In today’s digital marketing landscape using automation to complete tasks like emails, is a no-brainer. Automating these time-consuming tasks enables you to spend more time on other components of your marketing strategy. Studies show that 34% of marketers claim to use almost all of the automation techniques available to them, while on 18% claim they prefer “manual” work.¹
Content marketing centers around the creation and sharing of online material such as videos and blogs that are intended to stimulate interest in its products and services. When shared online, content marketing allows you to interact with your clients. This form of marketing also gives you the opportunity to appeal to a wider variety of buyer personas through the creation of content that interests them. One of the most important aspects of content marketing is that it adds personalization to the interactions you have with your clients, helping to grow relationships.
Marketing automation is the vehicle that propels a successful content marketing strategy. Automating tasks saves you time while allowing you to optimize and prove the ROI of your content marketing campaigns. Below are the most important things to consider when entering into the world of content marketing.
Automate Your Content Marketing Plan
Content Marketing without marketing automation is time-consuming. Automating tasks like emails and social media posts shifts your focus to the more important elements, like creating the content and nurturing relationships. Here are two of the challenges businesses face when it comes to content marketing:
Visuals:
Every piece of content that you produce should have visual elements. They can be anything, but the most effective are pictures, graphs, and infographics. Visual elements that are appealing help to catch and keep the attention of old and new clients. Within the content, visuals help to break up the text. Subliminally they can be used to highlight what you deem are the most important takeaways of the content.
Create Content that is Compelling:
The content that you post forms the foundation of the relationships that you build with your clients. Ensuring that your content is compelling is taking the extra time to make sure your foundation is solid before building on it. You want to make sure that what you are creating, whether it is a video or a blog post is interesting from start to finish. If your client base is made up of different types of buyer personas, staying organized is crucial so that you can post content that appeals to all of your personas. If you post blogs that only interest one segment of your buyers, you may run the risk of alienating the others. Use marketing automation to schedule emails and blog posts, so you can spend more time creating content for each persona.
Build an Optimal Content Plan
Marketing automation takes care of publishing your posts, but it is up to you to create that content. Creating a content plan will help to guide you so that you don’t end up with writer’s block when it’s time to create the content for the week. When creating a content plan it is imperative to do research to find the best times to publish your content. These times vary from company to company and are defined as the time that you will have the most engagement with your clients. There are four different types of content, but the frequency in which you post each depends on the needs of your company and the interests of your audience.
Engagement Content:
Engagement content refers to stats, motivational quotes, polls, quizzes, etc. This is the content that people share, like and tag each other in, which leads to more engagement amongst clients. It can evoke an emotional response, which makes it the most important type of content you’ll post. Because of this, it needs to be visually stunning, well written and scheduled to reach its audience at the right time.
Promotional Content:
Promotional Content includes special offers, discounts, and newsletters. While this type of content is effective at drawing new clients if posted too much the lack of engagement can drive others away. Depending on your business, this type of content may not apply.
Educational Content:
Educational content much like promotional content is dependent on your clientele. It is geared to educate readers on a particular issue or topic in the industry. This type of informative content can be published in the form of a blog post, chart, list or infographics. Just because it aims to educate does not mean the content needs to be boring!
Curated Content:
Curated content helps to fill in the gaps of your content calendar while simultaneously increasing your levels of engagement. Sharing industry news, hot topics and current trends are just some of the ways to showcase your involvement with others in the industry. You can also use curated content to spotlight some of your clients and content they have published.
If you are interested in learning how marketing automation and content marketing can help your business grow, then click on the banner below to schedule your free 30-minute call with us today.
¹Bogdan, Alla. “How Content Automation Boosts Social Media Marketing.” SharpSpring, SharpSpring, 29 Mar. 2017, sharpspring.com/blog/content-automation-social-media-marketing/.
