Harnessing marketing automation for B2B content marketing

The growing importance of the Internet to B2B customer purchasing decisions has motivated B2B sellers to create digital content that leads potential buyers to interact with their company. This trend has engendered anew paradigm referred to as 'content marketing.' This study investigates the organizational processes for developing valuable and timely content to meet customer needs and for integrating content marketing with B2B selling processes. The results of this single case study demonstrate the use of marketing automation to generate high quality sales leads through behavioral targeting and content personalization. The study advances understanding of the organizational processes that support content marketing and shows how content marketing can be combined with B2B selling processes via marketing automation in ways that achieve business benefits. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.