What makes the difference between good content and great content when it comes to getting a return on your investment? It’s often not about the content at all but about how you and your marketing team promote it. You see this in action whenever you run across an article with flawed information that has millions of views because of its irresistible click-bait headline. The investment in creating it may have been modest – the product of a few hours’ work for a writer and researcher – but the return is huge.
The gap between good and great isn’t in the quality; it’s in the delivery system, which is why automation and content work so well together. Let’s take a closer look at how data-driven marketing automation turns everything good your content team produces into something great.
Adapt and Repurpose
Google punishes duplicate content severely, so simply cutting and pasting the same article to multiple landing pages and websites does nothing to improve its visibility and could even render it invisible to search engines. If readers can’t find it, they can’t respond to it. At the same time, content creation isn’t free; skilled writers, copy editors, and researchers represent a significant investment, especially for B2B industries.
Marketing automation systems let you take that content and repurpose it across multiple channels while staying in Google’s good graces. The same posts that appear on your blog might also form the framework for a white paper or seminar. They might appear in a newsletter or as part of a brochure at a trade show. Automation allows for omni-channel promotions that reinforce a message even as they get the most mileage out of every bit of content.
Customize
Whether it’s in email, on landing pages, or with direct mail, customization drives response rates higher. When your marketing team is able to address specific leads’ needs and market to them one-on-one, conversion rates climb. To get that individual connection, invest in a system that automates the processes underlying it. If you had to pay your marketing team to seek out individual bits of data about every lead, your cost per lead would quickly rise out of sight. Marketing automation software allows marketers to break audiences down into segments and sub-segments so content creators can address each group separately.
With customization, you may be distributing content to smaller segments, but you achieve greater saturation and relevance within each segment. That’s good news for your ROI because you’re reaching an audience that starts off more engaged from the start. Let’s say you supply linens to the healthcare, restaurant, and hotel industries. Content that addresses your quick turn-around time might appeal to busy restaurateurs, while information about combating healthcare-related infections matters most to medical centers. Customization and segmentation mean you aren’t starting at zero with these audiences and already have a larger share of their attention.
Test
How do you know a marketing campaign is working – and just as meaningfully, how soon do you know it? Looking at sales figures months after the fact and attributing a rise to a particular campaign’s content tells you only an incomplete story. Make testing the impact of your content quick, and you get an instant upgrade in your ROI. Small changes to an image or a title – remember those Buzzfeed-style article headlines that garner huge traffic? – can have significant results. Automate your testing process, and all your content becomes more closely aligned with what your leads need to reach a buying decision.
When it comes to realizing a bigger return on your investments, “good enough” isn’t good enough. Upgrade from good to great when you automate the details of distribution and free your marketing team to create outstanding content.
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