Marketing automation technology has a voracious appetite for content. From lead nurture programs to customer retention campaigns, your content plays a key role in how well your automation software works for you. The reverse is also true: Your content marketing strategy gets a big boost from automation. Here’s how to wring bigger returns on your investment in content with your marketing automation system.
Align Content with Lead Scores
Marketing automation systems excel at ranking leads’ sales readiness, and that information tells you volumes about the kind of content you need at every level of your sales funnel. Are you focusing on lead acquisition with top-of-funnel content such as overviews, introductory articles, and social media mentions? Or are you strengthening your drip nurture campaigns with long-form articles, in-depth comparisons, and detailed how-to content? It isn’t just the quality of your content but the relevance of it that determines how people engage with it, so make sure lead scoring informs your content decisions.
Customize Landing Pages
Gated content needs a landing page, and landing pages serve multiple purposes. First, they entice the viewer to complete the next step and gain access to the content. They also give you another chance to send a message to your lead about how you can solve their problems. Perhaps most important, they’re the point of exchange where you and your lead swap data for knowledge; when they share their information on your landing page form, they buy access to the content. Marketing automation technology lets you develop landing pages to suit different market segments, earning more interest from visitors and increasing conversions.
Design Smart Forms
What do you want to know about your leads and customers? Whatever it is you want to learn, marketing automation tools help you learn it with forms that progressively store data to account files. Instead of hitting your leads with a form that has a dozen lines and risking their interest, you start with just a couple of lines for information on this visit. During the next visit and download, this lead gets served a form that auto-fills the previous information and asks for a few new details. You’re still collecting a great deal of information, but you’re doing it in an unobtrusive way that leads are more likely to answer.
Omni-Channel Content Promotion
The best content in the world means nothing if the only people who read it are your family members. You need potential customers to see what you have to say. Marketing automation software allows you to put your content in front of more eyes through an interconnected web of social media platforms, advertising channels, and organic search. Conventional marketing software doesn’t give you the reach that automation does, and it can’t coordinate campaigns across all marketing channels.
Automate Email Triggers
With automation, you’re able to set up a cascade of events to take place based on your leads’ behavior. If they subscribe to your newsletter, you send a verification autoresponse. If they download a white paper, you mail out a thank you with a follow-up. If they have gone quiet after showing interest, you deliver a tempting and timely offer that gets them talking again. Automating your email work-flows has a significant impact on ROI on both sides of the equation – that is, it both improves response and reduces cost because it frees your marketing team to focus on other aspects of lead nurturing.
Contextualize Content
Every time your visitors return to your site, they’re telling you something new about themselves. Your marketing automation software uses that behavioral knowledge to shape each successive experience your leads have with your site. You’ve seen this kind of software in action every time you go to a B2C retail site such as Amazon that shows you your past selections or what other customers bought with the items you’re browsing. The same technology works for B2B sales. With marketing automation, you can serve up customized home pages and highlight content you know your visitor finds useful.
Content marketing is too important to leave to chance. With marketing automation, you don’t have to.
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