B2B marketing can be a time-consuming process. So wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to automate everything, to make things run smoother and faster and help free up time for the more creative tasks of running your business?
That’s why there’s so much excitement about marketing automation – it’s a concept that broadly applies to the ability to automate most of the marketing tasks that take too long to take care of. Here are five ways the marketing bots could transform your B2B sales:
1 – Combine all your charts and data into one easy-to-use visual
Tools like SearchFuse are great at helping you scrape all the marketing data out there and transform it into a form you can use. In the case of SearchFuse, it means combining all the best SEO tools to manage, optimize, organize, monitor and report on a single SEO campaign. Ultimately, you’re able to see how well you’re doing on search, and all the data-scraping and analysis is handled for you by the bots.
2 – Automate your email follow-ups
The goal is to turn emails into conversations, where emails from potential prospects and customers are easily replied to, so that you don’t have the stress of having to reply to hundreds of people. That’s where vendors like Hatchbuck can help – they’re experienced at automating marketing activities so that customers eventually turn into fans. You can see at a glance who’s reading your emails, and who might be ready to buy.
3 – Turn website visits into conversations
How many times have you ever visited a website, and had a chat box pop up next to you, or had some message flash on the screen that was relevant to what you were looking for online? Companies are getting better and better at capturing these visitors before they venture off somewhere else. You can handle this easily with marketing automation.
4 – Handle your email drip campaigns
Every “drip” campaign is a way to keep in touch with a potential customer. But since the potential payoff can be so far out into the future or so limited (in terms of the number of people responding), most companies simply lack the manpower to send out lots of emails after an event, or before an event, or during a major sale. With new email automation tools, though, you can let the bots handle these “drip” campaigns for you.
5 – Create social media content on the fly
The key to a successful social media campaign is actually having the type of content that’s worthy of being posted on a regular basis. So take a play from the playbook of media companies, who use bots to post articles on Twitter and Facebook, or to auto-reply to people who are following them online. Imagine having every new press release, automatically posted to Twitter, or having the announcement of an upcoming webinar added to your social networks, enabling people to sign up.
The best part of all this, of course, is when the customer doesn’t realize it’s a bot doing all this. It should seem so organic, so seamless, that it has the personal touch to it. And that’s what makes it so effective – it gets you talking and conversing with customers at a time when you may not be able to do it yourself!
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.