We’re always trying to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and innovations in the marketing world and we noticed that marketing automation is becoming ever more relevant, as it has the ability to increase the efficiency of content marketing efforts
and cut costs at the same time.
According to the International Data Corporation, the marketing automation industry will grow to a net value of $4.8 billion in 2015, up from $3.2 billion in 2010.This impressive projection highlights the importance of marketing automation for professionals in the field.Among some of the ways in which automation can support content marketing tactics are with the management and prioritisation of leads, email marketing and performance measurements. Marketing automation can help professionals prioritise leads by applying a scoring system based on specific behavioural and demographic criteria.
Lead-generation for sales teams
This allows marketers to better manage their leads and keep tabs on how users interact with the brand’s content; when a high-priority lead engages with such content, a sales representative can be alerted in view of encouraging a sale. Marketing automation software can also help marketers track the behaviour of leads and help them determine the right moment to approach a customer – ideally when the chances of closing a sale are highest. Emails, for their part, are an important aspect of content marketing as they are one of the many ways to promote a brand’s content and are still one of the most effective marketing tools.However, content distribution via emails can be very time consuming; this is why marketing automation is a useful system: it can aid the precise targeting of leads based on the specific content consumers are interacting with and what stage of the buying process they are at. Marketing automation can make it easier to target sales leads at different stages of the process with content, allowing marketers the opportunity to schedule email campaigns well in advance. Marketing automation software can also help measure the performance of a content marketing strategy, something that has been bothering marketers for quite some time as it is very difficult to accurately calculate ROI from promotional content.
Creating marketing-qualified leads (MQL’s)
Marketing automation, however, can answer questions such as how many new leads a piece of content has generated, how many marketing qualified leads have viewed it and, finally, how many conversions the content led to. Impressively, marketing automation can also inform businesses what the cost-per-lead of certain pieces of content is by showing how many leads interacted with it. All in all, marketing automation is invaluable when devising a content marketing strategy because it can help marketers generate maximum efficiency from their strategies.