Posted by Brian Berg Google+
Marketing automation is the natural progression of your online business development and high quality value driven content is required for a successful MA program. Whether you’re using Act-On, Eloqua, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Marketo, Net Results or Pardot, you’re going to need fresh, quality content to ensure visitors interact and return to your site.
Before committing to a contract with any of the MA providers, ask yourself the following questions:
· Do I currently have quality content available?
· Can I generate content beyond product descriptions and Top Ten Lists?
· Will my content bring true value to my prospects and customers?
· Have I budgeted to outsource my content generation?
· Is there time in my work week to commit to market segmentation, content writing and MA implementation?
If you’ve answered no to any of the above, you may want to reconsider how you’re going to accomplish a successful launch. There’s no doubt, marketing automation can infuse your sales pipeline with new leads. The applications today make much of the manual marketing processes automated. But for some marketing teams, this relatively new SAAS is somewhat of a complicated marketing mousetrap.
Media Street recently posted a great article about marketing automation and content writing titled, “15 Ways Marketing Automation Can Maximize Your Content’s ROI”, by Paul Roetzer. For any business leaders in the process of consideration Marketing Automation for their company, reading this article will answer a lot of questions you may already have, and bring about many questions you’ll have to address.
The Challenge with Marketing Automation
Each year, smart business management goes through the process of evaluating their business plan, evaluating how the previous year’s plan was carried out, what was accomplished and what was not, and how to revise the new plan going forward. In addition to learning, implementing and adapting the new MA technology, thinking through your entire marketing messaging will be required for a successful MA launch.
Important Considerations before Committing to Marketing Automation
Your entire prospect and customer database will need to be segmented before content can be generated.
This step may be somewhat completed, but pre-MA segments may not fit your post-launch segments. You’ll likely find that the most valuable existing content you can write will resonate best with multiple existing segments while new content will need to be written for other segments. You’ll have to think through how your lead scoring will change from what you’ve got today to how you will measure prospects and customers in the future.
Poorly written content can have a negative effect on your followers
While good content engages the reader, delivers on what they need to make decisions and brings them back for more, inconsistent content quality can desensitize the reader to your brand. Your content should be consistent with all your messaging so that when the first time reader begins following your articles and posts, they develop their brand recognition of your company as a positive resource.
Build your Content Writing Team with a Common Goal
Unless you plan to do all your content writing, meet with your marketing team to discuss how your readers will view your content across multiple channels. Your social media manager should fully appreciate the teaser posts that point followers to your gated content. Your webmaster will want to work in unison with your content team so that all content is integrated. And your sales and customer service professionals must be aware of the main messaging coming from your marketing team to assist in manually providing requests efficiently.