Marketing Automation allows companies to automate digital marketing practices such as direct email, social media, and lead nurturing to save time and resources. However, the biggest benefit is the long-term nurturing that automation provides. Automating your digital marketing not only benefits you as the marketer but also provides benefits to your customers and subscribers.

What is the Use of Marketing Automation among B2B Marketers

According to Marketo, a majority of B2B companies are still using manual methods to implement marketing tactics and nurture leads. This can be very time consuming Most marketers who considered buying a marketing automation program indicated that their biggest need is to improve marketing productivity.

Moreover, Marketo and marketing technology consultancy Software Advice also found that high tech companies are looking for marketing automation tools now, more than ever. And, across industries, over 91% of buyers surveyed were evaluating marketing automation software for the first time.

While automation programs make life easier for marketers, it only works if you take the time to learn the tool and strategy behind marketing automation.

Marketing Automation Benefits

Marketing Automation programs provide benefits to B2B marketers by improving content marketing-derived revenues or enabling revenue to be mapped back or attributed to a contact’s interactions with online content and marketing efforts.

As a result, marketers can more effectively measure campaign results and tactics and use this information to determine future campaigns and marketing tactics.

Furthermore, automating marketing tactics is also proven to increases leads, sales and revenue and is expected to do so exponentially more in the future.

Benefits of Marketing Automation cited by MarketingCharts include:

• Improved lead management and nurturing – allows you to fill your sales funnel more efficiently.
• Enhanced targeting and personalization –gives you more power when approaching your audience.
• Campaign tracking –allows for better ROI measurement and planning for the future.
• Marketing and Sales alignment – improves ROI and, let’s face it, makes everyone happier.

For more information on how you can deploy a Marketing Automation, visit: www.imarks.in

Blog posts are the first step on the conversion path as they drive prospects towards your landing pages and forms. They are also an excellent opportunity for an organisation to show thought leadership and provide unique industry insights. But, how do you attract people to your blog feed in the first place? Unless prospects have subscribed to your blog, you’ll be unable to directly notify them when your latest post is published.

So now what?

Well, don’t fret. Blogs are a fantastic demand generation tool and fit comfy at the top of the sales funnel. This means that they are most effective when targeting prospects in the research stage of their purchase. As the prospects in question may not be able to name their exact issue at this point, they are most likely using search engines to just research their pain points. And this is when blogs become highly valuable in your lead generation activity.

Firstly, get to know your prospects, leads, and customers. Find out what their concerns, issues and pain points are. Ideally, identify the business-related keywords and phrases what they are most likely to type into a search engine or did so during the early stages of their buying process. This information can be gathered by speaking to current customers, reviewing the popularity of certain phrases on Google Adwords, or analysing the source data on your marketing automation software.

Once you have this information you can begin to create engaging blog posts that focus on these keywords and phrases. Using SEO best practice it’ll be possible to ensure your blog post ranks highly on the search engine results pages for this keyword.

Now, when one of your prospects uses a search engine to research their business issues and pain points, they are likely to see one of your blog posts which directly references their query.

It’s important to remember that blog posts are not e-books. They are not meant to be 1000s of words long. They are about providing top-level insight on a particular subject and ultimately driving the reader to convert to a lead by downloading a larger piece of content.

Be sure to only focus on one keyword or phrase per blog post, as otherwise, search engines will become confused and not rank the post as highly relevant to the prospect’s search phrase. It’s also worth noting that if you are starting a new blog, each post should ideally be 1000-1500 words long. This gives the search engines a good amount of content to digest and understand, so they can rank future blog posts more accurately.

Once the blog is more established you can reduce this to between 600-1000 words, but never less than 300. If a blog post has less than 300 words, the likelihood is that the search engines won’t even bother ranking it for their results pages.

Although SEO is an excellent way to ensure your blog posts are found on the search engine results page, there are other ways to ensure the maximum number of people see your latest post. Start by sharing the title and a snippet of text on all of your social media channels.

Only write a short teaser post on social media and link the reader to your full blog post. Also, when sending a lead generation email to your database, add a link to the blog at the bottom. All of these methods will help to increase your subscription rate and build interest in your blog.

A blog is an excellent tool, but only as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign, so to ensure you generate the best results from your activity. To learn more aboutB2B sales, comment if you have any queries.

How can Blogging help you to master it in Digital Marketing?

Content Marketing:

Content marketing is the hottest skill that’s in huge demand. Content marketing is not just writing a blog post or article and publishing it online. According to Seth Godin, Content Marketing is the only marketing that remains. It has gained more attraction as more and more businesses are starting to realize the importance of it. And it is mainly because the ads are becoming inefficient by each day.

How can Blogging Help You Master Content Marketing? Really want to know!

There is three important state of matter of content marketing— planning, creation, and promotion.

Experts recommend that if you spend 40% of your time in writing the blog post, then you need to spend 60% of your time in promoting it. When it comes to promotion, you have plenty of options – social media marketing & advertising, search engine optimization & marketing, email marketing etc.

It’s how blogging helps you to master content marketing.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO is the most sought after and the most difficult skill to master. Google is tweaking its ranking algorithm 200 times a year which keeps the practitioners on their toes as the tactics that worked before could become useless at the instant Google pushes an update. When you write your blog post, you would’ve done keyword research to pick the right keyword to focus and competitor research to know what kind of content your competitors have published. Those two steps are the starting of a good SEO process.

While writing the blog post, you’ll be using the ‘target keyword’ in the right areas to improve the ranking possibilities of that article. Also, you’ll be using it in the URL and anchor texts. It is the ‘on page optimization’ part of SEO.

Once publishing the post, you’ll be reaching out to influencers to promote your blog. You’ll use social channels to promote it. You’ll also consider tactics like using PR coverage or commenting or posting the blog post link in the communities or using social bookmarking etc. Those steps are part of the ‘link building’ component of the SEO. So, while focusing on writing and promoting your blog post, you’re mastering the crucial components of SEO.

Search Engine Marketing:

If you really want to excel at blogging, you cannot just rely on the organic traffic. As it might take a while to receive the organic traffic to your new blog posts, you can leverage Google AdWords and Bing Ads to gain instant traction. Since you’ll be focusing on research or awareness keywords for ads, it won’t be costing you much. Also, you don’t have to focus only on AdWords or Bing Ads, you can try and test second tier and third tier players like 7Search, AOL search etc.

Social Media Marketing:

Social is an essential component to succeed in blogging and in earlier times blogging is considered as a social media activity because your blog posts can evoke comments, likes, and shares from the readers. To leverage social media to drive interactions, you need to learn the right time to post on social media and to craft social media posts that get likes and shares. When you do it, you’ll be learning and mastering social media marketing.

Social Media Advertising:

It’s a known factor that Facebook doesn’t want to you get much of free likes and shares and the organic reach for the posts are diminishing by the day. Many bloggers have failed to recognize this change in promoting in social media as this adapt to it and it has cost them, robbing many of their readers and the shares from them. This opens up the path to learn and master social media advertising.

Integrated Digital Marketing:

Integrated digital marketing depends on how well you’re using the marketing channels and tactics in collaboration to achieve the best results. Using two or more marketing channels and tactics to achieve results is termed as integrated digital marketing. Then it will truly be focusing on driving the best results to the blog, you’ll be automatically mastering the integrated digital marketing skill.

Email Marketing:

List building and blogging go hand in hand and any successful blogger will try to focus on it. It will be monetizing the blog, they use email to support their revenue generation plans. Keeping in mind about the readers to updated with the latest blog posts through weekly newsletters, engaging readers with email only contents and promoting products and services through emails are few of the email tactics commonly used by the bloggers as these are the most important components of email marketing.

Marketing Automation:

Most savvy bloggers automate their marketing. When a new blog post is published, it is automatically posted on their social media profiles, submitted to ping servers and added to the sitemap. Also, they segment and show relevant content and ads to their readers based on the source of the visit. With email automation, they can tag, segment and promote relevant content and offers.

Analytics:

You need to know about your blog readers – where do they come from, what do they consume, where do they leave, how much time they spend and what actions they take and analytics tools like Google helps you with it. Learning about analytics tools is important for a blogger to improve defaults by publishing more blog posts on the topics that get more readership, likes, and shares. Every good blogger will be a pro-analytics user.

Now I’m quite sure about it that you can become a digital marketing expert through blogging. Isn’t it! What your opinion about this.