Content is the key ingredient of all your sales and marketing strategies. The difference between highly effective marketing campaigns and those that fail is the nature of the content they create. 

Marketing content commonly takes the form of:

• Blog articles

• Social media posts

• Brochures

• Videos (guides and adverts) and many others

Your prospects and customers find content through various channels facilitated by marketing automation systems. These include:

• Websites

• Emails

• Newsletters

• Social media and many others.

With multiple factors involved, your business, therefore, must create a viable content plan. Such would provide a road map for your team in executing their tasks in line with your overall strategies.

This article explores how to implement a content plan with your marketing automation systems to gain the best results. 

How to identify and create the right content

Crafting a workable content strategy involves several vital elements that supplement each other to form an effective plan. 

Some of these elements include:

Audience

You must be aware of the market you are targeting. That way, you can create content that speaks to them. You'll be able to determine the suitable content material, language, tone, etc. 

Platforms

Rolling out your content on the wrong platforms can negatively impact its effectiveness and thus traffic. So, you must find out where your audience mostly hangs out. Then focus on delivering content to those platforms in the most suitable formats, 

Information 

Your content plan should cater to the information needs of your audience at different stages of their sales journey. 

Now that you know them and where to find them, you should be able to deliver content that they will find most helpful for their specific sales stage. 

For example, you should not be flooding first-time visitors with promotions even before they even know you.

Call to action 

The target audience should be able to act on the information they have received. The content should be compelling enough to prompt the visitor to take the next step.

However, on top of that, you should include specific directions for them to act on, like booking an appointment, purchasing, signing up for a demo, etc.

Implementing an appropriate content strategy to work with your marketing automation

An appropriate content strategy works to feed your marketing automation system with key data you can use for decision-making. 

Here are a few simple steps to implement a content strategy for your marketing automation.

1. Define the goal of the strategy 

Define your content goals from the start. What results do you hope to achieve? More traffic, more qualified leads? More conversions?

Knowing this from the start will help you create suitable content to achieve these goals down the line. 

For instance, if the defined goal is to increase conversions for a new offering. Then, the content would revolve around showing the product's value, and corresponding calls to action would be to "purchase" or "get a demo," etc.

You can now set these desired actions as triggers in your automation systems to process and qualify leads that perform them. 

2. Design a content creation plan

You must figure out what kind of content will be most appropriate and how you will produce it. To figure out the best content, you must consider

Your audience: What kind of information and format would they be more receptive to?

SEO: what keywords do you want to rank for?

Frequency: How often will you produce the content?

These factors depend on the nature of your business and your set goals for the campaign. 

When using marketing automation, it is best to test each option to determine the most optimal solution.

3. Design a distribution plan 

Your content will be useless if it doesn’t get to the target audience. So, you must determine how often you will release content and the necessary platforms. 

A good content distribution strategy should ensure that the customers are not overwhelmed with content or have too little information to make decisions. 

Within the marketing automation system, you must set triggers for specific information when the audience makes the desired actions. For example, when they subscribe to the blog, the system sends that blog content to their inbox or starts an email sequence.

Furthermore, you can identify and schedule content to go out when it is likely to get the most engagement, especially on social media.

While you distribute content and inbound marketing funnels, pay attention to adding appropriate calls to action—these help guide your audience to the next steps.

Automate responses and feedback

As your calls to action drive customer engagement, you should utilize automated response systems to maximize the benefits. Take advantage of tools like chatbots to give customer support and immediate information.

Your marketing automation system would use information from such interactions to help you better understand your audience’s needs and behavior. You can later use this data to derive effective sales tactics.

4. Monitor and evaluate 

The content plan should allow for regular monitoring and evaluation. This process becomes easier with marketing automation systems since they have reports and analysis features. 

Regular performance results help you determine whether your content is working. You can identify weak links between your content and the automation tools and figure out how to improve them.

For instance, you may discover that your webinar funnels bring in more qualified leads than your blog posts.

5. Restructure the content 

Based on the performance and feedback from your content, you should restructure and rework the content. You might find new information to add, new content to link to, additional formats, new calls to action, etc. 

Companies that regularly refresh their content enjoy greater engagement and more traffic in the long run. So, as you create your content plan for the marketing automation pipeline, leave room for refreshed content and revisions as well. 

Conclusion

Content is a crucial ingredient for your marketing automation system to function. So, as you purchase automation tools, you must also draft a workable content plan for it.

Best practices suggest finding automation solutions that come with additional services. That way, your vendor can help you set up your systems and also design the most appropriate content strategies to go with it.

FunnelBud's experts can help you draft a plan and even produce the content you need to fuel your automation system, as we have done with multiple clients.