Great content pulls leads into your sales pipeline, but they sometimes need a bit of a push to traverse it. That’s why marketing involves both push and pull strategies to get the most out of their investments. Marketing automation software includes tools that have an impact in both directions, gathering and processing necessary data for successful push marketing and coordinating omni-channel content for effective pull marketing programs.
Giving Marketing a Push with Automation
Taking your product or service to your leads is a time-honored marketing strategy – one that dovetails beautifully with automation that organizes and interprets data for you. Clean, accurate data and a thorough understanding of your audience are essential for effective push marketing strategies because you need to know who and where your leads are before you can take your message to them.
Marketing automation software tracks demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data from your leads and centralizes the information from all channels
so you get a clearer, more complete picture of your audience. From compiling trade show attendee information to designing informative brochures to mailing them out to the most promising leads, automation tools are involved in every step of push marketing campaigns.
Personalization is another key element of push marketing, especially in digital formats. People pay more attention when the message is relevant to them, and customization tailors marketing messages to align with leads’ needs. With a marketing automation system, you’re able to define audience segments and address leads’ issues directly, making your message more relevant to them than a broad but shallow approach could manage. For example, your sale notification emails could be tied directly to a lead’s recent downloads or time spent on product pages.
Pulling Audiences in with Great Content
Content is one of your most important tools in a pull marketing strategy. With compelling content, you give leads reasons to seek you out and actively engage with you. In the digital realm, information is as close as your search bar, and leads can learn much of what they need to know to make buying decisions before they ever come in contact with your sales department. Great content positions you as an authority and familiarizes leads with your name while they’re still in the earliest fact-finding stages of their decision-making process. When they read your blog posts, download your white papers, and share your content, they’re already investing in you and are more likely to keep doing so when it’s time to buy.
Marketing automation matters for content marketing because it not only delivers the right content but at the right time, to the right audience. Drip nurture campaigns and email newsletters that prioritize information over selling pay off as leads get the knowledge they need to move ahead with buying decisions. Great content is also highly shareable, which is particularly important in B2B contexts that often involve multiple layers of buying authority. Make great content, and leads will take it to other decision-makers to reinforce their choices. Marketing automation software tracks activity and can trace decisions as they happen within an organization.
Putting It Together
Marketers need both pull and push strategies for success. With marketing automation, they’re able to assess how much of each they need, where to apply a push, when to supply compelling content, and how it’s all paying off with analytics that show where successes come from. Tying content to performance and linking it to data is a win for marketers, but it also pays off for customers.
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