Create a World of Marketing Automation Through Good Content—and Imagination

Create a World of Marketing Automation Through Good Content—and Imagination:

“The way to get started is to quit thinking and begin doing.” These words of wisdom were spoken by Walt Disney who took his own advice and began building a world out of imagination—Disneyland—in 1955 with only 20 attractions. I think Disney’s advice rings true today for those considering marketing automation. From time to time I speak with marketers who tell me, “We would love to get started but we don’t have enough content.”

If you wait until you have enough content, or the timing is perfect, or your CRM platform is a well-oiled machine, another year will pass and you will have missed another opportunity to enhance your company’s revenue performance. When it comes to content and marketing automation I tell people to consider the following:

• Use quality over quantity—You can effectively start your journey into marketing automation with just a few key pieces of content. An industry analyst report, a technical white paper, and a short customer case study are enough to build out a lead nurturing campaign. An investment into a webinar and complementary white paper would give you the opportunity to promote the live event and promote the archived event for months after. If you have minimal resources or budget to create content, record an employee speaker presenting at an event with someone’s personal digital recorder and then post it. Use your imagination. You may have to start by pushing out links to favorable industry articles that mention your products or services. Just make sure the content has value and is not self-promotional.
• Repurpose. Repurpose. Repurpose—Think big. Start small. With a just a few pieces of quality content you can make a big impression by promoting the content through Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels. You can use the content as follow up with seminar/webinar registrants—both those who attended and those who did not. Promote links to your content on materials distributed at trade shows, seminars, webinars, directory listings, and more.
• Make it engaging—Be sensitive to your prospect’s attention span and schedule and make your content easy to digest and remember. Use videos as a change of pace. No matter the format of your content, the general rule is keep it short, sweet, and to the point.
• Know the buyer role—As the amount of content you have grows, try to target the content by specific industry, role, and company size. If you are an international company you may also want to target your content by geography. Of course, if you are just starting out you may not have that luxury. However, pushing out content horizontally through marketing automation is definitely more effective than what you are probably doing today.
• Know the buyer stage—As you become more sophisticated with your content distribution you will want to map your content to where the prospect is in the revenue cycle. Educational pieces work well during the early awareness stages. Industry-oriented pieces work well just as prospects start looking for a solution. Solution-oriented and company-focused materials are appropriate for prospects engaged in an active buying cycle.

Getting started is the key. Take small steps and implement in phases. Build on your successes. The wonderful part of getting started with marketing automation—even if you do not have all the content you would like—is that you will show the full impact that your marketing department has on company’s sales leads, opportunities, and revenue. (You may even be able to justify getting more content development dollars or hiring a staff member to write more content quicker than you think.)

While marketing automation is designed to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, there may be a couple of small challenges to overcome along the way depending on your business processes. That does not mean you should not move forward today.

When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, more than twice the number of guests showed up due to counterfeit tickets. It was 101 degrees that day. The drinking fountains did not work. The warm asphalt had just been applied that morning and high heels were getting stuck in it. The vendors ran out of food. It was a public relations nightmare. Walt Disney continued to move ahead, adding attractions, fine-tuning processes, and tracking visitor experiences and metrics. Today, Disneyland has the largest cumulative attendance of any theme park in the world—with over 600 million guests since it opened.

What’s your strategy for content and marketing automation? Did you find these tips to be helpful? Please join the conversation in the comments section below.