Content is King, but Context is God – Salesforce Interaction Studio and Real-time Interaction Management in B2B Marketing

Salesforce Interaction Studio is increasingly relevant in the B2B space. Our CEO Christoph Cuquemel and Interaction Studio expert Stefan Brunnengräber report.

Marketing in B2B has long been very focused on trade shows, face-to-face meetings, etc., depending on the maturity of the company. Even before the Corona pandemic, however, there was increasingly more digitization of content in B2B marketing. From March 2020, this accelerated immensely and the motto “Content is King” took on greater significance.

Events were switched to webinars, whitepapers, online trainings, etc. were launched and posted on the website. B2B marketing automation tools were then responsible for tracking behavior and starting lead scoring/nurturing processes. However, for the majority of customers, these offers still fall under pull marketing, i.e. the customer or potential customer searches for the product or service independently.

RTIM added value for B2B

Here, an RTIM (Real Time Interaction Management) tool like Salesforce Interaction Studio brings two more added values to marketing for a B2B marketer.

1. From pull to push marketing: By creating dynamic segments (inclusion/exclusion) for website visitors, relevant content can be targeted to customers/leads and taken offline again in case of disinterest (e.g. 5 views, but no click) or success (e.g. whitepaper download, registration). Content can be targeted through banners, pop ups, slide ins, etc. and relevance to the individual website visitor comes either from individual behavior or data or from the popularity of a particular product or service.

2. From “Content is King” to “Context is God”: Salesforce Interaction Studio not only granularly records behavior on the website, but can be enriched with external data from a CRM, service tool or the like. From this, Interaction Studio then builds an affinity graph, which indicates implicit preferences of the customer/lead. The context created here for an individual person or account helps make Next Best Offer/Action campaigns even more accurate and relevant.

The combination of dynamic segments and a range of data points and affinities then allow holistic nurturing campaigns to be built. The customer/lead moves through multiple campaigns based on behavior and actions, which can be coordinated to represent the entire sales funnel. The Sales Funnel is also offered in Interaction Studio as a dedicated report that can be customized to meet the specific needs of the B2B marketer.

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness” – Jeff Bezos

Focus on testing and optimization

Testing and optimization should take a central role in marketing, but in many cases it is time-consuming. Interaction Studio helps marketers determine what works and where improvements can be made. This takes place either through the reporting dashboard, which provides sophisticated yet easy-to-understand analytics, statistics and attribution reports, or directly within the campaigns, where the marketer can easily optimize the algorithms and personalizations with the help of A/B testing. This is how you manage to increase conversions, click throughs, etc. in an automatic way.

Tools now also tailored to B2B marketers

Those listed so far have historically come more from B2C marketing, but are visibly finding their way into B2B marketing. However, Interaction Studio also offers a specific component for B2B marketers in the form of “B2B Detect”.

With B2B Detect, marketers can access filmographic data such as industry, industry etc. from the first interaction of a website visitor. This information is provided at the first page or app call based on the IP address. At the moment when the website visitor identifies himself via login or similar, this data can then be enriched with that from the CRM (e.g. Sales Cloud).

The combination of the data from B2B Detect, CRM and the affinity graph then in turn help to build a buyer persona, in which the thought and behavior patterns in the context of the buying process of a buyer persona are then taken into account in particular. This helps B2B marketers create more targeted topics that meet the specific needs and demands of customers/leads.

Conclusion – Seamless integration also in the B2B area

In summary, enriching traditional B2B marketing automation with an RTIM tool enhances the B2B marketing approach by seamlessly integrating interactions, personalization and engagement measurability to create a digital experience.