant Reminders.
In that case, it is possible to get the visitor back to your site if your company’s strategy involves remarketing ads (which it should!). These ads allow you to reach visitors who have previously come to your landing page as they browse other sites on the web. A week after their first visit, this customer clicks a remarketing ad.
Capture a Sale and Additional Lead Information.
After clicking the remarketing ad to return to the landing page, the customer places an order for a certain brand of the product. At this point, we can capture the customer’s name, email, organization and brand affinity.
Send Highly Targeted Follow-up Emails.
Shortly after the order, we send a highly customized communication through marketing automation software. The email messaging speaks directly to the customer by including the customer’s name in the greeting. The imagery in the email features only the brand of product the customer purchased. This content can also provide supplementary educational content such as recommend best practices in regard to product reordering and maintenance. This approach helps to ensure the customer gets the most from their new products and helps them outline procurement schedules.
To promote regular product reorders and ensure you are fresh in customer’s minds, consider using marketing automation to automate the distribution of brief, educational follow-ups to customers at 30, 60, and 90 days after their initial purchase. These communications should always include customized greetings and content specific to their brand affinity.
Next Up: Part 3 – How Do I Create Efficiencies Through Marketing Automation?