Marketing automation provides the opportunity to target prospects more accurately in less time.
However, without the right content, marketing automation quickly turns into spam, cold calls, and junk mail, targeting the same people over and over with the same unwelcome message.
Marketing automation needs content marketing to deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time.
Content marketing helps your prospects to solve a problem. It provides them the information they need. It tells an impactful story. And, when combined with marketing automation, it helps you to tailor your marketing communications for each recipient.
The speed and accuracy of your marketing automation engine combined with the quality of content marketing creates the perfect marketing machine. One that the best brands have learned to combine seamlessly.
Working together, marketing automation and content marketing accomplish every goal on the individualized and global checklist.
Marketing Based On Interest
Marketing automation works along the marketing journey, delivering targeted messages according to the recipient’s stage in the buyer’s journey.
Content marketing answers all the questions your buyers ask and provides the library of content your marketing automation platform needs to deliver marketing based on the customer’s interest.
Introducing Fresh Ideas
Without the successful implementation, marketing automation hits the same customers or prospects with the same message, and eventually gets relegated to the spam folder.
Building off the latest trends, interactions, or new media, content marketing makes every nurturing campaign not only personalized, but new and interesting.
Creating Immersion
Content marketing gives businesses the opportunity to source content across the buyer’s journey, while marketing automation provides the power to move content in the right direction.
Telling customer stories helps buyers understand the problems faced by their peers, and how they solved them. It helps to make them the hero of your stories, showing that your customers matter most, and that the company values their input. Spotlighting consumer-generated content also helps create loyal customers for life.
Show, Don’t Tell
Marketing automation helps in making targeted connections with customers faster, but content makes those connections count.
Instead of asking or telling a customer to watch your demo, try or buy your product, or even buy again, content marketing creates interest by showing what the product or service does for your customers, and how it solves their problems.
For example, Virgin Atlantic’s Instagram gallery takes customers on a tour to the places the airline flies to and the limitless and stunning visual adventures that they can find there. Customers find a place and a way to satisfy their wanderlust, only a few clicks away from the social media they use every day.
Departures online and print magazine by American Express takes customers on a journey with a similar approach, showing the places they can go, the things they can do and the experiences they can have with an American Express card, creating interest and intrigue without a hard sell.
Preventing Annoyance
Though repetition is key to creating awareness and building interest, it is also the primary contributor to annoyance in today’s content-saturated world. Burning bridges and annoying customers through repeat product-centric messages removes the most lucrative prospects and loyal customers.
Content marketing attracts prospects to your brand, and prevents annoyance by giving the customer something they need —answers to their questions and interests.
For example, Birchbox, the beauty product subscription service, shows customers how to emulate the latest beauty trends while using Birchbox products. While featuring the Birchbox brand and showcasing new products, customers aren’t seeing an ad; they’re seeing valuable information.
By providing information videos, articles, emails, how-to guides and other references to answer real questions, content marketing sells products without ever making a pitch, removing annoyance from the equation.
A Powerful Combination
While content marketing and automated marketing can work separately, neither can operate optimally without the careful cooperation.
Targeting customers, moving a message quickly, and moving it frequently is useless if the content is not worthwhile, but important content is meaningless if no one sees it.
Working in tandem, marketing automation and content marketing create awareness, engagement, revenue, and customer loyalty in a natural way.
~ Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael) is CEO of Marketing Insider Group, co-author of the best-selling book The Content Formula, and one of the leading voices in Marketing today.
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