Marketing Automation 103: Your Content Distribution Powerhouse

You have a content strategy in place. You have a lead database of current clients or prospects and leads. You have a writer on staff, or you have a team of freelancers. Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company, how do you distribute your thought leadership articles, company announcements, or client newsletters to not only the greatest volume of people, but also to the specific, targeted audiences intended for your message?

You guessed it. Marketing automation.

As part of our ongoing series, we’ve discussed the strategic benefits of marketing automation, how to populate your lead database, and how to segment your database without compromising personally identifiable information.

Today we’re going to discuss where the rubber meets the road—dynamic content distribution, lead scoring, and data analytics.

The Hard Way

Once your asset is developed, now what? You could use Outlook to send a manual email blast with limited to no visibility for whom receives or opens it, trust your account managers to send the asset to their clients or leads piece-meal, or promote on social media platforms.

In today’s marketing world that’s moving increasingly toward data analytics, however, are these tactics the best you can do—or provide the most ROI for your organization?

Dynamic Content Distribution

With marketing automation, your lead database is most likely segmented based on a schema developed by your specific marketing targets: industries, verticals, etc. This segmentation, for many marketing automation platforms, allows you to create dynamic assets.

For example, let’s say you want to send a healthcare-focused newsletter to both your provider and health plan customers about company news, but you also want to include a vertical-specific thought leadership article. Marketing automation platforms allow you to build templates with dynamic modules. You can then apply filters to the specific thought leadership article that sends one newsletter to all of your clients but also dynamically changes the thought leadership module based on segmentation.

The result? All of your clients receive the company news, but your provider customers receive the provider-specific thought leadership article, while your health-plan customers receive theirs. Automatically.

Lead Scoring

You’ve sent your newsletter. Your clients and leads are clicking through to read your content. This stage is where your marketing funnel starts to feed your sales funnel. Based on your marketing automation platform, you can set scoring mechanisms for email opens, click-through-rates, etc.

You might determine that clicking through to your thought leadership article automatically assigns a score of 10 points. Based on coordination with your sales team, as more newsletters are distributed, for example, when a client crosses a threshold of 50 points, they’re ready to be contacted as a warm lead for an opportunity to sell, upsell, or cross-sell. The benefit to this methodology is that it minimizes the number of cold calls your sales team has to make and maximizes qualification of an opportunity, resulting in more efficient use of your sales apparatus.

Data Analytics

If you’ve been using one of the tactics from “The Hard Way” section, running data intelligence is the key to measuring the effectiveness of the email blast itself but also presents a challenge. With a marketing automation platform, however, you can run detailed analytics that demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts. Detailed reports visualize data for open rates, click-through-rates, cookies from anonymous sources, etc. These visualizations are fantastic evidence-based metrics to showcase to clients—if you’re an agency—, to the C-suite, or to the board.

As the old world of marketing moves into the 21^st century, so do the tools, technology, and tactics available to you. If you haven’t evaluated your marketing stack, now is the time to start—with marketing automation.