Content marketing plays a big role in how we create opportunities to grow sales, retain existing customers and build brand loyalty. Reaching your customers through marketing automation is a great way to be timely, relevant and actionable, but your overall content strategy and structure is a daunting task that should not be overlooked.
Think about it this way, marketing automation amplifies your message, but if you don’t have the right message, it won’t land or resonate the way you expect. To be an effective marketing engineer, you’ll need to keep the content format in mind.
Focus on Your Channel
Marketing automation simplifies the process of easily engaging with all of your audiences across multiple touchpoints – social media, email, text and even sales. To be present in these continuous conversations with your clients you’ll want to ensure that your landing pages, emails, and website content are all aligned to enable the same goal – lifecycle nurturing. So, how does one do that? By focusing on how marketing automation and content marketing work together on the specific channel you’re looking at.
For example, social media is where your content will absolutely need to stand out and flourish. Automation can help you get the message out there, but be sure it is focused on learning more about how your customers engage with your brand. Your email and mobile channels are among the most powerful places to personalize content and be relevant. Finally, your website is the one channel that serves as the backbone of your content strategy. It’s more than a library, it’s a place where conversions happen and loyalty is established.
Be Personalized, but Relevant
Tailor to the right person rather than blindly distributing content. If your automation strategy doesn’t assume there’s a journey in place aligned with specific customer personas, then you’re likely doing it all wrong.
Create a content marketing plan that considers all factors of your audience base so that you’re sending a message that is unique to their needs and preferences. Much like a relationship, marketing automation needs messaging in place that doesn’t feel, well, automated. Remember, automation is here to help you streamline, but you will still need to put a considerable amount of time behind getting to know who your audience is.
Showing your audience that you care about their specific preferences shows that you value their time. In due time, they will value your message more because it speaks to them and cuts through the noise. Data shows 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content.
If you’re A/B testing or Retargeting, make sure you’re handling content carefully and ensuring that you’re keeping your CRM updated, so that you don’t send the wrong messaging to the wrong person. Always remember these 3 steps when creating and distributing your content:
- Creation – Have a dedicated process in place for content creation, so you can always fine tune to not only what is relevant, but who it is for.
- Curation – This will help you stay top of mind, you’ll want to divide and conquer your content publishing approach, so keep it niche and keep it curated.
- Distribution – Sheer volume should not be your approach, segment your audience and distribute to sub audiences, gather your performance learnings and re-distribute to a new set of people if you didn’t have the success you expected.
Simply put, have a streamlined approach in place, so that you’re always producing and delivering highly relevant content that helps your brand stay top of mind.
Look to the Future
It seems that these days everyone is a content creator, which makes it even harder to get your content in front of your audience. However, content creation is still incredibly successful despite “content shock.” In short, people are consuming content at a much higher rate than anticipated, so while creation is on the rise, so is consumption.
Remember, this only means that your content has to continue to get better and better over time. Channel your time into a good content piece to yield the results you truly want.
Tackle Marketing Automation Efficiently
Remember, you will always need the right mix of technical and strategic initiatives to launch a successful marketing automation initiative. We work with clients across many industries, so if it exists, we’ve probably seen it. Working with our agency can help you gain the knowledge and experience you need, so you can get past the learning curve and straight into getting to know your audiences. Let’s work together to create a content strategy that will enable your company to automate more efficiently and drive more revenue.
