Marketing Automation in Business-to-Business Relationships and the Emerged Value Cocreation

Abstract

By the time of COVID pandemic and the consequent physical contact restrictions, relationship marketing requires the use of digital technologies. While digital marketing and marketing automation has been widely researched in the business-to-consumer (B2C) context, this chapter discusses the use of marketing automation in business-to-business markets and explores how value cocreation occurs. Contextualized in the Service Dominant Logic (SDL) theory to explain the value emerged, the inbound content marketing methodology rises as a strategy to nurture, classify and follow leads throughout the selling process and guarantee that content is delivered correctly to the target. Four interviews with managers of companies using inbound marketing and marketing automation in B2B were conducted. Results evidenced the importance of offering useful and relevant content to the audience through the various digital platforms available, namely the companies’ website, blog, social networks and email marketing.