Content marketing automation has the potential to generate better quality leads, nurture said leads more easily, and convert more of them while in the process improving your bottom line, gathering great data, and leaving you more time to focus on strategy. Sounds great, right?
Before we can reap the valuable benefits of marketing automation, we need to figure out how to best use this technology for our business. There are numerous marketing automation strategies a business could employ. Here we delve into just a few to help you get started.
Define Your Goals
Why are you using marketing automation in the first place? Make sure you have a thorough understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish before you begin. Let your goals drive the tools you choose and how you build and optimize your campaigns.
Buyer Personas
Take the time to create well thought-out buyer personas. Build out their stories and add context. Identify what makes your customers who they are, the communities they’re part of both online and offline, their behaviors online and offline, and what content is most valuable to them. Let these buyer personas direct the path of what and how you’re automating content.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is key for making it easy for sales to focus on the right leads. Start by defining what a quality lead looks like and how they behave. Makes sure your sales and marketing teams work together to identify the elements of a quality lead.
Don’t rely solely on information provided by your prospects. Instead, use what you’ve observed. For example, test which actions correlate with buying. Prospects who visit a detailed pricing page may be further down the sales funnel than those who attend a webinar. Know what actions are closest to conversion and then use that information to score leads as they enter and move through your funnel.
Relevant Content
When it comes to nurturing leads, relevance is the most important aspect of content. You have many options for ensuring your content is as relevant as possible to your buyer’s needs and wants.
For starters, you can map your content to the buyer’s journey. This strategy will allow you to deliver interesting, useful content to your leads that will help guide them down the funnel.
Consider which content types your audience is hungry for at different points in the journey. Most marketing automation software offers options for targeting and personalization that will help you deliver your content to the right prospects. You can also find out directly from your prospects what makes content relevant based on how they engage with it.
Marketing automation offers tons of great benefits for your content marketing efforts. However, before you get started, make sure you have solid strategies like the ones above in place to meet your goals.
Get in touch with Filament for help creating relevant content that will help nurture your leads down the sales funnel.
