Marketing Automation and Content Marketing
There has always been a disconnect between marketing automation platforms and content marketing. Many businesses view them at opposite ends of the marketing spectrum, but they both go hand in hand throughout the buyer’s journey.
Companies need to treat content marketing less as a top of funnel action and more as something that can help the buyer from beginning to end. We’ll examine how marketing automation and content marketing can work together to create marketing campaigns that convert and bring in qualified leads.
Why the Marketing Automation and Content Marketing Disconnect?
Marketers often need to prove the return on investment for their campaigns and with automation tools that often easy. There’s plenty of data to show how many people reacted to an email, ad, or other methods.
Content marketing ROI is murkier. You can create blogs and see how many people visit the page, but how do you know that blog led to a customer buying a product? Lead generation is a highly used key performance indicator and content marketing can’t always provide that information.
This has led to a disconnect where people use content to get people to the site and then the marketing automation takes over before finally heading to the CRM platform. In today’s digital world, these teams need to work together.
Leveraging Content in Marketing Automation
One of the biggest pet peeves of content creators is they build an audience with their content that creates email signups and soon the customers are inundated with emails and lose interest. Content marketing grabs leads and it’s only through working with your sales and marketing automation areas that you can increase conversions and move them across the sales funnel.
For example, if a customer reads a great article on your site or from a guest post, etc., and signs up for your email newsletter. Instead of getting a sales email, he gets an automated thank you note that points out other white papers or items of high value he can read.
He reads the content and decides to buy the service. The marketing automation tools and content marketing worked together from start to finish.
Data and Content Creation
Marketing automation tools provide various metrics that content marketing can use to help refine the content. For example, if an email newsletter shows a high percentage of people reading a specific type of blog or content, then the content team and develop more like it and vice versa.
Marketing automation is an amazing tool, but using it in conjunction with your content team can increase conversions and drive customers to your CRM. Use the data created by each to help refine the other.
A business needs both marketing automation and content marketing to succeed in today’s tech-savvy world, but too many businesses treat them as separate parts of their digital marketing plan. If you use them together you can develop a more successful marketing campaign.
If you want to learn more about content marketing and marketing automation, then contact us today or schedule a call.
