Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Over the years, I have found that it’s important for any vendor to be very clear and upfront about what their solution will – or will not – do. After all, you don’t just want customers – you want happy customers that will recommend your solution to others. A good fit is vital for both the vendor and the customer.

Marketing automation and sales acceleration tools are wonderful. They can do so much:

1. Marketing automation tools enable you to launch more marketing campaigns using your existing resources.
2. Marketing automation tools enable you to generate more qualified leads.
3. Effectively manage your demand generation campaigns.
4. Automate lead segmentation, lead scoring and nurturing, making them far more efficient than manual processes.
5. Use real-time lead alerts to enable your sales team to capture leads as soon as they are ready.
6. Use anonymous visitor tracking to get a complete picture of where each lead stands and gain better visibility into their level of readiness and what exactly they are looking for.
7. Know your leads better and tailor your campaign to meet their needs and answer their particular pain points. As a result, have a higher chance of turning leads into customers.

Our customers tell us that now that they use our marketing automation tools, they can’t imagine going back to manually managing demand generation campaigns, and we know exactly what they mean.

But it’s important to remember that there’s one thing marketing automation tools will not do: they will not create content for your campaigns. A good marketing automation tool will take your great content and the leads it generates and make the most of them – using the content wisely and monitoring response more efficiently than you could ever do manually – but content creation needs to happen first.

How does one go about creating B2B content? It’s actually easier than one might think. We’ve covered B2B content creation tips in various past blog posts. The main things to remember when creating B2B content:

1. B2B customers are human

2. The Sales Pitch Is Out, The Relationship Is In

3. Give them something to talk about!

4. Listen To Your Prospects

5. Use Your Content Wisely

Create some great content first, distribute it using trackable emails, then continue using marketing automation to segment, score and nurture leads, and receive an alert when they are ready to buy.

I loved everything about this post by Jeremy Victor. What a great list to remind us how to be better – better employees, better employers, better entrepreneurs, better persons.

On the personal level, there were quite a few points there that I have added to my 2011 goals. On the professional level, I loved the focus on the customer, on the customer’s needs, and on how to make the buying experience better.

“Customers are human beings,” says Victor. “Fear, risk, uncertainty and doubt all come into play during the B2B purchasing process. Address these emotions in your content.” So true! In the B2B space, many of us are often guilty of viewing our customers as a corporation, a soulless enterprise. But even in the B2B space, our customers are people, and our content needs to address that.

It’s true that the purchasing process in the B2B space is often quite different than the buying process for consumer products, especially affordable, accessible consumer products that do not require much research. In contrast, in the B2B space, there are usually several decision-makers involved in the process, and they take their time, gathering information, doing their research, before they finally reach a decision.

But during that stretch of time from the very first contact point and until a purchase decision is made, we are dealing with human beings. As Victor so eloquently points out, they think and react like people, and when we prepare content for them – the content that we will then distribute and monitor via marketing automation tools, we should take that into consideration.

Our content should be engaging, readable and truly interesting. It can’t be dry and boring! Remember, you want people to actually read it, have some kind of an emotional or intellectual response, and – hopefully – ask for more.

As we continue to create content for different groups of prospects based on their level of readiness, we should always remember that we’re dealing with people – and our content should answer (ideally, anticipate) their questions and concerns, soothe any fears, and make only the promises we are able to keep.