You will learn how I became a fan of marketing automation , how good content marketing helped me mature towards the final decision, and what I would do differently and what I am proud of today.
The article is subjective, but not sponsored , so if I provide the names of products or manufacturers, I do it only out of the belief that such information may be useful to you.
A few years of content marketing
campaign-userengage-1024x510 (1)
You probably know from experience that in B2B purchasing cuba business email list processes can last even a dozen or so months. Mine lasted several years. I first encountered inbound marketing and marketing automation around 2009. I listened to a presentation by a B2B marketing expert who showed tools and methods of working with clients that I thought were yet to be created. It turned out that hundreds of companies, mainly in the US, used lead nurturing, segmentation, content marketing and it brought surprisingly good results.
The American market was then saturated with traditional marketing activities and companies were feverishly searching for new, more effective methods of B2B marketing. In Poland at that time, these traditional methods worked quite effectively, which is why few people were interested in marketing automation.
Fortunately, Google was already on the market and had quite an interesting set of results for the phrase marketing automation. Reading blogs, downloading e-books, participating in webinars, I became the subject of the most advanced, automated content marketing activities because they were conducted by the producers of marketing automation tools.
Only that it was Content Marketing with a capital "C". The information was selected to first familiarize me with basic concepts such as: inbound marketing, lead nurturing, digital body language, lead scoring and many others. Product information was kind of in the background. Since the information was very valuable to me, I shared my data in return, building my own lead scoring.
I can honestly confirm that 90% of the theoretical knowledge I have acquired about marketing automation comes from marketing materials from the manufacturers of these tools. For me, this is the absolute pinnacle of content marketing – sharing knowledge for free that customers are willing to pay for. Then I bought probably all the books on the subject, but I did not read anything in them that was not at least briefly discussed in e-books, blogs or podcasts by the manufacturers of marketing automation software.
I took advantage of the opportunity
opportunity-1024x576
During my education, I received an offer to create a B2B marketing department at Samsung and I thought it would be great to build it based on modern tools and contemporary knowledge of B2B marketing. Literally after a few months, I learned that the headquarters was considering implementing marketing automation and was looking for a local office that would test it on its own skin. My skin had been ready for such a test for a long time, which is why the Polish branch of Samsung became the first country in Europe and probably the second in the world to implement marketing automation principles and tools. The choice fell on Eloqua, which belongs to Oracle. I will immodestly add that I contributed to this, because it was Eloqua marketers who shared their knowledge with me for several years, patiently waiting for the time to sell. They waited, because instead of bombarding me with offers and discounts, they made sure that I became a perfectly educated customer.
