How to Do More for B2B Marketing Clients, in Less Time

It’s hard to find a B2B marketing agency that doesn’t rely on at least one technology to scale its operations and streamline collaboration. In fact, most digital agencies probably use at least three such platforms – if not more. These solutions are designed to connect the dots between content marketing, sales processes and customer engagement, and help you organize and automate time-consuming projects. Scaling is key to running and managing an agency efficiently, as well as maintaining a competitive edge in the marketing industry.

Although clients continue to increase their expectations for marketing activities and results, many agencies simply can’t afford to keep hiring additional employees. So, how can you successfully do more with less, without compromising on quality?

Marketing and automation tools can be extremely useful for scaling your business, but in order for this to happen, two major guidelines need to be met. The first is that all team members must learn and use the solution. Otherwise, it will be much harder to coordinate projects and keep everyone in the loop, which defeats the purpose of using the tool in the first place. The second is that the platforms you select need to integrate and communicate with each other; having data automatically synced for you is one of the best ways to eliminate manual work and save time.

According to Kfir Pravda, CEO of Pravda Media Group, who recently led a customer-hosted Oktopost webinar, automation and streamlining processes with the right software is the best way to scale a marketing business. Here are a few great software solutions to help you scale your B2B marketing operations, and make much more efficient use of your time.

Say Goodbye to E-mails, and Hello to Project Management Software

E-mail is probably one of the least scalable tools for project management, and using it to organize and keep track of multiple marketing projects involving different employees is clearly ineffective. Instead of sending dozens of emails with attachments, online project management tools such as Basecamp let you create project templates that the whole team can manage from start-to-finish, from one centralized location.

With Basecamp, managers can create a new project and manage all of the work associated with it, along with deciding who is contributing to the project, and have access to certain information. Each user has his or her own profile, dashboard and to-do list, and it’s easy to set up e-mail reminders for due dates. All discussions, information sharing, comments, scheduling ad task-assignments exist right alongside the project itself.

Basecamp can also be used on the client-side, particularly to speed up the on-boarding process. If you need to receive specific data from a client, schedule calls or set-up meetings over a certain time period, the platform will help you centralize all of these tasks. During the Oktopost webinar, Pravda cited that with Basecamp, his company reduced the time it takes for client on-boarding by 75%!

Automate Your Social Media Marketing

B2B marketing and large-scale content distribution goes hand-in-hand, especially when it comes to social media. Today, prospects expect B2Bs to supply a steady stream of valuable content to keep them informed, and it’s a marketer’s job to ensure this information is highly visible, especially on social channels. Manually accessing, posting on and attempting to measure results across a number of social network is extremely time consuming, and really inefficient. Using a tool such as Oktopost, the B2B social media marketing platform, enables you to comprehensively manage all of your social media marketing from one interface.

Kfir commented that Oktopost is a classic example of how a technology can help launch a scalable marketing operation, particularly when it comes to scheduling posts for multiple LinkedIn Discussion Groups at once. Oktopost lets you create social campaigns, easily schedule posts for multiple times and days in advance, and measure your KPIs performance for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Planning large-scale content distribution schedules, even for months at a time, can be done in less than an hour. In addition, Oktopost captures all of your lead data, and automatically syncs the information with Marketo and Salesforce.com.

Leave the Repetitive Tasks to the Machines

Although some marketing assignments are unique, one-time events, on a daily basis there are numerous tasks related to lead nurturing that are repetitive in nature. Leveraging a marketing automation software program for tasks such as e-mail campaigns, lead generation and webinar management is extremely cost-effective. For example, Act-On streamlines all of your e-mail marketing processes, integrate forms and landing pages, and easily track campaign performance.

With Act-On, you can pre-schedule e-mails campaigns for anything related to your product or service, particularly the trial-to-customer nurturing process. Just create the e-mails once, schedule a flow to have them automatically pushed out on certain days, and then optimize your future e-mails according to the results. In addition, you can duplicate successful e-mails programs for similar assignments going forward. This solution is particularly helpful when it comes to webinars, considering that they have a very structured promotional process. Act-On makes it easy to create assets for pre-webinar promotion, and schedule different follow-up emails to be sent out to for attendees, as opposed to those who missed the event. This type of solution lets you launch a landing page, create a form, as well as a comprehensive email campaign, from start-to-finish, in just a few hours.

Manage Your Social Media Engagements

The digital era has created a sales process that is much more complex and engagement-based than what used to exist. Relationships with your target audience need to be cultivated on a daily basis in order to move B2B prospects down the funnel and convert them to clients. Managing this type of engagement has become increasingly complicated, particularly given that much of it takes place across a number of social media channels. Nimble is a great solution that combines CRM functionality with social media, making it easy for agencies to scale-up relationship management.

Nimble lets you see all the people who you have potential engagement opportunities with, assess their value to your company, and track your followers on social networks. It also lets you view who mentioned your company in a social context, and communicate with them straight from the Nimble dashboard. Kfir remarked that Nimble reduces the time it takes to identify which prospects are a top priority to connect with, helping scale engagement activities and effectively communicate with people who matter most. The platform also has a Stay in Touch feature, which serves as a “timer” that reminds you to connect with people over a certain period, eliminating the concern that you’ll forgot to follow up with a certain prospect, client or thought-leader.

*To see the entire webinar, click here

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