B2B Agile Marketing with Marketing Automation

by gabriel_sales | Aug 14, 2013

This is the second part of a two-part blog series on agile marketing for B2B. For part one, click here.

In the first half of this blog series, we explained that B2B agile marketing starts with research and observation. By looking at industry data, market reports and your competition, you get an understanding of the overall landscape you are trying to sell in. Taking that into consideration, you then listen to your current customer-base and your prospects to understand how they view their problem and what they want from a solution.

You can listen to your prospects and customers directly and indirectly. Using the direct approach, you can call them, email them or ask them to take an online survey. When using a direct approach, you should ask questions focused on experience (i.e. “Was this helpful in your research of Problem X?” “What could we have done better to improve your experience?”).  You can do indirect research for agile marketing with marketing automation. Using a marketing automation platform, you can observe and track prospects’ online behaviors to give you information regarding the effectiveness of specific campaigns or pieces of content. For example, you could determine that a specific email had a 20% better click-through rate than any other email you’ve sent out.

Using the information you gather from the industry and your own internal efforts, the next step in agile marketing is to refine your messaging and tactics. It is important to remember that with agile marketing, change happens at an incremental level. This means that if a white paper you sent out had a low download rate, you should try changing the title or description before you rewrite the entire thing. The point is to make small improvements quickly, not to start over from scratch every quarter.

Testing is another important aspect of agile marketing and is another place where marketing automation can be extremely valuable. In order to ensure the modifications you’ve made to your strategy and tactics are effective, you should test them with a small audience. For example, if you are going to blast an email campaign to 5,000 people, send it to 250 people first as a test group. Using marketing automation for agile marketing, you can look at things like download, click-through or response rates. If the numbers are where you want them to be, you can send out the rest of the blast. If they aren’t, you know it is time to go back to the drawing board and have saved yourself from sending ineffective marketing to thousands.

When done correctly, agile marketing with marketing automation allows you to create marketing content and execute marketing campaigns with greater efficiency and less risk. Because your decisions are based on research and measurement rather than abstract belief, your marketing efforts become more effective and less labor-intensive, which means less work for more money!

For more on the benefits of agile marketing with marketing automation, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

B2B Agile Marketing – What is Agile Marketing?

by gabriel_sales | Aug 14, 2013

This is part one of a two-part blog series on agile marketing for B2B.

If you are a B2B marketer, there is a good chance your current marketing strategy and tactics are slightly different than they were a year ago. They might even be different than they were six months ago.

These type of fast-paced adjustments reveal an underlying movement in the world of marketing toward greater adaptability and agility. “Agile marketing” is the new buzzword floating through the B2B blogosphere, and in order to stay ahead of the game, you need to know what it is and how to do it.

“Agility means that you are faster than your competition. Agile time frames are measured in weeks and months, not years.” ~ Michael Hugos

For B2B marketing, agile marketing is ability to observe your industry, listen to your market, and look at internal metrics in order to quickly respond with incremental modifications to your strategy and tactics. It’s really about using observations and data to constantly refine your process based on your overall goals. This is most easily done using marketing automation, which gives you a “behind-the-scenes” view of your sales and marketing process from start to finish.

B2B agile marketing starts with research and observation. By looking at industry data, market reports and your competition, you get an understanding of the overall landscape you are trying to sell in. Taking that into consideration, you then listen to your current customer-base and your prospects to understand how they view their problem and what they want from a solution.

For the second half of this blog series click here.

For an in-depth look at why agile marketing is now a required strategy to stay competitive, you can download our white paper on “New Rules for B2B Sales & Marketing in 2013”.