Marketing Automation - further development in the B2B environment

Lead, conversion and sales increase with the help of marketing automation using ELPRO as a case study. A bachelor thesis by Cindy Hameed.

Marketing Automation was an important topic for companies in 2020. According to current forecasts, on average over 75% of B2B companies in the USA, Germany and Switzerland use marketing automation. And yet, the further development of a marketing automation strategy is still little covered in the literature.

The aim of this bachelor thesis was to determine how SMEs in the B2B environment with an already implemented marketing automation strategy can further develop their lead management and content marketing in a target-oriented manner.

In order to answer the research question, the current situation of the B2B company ELPRO was first examined by analyzing Google Analytics reports and CRM data in order to identify possible weaknesses and problem areas in lead management and marketing automation.

As a further step, a literature research and a qualitative survey of experts in the field of marketing automation were conducted. The aim was to compile an overview of measures through which B2B companies can further develop their marketing automation strategy.

The answers of the interviews show that marketing automation can become even more successful if it is integrated into the corporate strategy and thus used strategically.

Another insight is that marketing automation cannot be successful without content marketing. Here, especially the topics of content distribution and search engine marketing represent a strategic relevance for the success of marketing automation.

The research results and the literature research further show that the effectiveness of marketing automation can also be increased through the continuous optimization of processes, content and marketing activities.

A key finding here is also the increasingly important data-driven decision making. This insight is confirmed by the theory that data analysis will not only be relevant for marketing automation, but for the entire company.

Based on these findings, the implementation of data-driven decision-making is recommended as a course of action for B2B companies.

This new approach is designed to help companies optimize content management, lead management and marketing automation.

A process was developed through which the companies must first develop the objectives including KPIs and the database.

As a second step, companies can define the individual measures or content based on the database and implement them using A/B testing. The better variant should then be adopted and serve as a future basis for new content.

The last step in the process is controlling. The objectives and KPIs should be reviewed and a statement must be made as to whether the effort was worthwhile in relation to the desired return.