B2B companies are increasingly occupied with the automation of marketing and sales. In an interview with Springer Professional, Springer authors Marc Gasser and Laura Mäder reveal what is important, why content plays an important role and how faux pas can be avoided.
Marc Gasser is an IT entrepreneur and has been digitizing the marketing and sales processes of technology companies for 20 years. He is the managing director of Pedalix GmbH and an Innosuisse expert in promoting innovation in Switzerland. Laura Mäder is a copywriter. For several years she has been advising and working in B2B companies as an expert for content experience along the customer journey.
Marc Gasser/Laura Maeder
Springer Professional: At least since the pandemic, sustainable sales growth without high investments in resources has been in demand. How can automation help B2B entrepreneurs gain a competitive advantage?
Laura Mäder: An automated lead management process requires qualitative and informative content and regularity so that B2B companies can position themselves sustainably. With content, you stand out from the competition, for example, through unique market surveys in which you explain a new trend very comprehensively. We call this hero content. This is broken down into many small chunks (e.g. website posts) and distributed weekly via Linkedin, e-mail marketing or YouTube – always with a reference to the hero content, of course. The repetitive distribution of content can be automated and means that the company is top-of-mind with the target group when the willingness to buy is right.
Give us insights into your experiences from over 100 B2B digitization projects: What prevents companies from pushing forward with the development of their digital marketing and sales processes?
Marc Gasser: Product marketing for B2B companies is complex, so it requires know-how and time. However, companies often do not want to invest these resources. Most of them therefore leave it alone or start somewhere without making a clear plan beforehand. The result: ad hoc marketing campaigns and haphazard marketing automation. These quick fixes are often not only ineffective, they also cost a lot of money.
Laura Mäder: We often observe that the marketing strategy of B2B companies has weak points right from the start: the target groups are vague and the messaging is incomprehensible because it is overloaded with technical terms and meaningless words such as “innovative”, “quality leadership” or “customer-oriented “. In order to establish a functioning marketing and sales process at all, you have to start at the very beginning.
A digital B2B roadmap has emerged from your work. What exactly can entrepreneurs achieve with this step-by-step guide?
Marc Gasser: You manage to largely automate your marketing and sales process. Experience has shown that this process takes six months and includes three phases:
- Planning,
- experiments and
- scaling.
The first phase is about analyzing existing customers, developing the messaging and product positioning, and finding the right hook, the hero content. Phase two then runs experiments to test, adjust, and try out the messaging and product positioning. The final phase is to build on what worked and build repeatability through marketing automation workflows.
For such workflows, content is an important foundation of how you write in your book. Why is it so important to you?
Marc Gasser: Most users – some studies assume more than 97 percent – are not ready to buy, but first research online and want to find out more. Accordingly, it is important that companies provide relevant content and position themselves as experts in order to be top-of-mind with the leads when the willingness to buy is there.
Laura Mäder: However, expertise doesn’t just mean talking about the product. Unfortunately, we observe this “product infatuation” again and again in B2B companies: All content revolves around the product, its specifications and designs, with the most important thing, namely the customer, being forgotten. But technical jargon does not create trust. This is particularly important for complex and expensive products, which we often deal with in the B2B area.
How do you create this trust?
Marc Gasser: On the one hand through relevant, informative content. According to a study by Salesforce, 68 percent of B2B marketers were already using automation in 2020 to regularly provide contacts with informative content on this journey. On the other hand, also via so-called preliminary products such as a workshop. In this way, the customer gets to know the company and the way it works for a significantly lower amount and gains trust.
What is the effect of working with automated processes related to content, lead management, etc.?
Marc Gasser: Automation helps to focus on the essentials: Tasks can be carried out faster, more efficiently and often more precisely than if employees had to do them manually. But it’s not about automating everything. That’s not the goal. Automation should make routine tasks obsolete and not employees. They should be able to take care of tasks where they can really add value, such as strategy development. Another advantage: Automation inevitably requires the breaking down of silo structures, be it across teams, such as sales and marketing having to work together, or with regard to data storage and use. Only then can automation lead to success.
