Thesis
Exploring the role of marketing automation in fostering online engagement in business-to business settings
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2024
- Thesis identifier
- T16877
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 201855349
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- Digitalisation and advancements in technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, have created new opportunities for understanding buyer-seller interactions in complex business-to-business (B2B) customer journeys. This thesis contributes to this understanding, by exploring the role of marketing automation in influencing online engagement behaviours across such journeys. For this thesis, 29 semi-structured interviews were carried out with experienced digital marketers working in-house in B2B organisations (n=14) and digital marketing agencies (n=15). Participants were selected based on their expertise with marketing automation and B2B content marketing and they were based in two countries, Finland and the UK. The findings of this thesis reveal how online manifestations of engagement are journey-dependent, and thus engagement manifests differently in different phases of the B2B customer journey. Moreover, marketing automation can be used to both capture and facilitate these instances across the journey. Additionally, the findings demonstrate how prospects are engaging with the selling organisation before purchase, and even before humans (e.g., marketers or salespeople) are involved. This is of interest, as a large portion of extant academic research has considered engagement as a post-purchase endeavour (e.g. Lemon & Verhoef, 2016; Pansari & Kumar, 2017). Thus, the findings of the study extend our understanding of B2B engagement by considering engagement behaviours that occur prior to the first purchase, as well as the potential of non-human actors (Storbacka et al., 2016) in fostering such engagement. Furthermore, this thesis contributes to engagement marketing literature by developing our understanding of automation-enhanced online engagement marketing efforts. The findings demonstrate how marketing automation enables the personalisation of interactions at a scale, enabling the creation and management of more outbound engagement opportunities between organisations and their audiences. Moreover, the abilities of marketing automation to measure online engagement behaviours and factors that facilitate the success of such initiatives are addressed.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Alexander, Matthew
- McLean, Graeme
- Resource Type
- DOI
Relations
Items
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Visibility | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
PDF of Thesis T16877 | 2024-12-09 | Public | Download |