How Does Marketing Automation Help Your Content Strategy?

Content has always been critical to marketing success. Developing the best words and messaging can build trust and credibility that can then create leads, influence purchase decisions, and add new customers. Before the explosion of digital marketing, the content was somewhat manageable.

Today’s marketing environment requires large measures of content marketing across more channels than ever before, often leaving many companies struggling to keep up with content creation and distribution.

Enter marketing automation, which can provide numerous benefits for marketers in terms of time and money savings as well as insights that can drive better results from a marketing strategy. The same goes with a performance-driven content strategy that makes up part of that overall marketing plan.

Here’s how marketing automation can help improve your content’s message and delivery:

Determine quality leads and reactions with marketing automation tools

Marketing automation tools are an effective way to define and qualify quality leads. This process can also score the leads, providing different values that alert marketing to the level of interest and proximity to closing a deal.

The insights can also reveal other actionable advice for content planning, including what content has created positive action and when as well as what has not worked. The data can reveal what website pages were visited and for how long as well as what social media interactions or emails elicited the greatest response.

Segment and personalize with marketing automation software

Automation solutions for marketing can integrate with other tools that inform content strategy aimed at segmenting the target audience and customer base for personalized content. For example, marketing automation tools can sync with an existing CRM system to transfer data from a landing page directly into contact records and separate the data using specific segmentation criteria.

From there, content can be designed based on each segment’s data for more effective engagement. The results will continue to improve over time as the automated process collects more detailed data with each interaction.

Automated testing tools for ongoing improvement in content marketing

A/B testing is an automated process that can inform what type of images, headlines, content messaging, and content form achieves the best response and performance from a particular campaign. The testing reveals which combination delivers the highest conversion rate, delivering a high-performance content strategy.

Smart work, not hard work for your content strategy

From achieving all of your content strategies to expanding what you aim to achieve, market automation does a lot of the time-consuming work for the marketing team. This work includes taking care of scheduling social media content to improve content promotion tactic performance.

The same goes with automating email workflows, including sending email campaigns and follow-up messages. These systems can also track and decide on the optimum content delivery time when the most target audience members will be accessible and focused on reading the information.

Doing so enables the content management team to focus more on compelling content creation and less on what would otherwise be a cumbersome delivery process.

Listening and reputation management matter to your content strategy

A content strategy is not just what you want to say to audiences; it is also about listening and knowing how to respond to both positive and negative comments from that audience. Your content strategy will be better informed about what is being said about your brand, product, or service thanks to automated reputation management processes that collect and alert your marketing team in real time to comments.

That automated capability provides a way to speed content creation to address those audience members or customers as quickly as possible. The faster you can respond and engage with these audience members, the better you will be able to do damage control as well as increase the impact you have on that audience with your level of care and concern.

Customer journey tracking with marketing automation tools

Marketing automation does the stalking for you, following these leads throughout their purchase journey to understand and respond to contact interactions along the way. Knowing whether or not leads are progressing through the customer journey can inform how you may need to alter or pivot your content strategy. Based on what you learn, you may need to update your call-to-action to lead those prospects down the right path or provide new content assets that speed decision-making.

Less work, more insights, better performance for your content marketing

On so many levels, marketing automation can help your content strategy, which, in turn, can improve your overall marketing strategy. The marketing and sales team can focus on the higher level aspects of content creation as well as have more diverse data to inform them of what the audience wants and needs. The content strategy gets better and higher performance follows.

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