Buyer Engagement with Marketing Automation

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a system, often a SaaS solution (i.e. software as a service), for developing, implementing and automating online marketing campaigns. It enables you to increase the effectiveness of your marketing operations. For instance, it can help you create and send mailings, and automate follow-up with all your leads.

What’s more, marketing automation also enables you to measure the results of your marketing activities, as well as your marketing ROI. It results in maximum marketing efficiency, improved collaboration between marketing and sales, higher lead conversion and a rise in revenue.

Engage your buyer with marketing automation

So how does marketing automation help you better connect with prospects and customers? Let’s face it – no one wants to receive irrelevant or meaningless e-mails, whitepapers, articles or other content. If the information you’re sending does not align with the needs and interests of your target group, you’ll likely see low open, download, and consumption rates. And that’s a huge barrier when it comes to engaging your target audience in meaningful dialogues and building relationships. With marketing automation, you can identify what matters to prospects and customers and send relevant, compelling information, offers and content.

The importance of accurate target group segmentation

Real relevance and true engagement all start with accurate segmentation of your target group. Most marketers base their segmentation on persona information, including job title, company size, industry and turnover. The problem is that this limited segmentation (also called one-dimensional segmentation) focuses on the attributes that matter most to your company.

What you’re not taking into account are crucial questions, such as what are our prospective buyers’ biggest challenges? Is this campaign relevant to them at this point in time? Can we provide a solution to help them achieve their goals? By failing to address these issues, you likely send out information aimed at the masses. While you may manage to engage some promising buyers, you’re likely missing out on the opportunity to connect with many more.

The solution is to add a second dimension to your segmentation: previously registered engagement, or behavioral data. For instance, which web pages did the prospect visit or which content is bringing buyers back to consume more information? Moreover, you can review the information and content that is accelerating movement through the buying journey and triggering a purchase.

By adding this behavioral data to your demographic records, you can more granularly segment your target audience. In turn, you can establish a more relevant communication flow, sending the information that matters most to that prospect at that given point in the buying process.

How to engage your target audience with marketing automation 

With marketing automation enabling you to monitor the content consumption behavior of your prospects and clients, 1-to-1 marketing is now within your reach. In other words, you can truly engage every single individual within your target group with a fitting, made-to-measure campaign. Using campaign flows, you can ensure that every interaction with a potential customer is a meaningful one based on an earlier interaction, whether with your website, through an email, or with someone in your company.

Consider this scenario: an HR manager wants to know more about e-learning as a flexible training strategy and your company is a training institute. The prospective buyer’s first ‘engagement’ on your website is filling out a form to download your e-book on this subject. Your marketing automation system could be configured to send a follow-up email to him featuring a case study highlighting how an HR manager in an organization similar to his benefited from e-learning.

If he downloads this, you can then invite him to register for a webinar about your solution. In this way, you retain his attention and take him through the buying process step by step. At the same time, you can configure your marketing automation system to send the most fitting follow-up content to other prospective buyers based on their distinct job titles, organization size, online behaviors and more.

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