Use Marketing Automation to Improve your Content Marketing
Let’s start with an indisputable fact: content is king. According to a survey from Hubspot, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content creation and 78% of companies have a team of people specialized in content creation.
The reason is simple: content marketing allows marketers to give reliable, powerful, insightful, and actionable info to customers. It’s a way to grow sales, keep existing customers happy and attract new ones. Working on an effective content marketing strategy is key to success.
The bad news is that it can be a very daunting task if it’s done manually. Fortunately, there are tools to help, and it’s when marketing automation is entering the chat.
A report made by Research and Markets in March 2020 was predicting that the global marketing automation market will reach $8.42 billion by 2027. According to email monday, a website specialized in marketing automation, on average 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation.
Used together, content marketing and marketing automation are like a powerhouse for your engagement marketing strategy. Let’s have a close look at what content marketing and marketing automation are. We’ll then see why it can help with content personalization and how to concretely put them both into place and why they complement each other to improve your marketing and content strategy to beat the competition.
What are content marketing and marketing automation?
The Content Marketing Institute offers a clear definition of content marketing:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing is the development of blog articles, newsletters, videos, podcasts, white papers, and other media for current and potential customers. It allows brands to show their expertise and that they care and understand their customers. Creating marketing content on a regular basis helps nurture customers who will see your brand as a valuable source of advice and have it in mind when it’s time to buy.
Marketing automation is “a technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.”
Marketing automation allows to:
- Target customers with automated messages (emails, web, social media and texts)
- Send messages automatically according to instructions called “workflows”
- Define templates for workflows and modify them to achieve best results
- Automate marketing campaigns and sales activity to maximize profits
- Remove repetitive tasks and reduce human errors
- Focus on challenging issues
- Scale your business
- Save time and money
With social media and other sharing platforms, the Internet is saturated with content of very good to very bad quality, which means that consumers are getting pickier about the type of content they consume. To stand out, marketers have to tailor their messages and experts are predicting that content personalization is going to be the solution.
Content personalization: where content marketing meets with marketing automation
Content marketing is the strongest sales force that exists today. Unsolicited advertising is way behind us, nowadays consumers express their will to receive content made by brands and it affects their decisions when it’s time to buy. Indeed, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of people prefer to learn about a company through articles rather than adverts.
Légende: Source: SmarterHQ
In the same report, we can learn that content personalization creates 3 times more lead at over 60% less cost. Implementing a smart content personalization strategy drastically improves the customer journey: they feel surrounded with attention and care, so who wouldn’t like that?
It’s exactly what marketing automation softwares leverages: a wide variety of tools like email marketing automation, retargeting and dynamic content customization to give consumers relevant content right they need it.
3 ways marketing automation and content marketing team up to deliver accurate content personalization
Let’s have a look at where marketing automation can help in your content marketing journey.
Content creation
Bot-writers already exist, but the quality of their work is questionable… If you are looking to produce high-quality content, it’s not the option you should go for. However, there are myriads of tools that can be helpful – like BuzzSumo which provides great insight for you to produce content using hot topics according to what your target group is looking for.
This way you can fine-tune your content and stand out among your competitors.
Curation
Content curation that consists of selecting and resharing existing content, is a great strategy for marketers. It allows you to stay on top of your audience while leveraging content created by others. Nevertheless, if handled manually it can be very time-consuming. Using automation can in this case be extremely helpful. For example, the platform Content Studio helps you easily identify and curate third-party content relevant for your audience.
These tools are extremely helpful to target audience groups in your niche in a blink of an eye.
Distribution
Whether it be original or curated, the most challenging and time-consuming task is to deliver content to your audience. The high volume of distribution channels being overwhelming (emails, social media, blogs, sponsored content, native ads…) and customers expecting to get more than ever personalized content, it’s getting extremely difficult to keep up given your consumers are at different funnel stages and stages with the history of your company.
But that’s not it…
Légende: Source: email monday
You also want to know if the efforts you put into content creation and/or curation are paying off. This is why it’s crucial to track, analyze, monitor and finesse your strategy at all times.
Don’t try to do it manually! Nowadays there are tons of methods to save you time, money and sanity. Work on smart features like:
- Predictive content and analytics: AI content creation and machine learning can help you show relevant content to your target groups
- A/B testing: this helps deliver the best batch or triggered emails to each contact to increase engagement and drive click-thrus.
- A streamlined and synchronized database: this updates your CRM in real time based on online and offline customers behavior.
- Retargeting: it uses all the data collected on your audience to create more personalized content and targeted ads on popular platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc…
- Web personalization: this collects behavioral info on visitors (even anonymous ones)
Marketing automation is the secret weapon to be sure the hard work you put into place to create content is effective and not wasted to deliver the right piece of content at the right time.
Analysis
Marketing automation is crucial to execute any marketing strategy in the long term.
Which content is working? Is it generating leads and sales? Can you measure ROI? Marketing automation is giving you effective data to answer these questions and to improve your process in:
- Identifying the most effective channels and campaigns with A/B testing and custom KPI
- Viewing and sharing analytics thanks to reports with the data collected
- Analyzing how your content influence customer behaviors and even tie revenue to particular campaigns
Marketing automation is taking marketing content to the next level. It’s an extremely useful strategy to:
- Save up time and money
- Focus on important tasks
- Create and track content across multiple platforms
- Deliver the right content at the right time
- Reinforce the bond with customers
- Know if your content is performing well
If you are ready to improve your marketing strategy the current smart move is to invest in content and automation. This way you are sure to stay on top of all the trends in order to deliver a personalized offer to your customers and get short and long-term benefits for your business.
Investing in marketing automation softwares is also what will make you be one step ahead of the competition.
