Content Marketing and Its Place in Marketing Automation - Running Automation Campaigns - Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

Part III. Running Automation Campaigns

In this part …

· Get to know how content marketing plays a key role in marketing automation, and learn how to create this content.

· Find out how to get started with drip nurturing campaigns and how to create campaigns that will convert prospects.

· Understand the new best practices for forms and landing pages in automated campaigns.

· Discover the new world of personal emails and how to use them in an automated fashion.

Chapter 8. Content Marketing and Its Place in Marketing Automation

In This Chapter

arrow Developing content for the buyer’s journey (a.k.a. the funnel)

arrow Gleaning new insights about content

arrow Tying video and webinars into automation

When you have a marketing automation engine, you need to fuel it. Content is the fuel for all modern marketing, especially if you use a marketing automation tool. Marketing automation helps you derive insight from content that you never had before. It tells you where a prospect is in the buying cycle, which content is getting stale, which content is most influential to a closed deal, and much more.

These insights are obtainable only if you understand the new relationship between content and marketing automation. In this chapter, you find out how to create content specifically to be used with your marketing automation tool, when to use short-form versus long-form content, and how to prove the value of content marketing through your marketing automation tool.

New Content for a New Tool

To maximize the use of your marketing automation tool, first you must understand people and their relationship to content. Automation is great only if you are sending the correct content to the correct people. To build a basic understanding of how to get it right, you need to realize that people engage with two types of content:

· Problem-solving content in the buyer’s funnel: Within the buyer’s journey, or funnel, people look for content to help them solve a problem. This means that you need to make sure to send the correct content at the correct time.

· Content for professional development or entertainment. This is content that is consumed on a daily basis and is not a signal of a buying process. Most people consume the same amount of professional development and/or entertainment on a daily basis. The blogs you read every day, or the Twitter followers you listen to daily, are good examples of this content.

When designing content, you need to set goals for your content as it relates to your lead life cycle. Follow these pointers to help make sure that the goals for your content match up to its relationship to the lead life cycle.

· Early-stage leads: Early-stage leads don’t need to hear from your sales team. They don’t need to be prompted for a demo and don’t want to read your press release. When crafting content to attract early-stage leads, consider creating content to help leads be better at their jobs. Your goal for early-stage content should be to build a relationship, not sell. Jay Baer (@jaybaer) said it best: “Helping is the new selling.” Some good forms of content for early stage leads are

· Blog posts focused on how to identify a problem

· How-to articles

· Short video clips

· Mid-stage cycle leads: Leads that are in the middle of a buyer’s journey generally have a problem, or pain point, but not a way to solve it. Generally, buyers in this stage also do not have the budget, authority, or timeline to purchase. Content for leads in the middle of the buyer’s journey should help explain options to solve their issue.

You also need to show substantial social proof, that is, show how others have benefitted from your solution. This proof can be in the form of an interview with a person who is a client, or a testimonial letter. This information helps prospects see how others solved a problem by using you. The goal for this content should be to help people identify the way to solve their pain as well as to get their team to buy in. Social proof provides validation from outside your company. Some good forms of content for mid-stage leads are

· Blog posts focused on how to solve the pain points

· Webinars featuring client success stories

· Case studies

· Late-stage leads: Leads later in a buyer’s journey have already agreed on how to solve their problem and are looking at vendors. They are in the process of making a short list of vendors to vet. Your goal should be to get on the short list. Some good forms of content for late-stage leads are

· Blog posts comparing you with other vendors

· Buyers’ guides

· Sample RFPs (Requests for Proposals are typically used by large enterprise companies looking to evaluate vendors. They consist of spreadsheets of standard questions to be asked of all vendors as a screening round before demonstrations are set up.)

· Sales leads: Leads in the salespeople’s hands still need content. The sales team usually sends it, but you need to create it. Some good forms of content for sales leads are

· Blog posts on achievements

· Case studies (can be the same ones used for mid-stage leads)

· One-page sales sheets

image When advertising on Google AdWords, test different advertisements for the same piece of content. You might find that the same piece of content can work at different stages in the lead life cycle, so make sure to test this possibility. Craft your advertisements specifically to a single stage in the lead life cycle to increase your odds of engagement and extend the life of the piece of content.

Blogging and its place in your automation strategy

Blogging is usually the first type of content most companies create. It is low cost, low effort to create, and it’s effective. Blogging online is easy, but it’s a difficult way to drive traffic in the short term. Blogging is a long-term strategy that needs to be correctly understood so that its benefits can be maximized. Also, a blog isn’t something people are going to read during the buying cycle. So you need to understand that blogging is for audience building, which in turn builds your funnel. But it is very different from the content you need to create for the buyer’s journey. Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing for your blog and tying it into your marketing automation solution:

· Evergreen posts: Posts that have a very long life span should be given more attention than shorter, time-sensitive posts. Evergreen posts should be well researched and heavily optimized for SEO. These posts pay dividends long into the future. Also, use these posts to advertise your content. Figure 8-1 shows a blog post with the source of research to drive downloads of the content.

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Figure 8-1: Evergreen blog post supporting content downloads.

· Breaking news posts: Breaking news posts are generally quick-hit posts. They are very timely and have short life spans. They drive a lot of traffic in a short time period. When writing breaking news pieces, make sure to work appropriate content into the body of the article. The goal is for your breaking news to be shared and conversational, thus driving people back to the post and seeing your content.

· Thought leadership: Your blog is your soap box. Use it wisely and effectively. With 2 million blog posts going up every day, the amount of content you have to compete against is huge. Keep focused on your goal of being the brightest mind in your industry and you can gain the thought-leadership spot. If you fill your blog with reposts of other people’s thoughts and ideas, you are going to get traffic but won’t be considered a thought leader. If people consider you a thought leader, they are more likely to engage with and share your content.

· Being noticed: Many times, you have tactical goals. They might not be lead-generation goals but rather visibility goals. Maybe you need to get on the radar of analysts. When your goal is to get noticed, consider creating content specifically for analysts. Interview them, do research that they will find interesting, or propose a question for them.

· Readership: For your blog to be read, it has to be seen. Don’t just wait for it to be found; to drive readership, you also need to promote it. When you have evergreen posts, you can use them in lead-nurturing campaigns and even as social engagements. Think about advertising posts on Facebook ads, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Consider promoting a post just as you do a piece of content in these advertisements, not your blog’s name. Driving people to your blog gives them a reason to come and helps them to find more of your content.

image Some blog platforms have sidebar callout features. The features are just advertising spots on the side of your blog. Use these features to advertise content offers as well. These are good places to show a video, the cover of a white paper, or an impressive statistic. Think of these as mini billboards used to generate a click to download the content. These also are easy to change so that you are always promoting your most important content regardless of which post someone is reading. These are a great place to use dynamic content populated from your marketing automation solution.


Six people in content marketing to follow on Twitter

Content marketing is a world unto itself. It takes a lot of work and planning along with great execution to have an awesome content strategy. Whether you’re new or a veteran content marketer, make sure that you’re following the best people to learn from. Here is a short list of some of the best minds in content marketing:

· Joe Pulizzi (@joepuizzi): Joe is the head of the Content Marketing Institute.

· Nolin Lechur (@nolin): Nolin is cofounder of Brainrider, a boutique marketing firm specializing in content marketing.

· Jay Baer (@jaybaer): Jay is the founder of Convince and Convert and author of Youtility (Penguin Group, 2013).

· Wistia (@wistia): Wistia is a video hosting company that teaches you how to do video content — and teaches it better than anyone else.

· Ann Handley (@marketingprofs): Ann is cofounder of Clickz, Chief Content Officer at Marketingprofs, and author of Content Rules (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012).

· Joe Chernov (@jchernov): Joe received the 2012 Content Marketer of the Year award (awarded by Content Marketing Institute) and is Chief Marketing Officer at Kinvey.


Knowing when to use short-form content

Short-form content is a shortened version of a full document. A good example is a blog post created from a full white paper or industry report. The report is the long-form content, whereas the post is the short-form content. If you break the report up into sections and make each section a separate piece, this would be considered short form as well.

When using short-form content, the best place to use it is in outbound marketing efforts. Because of its length, short-form content is easy to engage with and easy to create, thereby allowing you to generate a lot of email content from very few long-form pieces of content. Use it for

· Lead nurturing

· Email marketing

Knowing when to use long-form content

Long-form content is a full version of a document. A good example is an ebook, a white paper, or a long industry article. The report is the long-form content, whereas the post is the short-form content. You typically use long-form content for inbound traffic. It is promoted via paid search and SEO and is found by buyers doing research.

Site visitors are more likely to engage with long-form content than short-form content when you require them to fill out a form. The consumer finds more value in a larger document and is more likely to fill out a form in return for your content. Use long-form content for

· Paid search

· SEM lead generation

· SEO lead generation

· Social lead generation

Creating content for lead nurturing

The number-one complaint I have heard from people getting started with marketing automation is that they don’t have enough time to create content. This is also the number-one reason that I have seen companies delay their adoption of marketing automation. However, the real issue is that they are thinking about content in the wrong way. When you are building content for lead nurturing, it is very easy. Take a look at some easy examples of content for nurturing programs:

· Short form: The opposite of long is short. Short-form content should be easily digested within five minutes. In a recent research report I conducted, only 1.7 percent of respondents said that they prefer content over five pages long. To create short-form content, you can break down long-form content or create it from scratch. The content should consist of specific ideas that can then link to bigger pieces of content if the person wants to read more.

· Blog posts: You don’t have to write them! Two million new blog posts go up each day. If you want to be considered a thought leader, you should also consider helping people find information, not just creating it yourself. Other people’s blogs are a great way to do this. Send emails with links to other blog articles by industry experts. You are sending a link to the blogs, not putting the blog content into your email.

Being a thought leader doesn’t always mean that the thought belongs to you. Raising awareness of good thinking is also a way to become a thought leader. If you use this technique, make sure to let readers know why you are sharing the ideas. Tell them the reason that a post is great, for example, and what they should try to learn from it.

· Videos: Video content is currently one of the most engaging forms of content. You can create videos quickly, easily, and with little expense. If you have not done videos before, I suggest going to Wistia.com (@wistia) to find out how to do video well. Wistia.com also shows you how to shoot video with anything from your iPhone to a production camera. My first video was shot on a Sony HandyCam with a microphone from a computer attached to it. You don’t have to put the video in your email, and it is not advisable to try to embed video in email. Instead, take a screen shot and make the image a link to your video. Or just use a hyperlink to the video.

· Testimonials: These are a super great form of content as well. They are key to lead nurturing because they show social proof. Social proof is something all buyers are looking for before they set up demos with your company. I suggest having testimonials in different content forms. Consider having a few videos, a few interviews hosted on your blog, or a few case studies. A testimonial can consist of only one item, such as a single quote. Don’t try to overproduce these elements at this stage. It is more important to have just one quote from four companies than to have one single case study with lots of quotes in it.

· Short research: Proprietary research is a must. There are 294 billion emails sent every day. For your emails to be engaged with, they have to be fresh and relevant. The easiest way to ensure that they are fresh is to create new research. Research is interesting in lots of ways and can provide you with tons of value. Consider using SurveyMonkey or LinkedIn to conduct short surveys. You can pay for survey submissions for about $3 each. Remember that you need just one metric, so don’t go overboard with your research.

Observations are a form of research, too. One of my best and most productive research projects was to chart the adoption of best practices for the marketing industry. I did the research by observing 150 websites and checking the basic items such as their forms, emails, and website. This was all observation based, but it told a very compelling and powerful story. So don’t always think that you need to hire someone for research or that it’s outside your means.

· Survey: Send a survey to your prospects. This is a great form of content. You are asking for their input, which is not a typical form of engagement; it is, however, highly effective. You can survey their biggest pain points, their thoughts, or their opinions on how your company can improve.

· Infographics: The current golden child of many marketers, infographics have become a must for any company. If you don’t have the means to create them, find your local design school and pay a cheap artist. I’ve paid $200 dollars per infographic and driven tons of engagement through it. The infographic is a visual depiction of data. It’s usually fun and uses graphics to showcase the data. Graphics are used frequently to take mundane topics and make them fun through good graphical layouts. Make sure that you have fresh data and then worry about making it pretty. This is where you can use your survey data or your research to drive increased engagement.

· Webinars: Conducting webinars is another great way to drive engagement in a nurturing program. ReadyTalk (@readytalk), a webinar-hosting company, suggests that hosting a webinar recording on your website can increase the life span of your efforts and increase your lead count. In a recent survey I conducted, I found that only 16 percent of consumers preferred to watch a webinar live. The largest majority said it didn’t matter whether it was live or recorded. So consider putting links to your webinars in your nurturing programs.

Managing Your Content

After you have content, it’s time to learn to manage it. Tracking your content — knowing who is engaging with it and where it is being engaged with —helps you figure out how to present it better the next time. Marketing automation makes content management very different from how it used to be.

Hosting content in your marketing automation tool

Your marketing automation tool has a content repository, which is where you can upload content. The purpose of hosting your content here is to track it. When you host your content in your marketing automation tool, it records every person interacting with your content and allows you to run segmentations and automation based on content engagement. The content to host in your marketing automation tool is as follows:

· White papers

· Sales collateral

· Image files needed for email templates

· PDF files

· Ebooks

· Case studies

Content you should not host in your marketing automation tool is the following:

· Blog posts (These remain in your blogging platform.)

· Videos (These are stored in your video-hosting solution.)

· Webinars (These are stored in your video-hosting solution.)

When you host your content in your marketing automation tool, it gives your content a new URL. See Figure 8-2 to see the URL of the white paper I uploaded. You use this URL to promote your content. This is the URL that you will use in social media, as a hyperlink on your blog, and for your AdWords campaigns.

When you host content in outside sources, such as video files, make sure to understand how your solution deals with tracking these. The reason you usually don’t want to host these files inside your marketing automation tool is their file size. Generally, you have a limit on the amount of content you can host in your solution. A single video sometimes can eat up your entire storage space, so using an outside hosting solution for videos is recommended. Using outside hosting also gives you many other advantages that I cover when I talk more about videos later in this chapter.

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Figure 8-2: The URL I use for promoting content via my marketing automation tool.

Easy ways to track your distributed content

When you have a third party send out content for you, or your content is hosted on another site, you’re distributing content. Sending distributed content is very common if you ever put on list rental email campaigns or engage in comarketing with your partners. In these cases, you need to be familiar with ways to track your engagement when your assets live off your website. Uploading a sales presentation into an online tool like SlideShare and posting videos to YouTube are both good examples of assets living off your website. If you learn to utilize your marketing automation URLs and custom redirect URLs, you’ll always be able to track your assets. Here are some methods for tracking distributed content:

· Given URL: Your given URL is the URL you are given by a tool or program. This is the URL your marketing automation tool gives you when it hosts your asset. Figure 8-3 shows the given URL of a white paper I loaded into my marketing automation tool.

· Redirects: A redirect is a URL that allows you to track a person back to another location. Figure 8-4 shows a redirect URL being set up to go to a YouTube-hosted video. Using a custom redirect is great when you are doing a comarketing campaign and using assets hosted on other sites.

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Figure 8-3: The given URL of a recently uploaded white paper.

· Master campaign. If your campaigns include many different content pieces and assets, you might want to create a master campaign, which allows you to tie a lot of assets together to track the full campaign much more easily. Creating a report is something you do for any campaign you run on your own site; however, you should go to this trouble only if it is a large campaign. To do this for every small comarketing piece might be overload. Having a master campaign makes your life a lot easier when trying to digest the effects of a full six-month marketing campaign that uses many microsites and assets.

· Automatic redirects. If you want to protect content that you’re not hosting, you can do so. Your forms or landing pages can automatically redirect a person to another web URL after the person completes the form. You can easily set up a redirect on your form or landing page; how to do it depends on your tool. Having a redirect allows you to have your lead capture form on your site while driving people automatically to other third-party sites so that you can track the action.

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Figure 8-4: A custom redirect for a hosted video.

Creating new content reports

If you’ve followed the suggestions in this chapter for tracking your content, the guesswork is now gone: You know exactly which content is getting engaged with, by whom, and when. This is the biggest difference you will notice about your content between pre- and post-marketing automation. Before marketing automation, you knew whether people filled out a form to download your content. Post-marketing automation, you know when they actually read it, watch it, or share it.

Here are a few basic reports to consider creating after you have this visibility:

· Engagement/time report: Now that you can track every person who engaged with your content, you need to be able to look at the data and determine whether your content is trending up or down. Some content will have timelines, but other content (such as evergreen content) won’t. Make sure that you can export a CSV file of your content engagement and can see a trendline of engagement. If you notice that your content has declining engagement, look at the content and the distribution. Have you reduced the distribution of the content? Or is the content in need of an update?

· Influence report: Much of your content can now be tracked to see what influence it has. An influence report helps you see whether your content is helping to move people through the funnel. This is also easily seen in a stage-based report. A proper stage-based report will show the last content engaged in by a lead moved to the next stage. Both of these reports will help you identify which content to send to people and at which time. This allows you to easily build an automated program to send the correct content at the correct time.

Tying Webinars and Video to Your Automation

We have been trained to love video. It’s the status quo, so jump on board. The average American reads only one book per year and watches 40 hours of television each week. Learning how to engage consumers where they want to engage is key for the future of your marketing.

The two most popular media are webinars and hosted videos. Both are very engaging and can be directly tied into your marketing automation tool to give you deeper insights into how people are consuming your content, how to improve your content, and how well it is driving revenue for your organization. In this section, I show you how to tie webinars and hosted videos into your marketing automation tool.

Understanding webinars for automation

Along with all forms of video, webinars have become one of marketers’ greatest lead-generation tools. If you have been on the hosting side of a webinar, you can understand the difficulties of trying to engage with an audience you can’t see. Webinars can increase their effectiveness when tied together with a marketing automation tool. Here are a few tips to keep in mind to get more out of both your webinar and your marketing automation tool when they are tied together:

· Integrate your tools: Integrate your webinar platform with your marketing automation tool. Doing so removes the need to import and export your lists. It also allows you to score leads based on their engagement with the webinar, in turn allowing you to easily segment attendees and score prospects on webinar engagement.

· When using slides, make them fun: A webinar is a visual and auditory experience. If you are neglecting either part of this experience, it could be boring. If it’s boring, you hurt your future webinar attendance. Have fun with your slide deck presentation so that your audience wants to look at it. If you don’t have design skills, buy prebuilt slide templates through Themeforest. Figure 8-5 shows some of the great designs you can buy instantly.

image Learn to use the Master Slide feature in PowerPoint. This feature allows you to easily edit a slide deck template. Customize a basic PowerPoint prebuilt template to create your own in seconds.

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Figure 8-5: Themeforest PowerPoint designs.

· Use polls: If your webinar tool allows for polls, use them. They help you engage with your audience. Also, other webinar tools, such as ReadyTalk, allow you to score leads based on engagement with polls, as shown in Figure 8-6.

· Replay: Make sure that you host your webinar so that others can watch it later. Anita Wehnert from ReadyTalk says the company has seen prerecorded webinars drive 47 percent more leads over time than the webinar did the day it aired. Make sure to protect your recording with a lead capture form. For more details on lead capture forms, check out Chapter 9.

image Before you run any webinar, always have a dry run. Failure to get everyone together to go over which buttons to hit and when, perform a sound check, and double-check other aspects of the process will result in a flawed webinar. You can resolve all issues with webinars by making sure that everyone knows what to do and when to do it.

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Figure 8-6: A poll in use in a webinar.

The world of video and automation

Webinars are a type of video; they are performed live and then hosted later on to continue to drive engagement. Video is an extremely powerful tool when combined with automation. Automation allows you to capture email addresses from your videos, track a prospect’s engagement with the video, and even serve up different videos based on the prospect’s lead score. Here are a few keys to integrating video into your automation tool:

· Host your videos: You need to first host your videos with a video-hosting tool. Most of these tools integrate into a marketing automation tool. These tools allow you to track exactly which prospects watch which videos, and even how much of each video they watch. Figure 8-7 shows an example of a prospect record and the amount of the video the prospect watched.

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Figure 8-7: A prospect’s record with the video history displayed on the lead record in the CRM.

· Integrate your calls to action. Calls to action are usually buttons that get people to take an action, such as Sign Up, Download, or Register. Your calls to action need to be tied to your marketing automation tool, which is easy to do if your video tool is connected to your marketing automation tool. If they aren’t connected, just use a traceable URL or a form embedded in your video. Figure 8-8 shows a video with an email call to action used to capture email addresses to add people to nurturing programs.

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Figure 8-8: A video call to action from the Wisita video player.

· Dynamic actions for more engagement: Earlier in this chapter, I mention using dynamic call outs and dynamic automations. Consider taking your video to the next level by suggesting other videos for people to watch when they are done watching one. You can easily use your marketing automation tool’s dynamic functionality to display different video suggestions based on a person’s lead score. Figure 8-9 shows an example of this. When prospects have a score of 0–10, they are shown video number 1; when their score is 11–35, they are shown video 2; and leads with a score of 36+ are shown video 3.

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Figure 8-9: A dynamic call to action promoting a video to watch.


A case study for using video for marketing

The Paul Bradford Sugarcraft School offers online classes and instruction in cake decorating. Many visitors come to the Sugarcraft site and immediately purchase the courses. However, lots more visitors are interested in the content but are not yet ready to commit to a paid membership.

To engage and connect with these prospects, the Sugarcraft team created a series of short, free videos. Importantly, Sugarcraft added a call to action at the end of the video to collect email addresses from those prospects who wanted more free content. According to Matt Barker, “We know that email is by far our best marketing tool, so we wanted to create a piece of content with the sole aim of new email acquisition.”

This call to action at the end of the video gives the Sugarcraft team an opportunity to engage with prospects who are not quite ready to convert to paid customers. Prospects are added to an email list to receive regular updates and new videos, which helps Sugarcraft stay in touch with these leads. In the first month after implementing the video, Sugarcraft collected more than 7,000 email addresses and saw an increase in conversion to email from 3.4 percent (without the email form) to 8.2 percent (with the email form). The team is hoping to build out its free video series and continue to use email marketing to convert these prospects into paid members.