Integrating Marketing Automation and Content Management Systems
Over 57% of B2B purchasers, on average, make their purchase decisions before they talk to the sales rep of the company. It has become ever more imperative to generate rich, relevant content and ensure it reaches your potential leads as they evaluate their choices. While a Content Management System (CMS) is used to generate and manage content, companies are increasingly using Marketing Automation Software (MAS) to engage and nurture leads by delivering content in a timely and relevant way. Studies, however, show that over 50% of consumers disengage from brands due to irrelevant content and over 60% of marketing messages being delivered are generic and not personalized to suit the needs of the recipient.
Merely generating rich and informative content is of no use if they are lying idle on your website or blog. Content has to be curated and re-packaged to fit the needs of the customer depending upon variables such as customer segment and demographics. It needs to be delivered to potential leads in a timely and relevant manner through drip campaigns or lead nurturing.
What can companies do to be trigger-ready when a potential customer is lurking around the corner? Companies must look to integrate their Content Management System with their Marketing Automation Software (MAS) to better target and structure their communications to the customer with robust content.
Understanding the Basics: What does what?
A Content Management System is a piece of software that allows you to create and manage digital content. Think of your website – whether it’s updating existing content, adding or changing photos or videos, creating news-worthy stories and blog posts, a content management system streamlines the whole process, making it easy, flexible and consistent across platforms. Popular CMSs include WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore and Joomla, among many others, which you can use to develop a content strategy for your business.
A Marketing Automation Software is a set of tools that allow you to plan and automate marketing communication to your potential leads and customers. It allows you to manage marketing campaigns, CRM integration, landing pages and lead management in an easy-to-use and effective manner. Leading MASs include HubSpot, Perdot, Marketo and Eloqua to name a few. These can be used in a standalone manner; but the effectiveness increases considerably when they are integrated to your CRM and CMS.
The Best of Both Worlds: Integrating your CMS with MAS
When you integrate these two systems, with one feeding data from the other, you create an intelligent customer engagement strategy. We find that companies doing so reap the following benefits:
- Create Once, Publish Anywhere: By making your CMS the one-stop repository for all content, you reduce duplication and redundancy. This allows your MAS to create timely campaigns to nudge potential leads into customers by directly sourcing relevant content from your CMS. Your marketing campaigns develop a consistent theme across platforms as all content is sourced from one place. The consistency helps sales and marketing teams get a unified view of the customer and better evaluate the efficacy of their marketing campaigns.
- Smarter, Organic Content: Insights collected from your MAS can be used to craft richer and more engaging content. The MAS will provide insights into how the potential leads respond to each marketing campaign and their position in the sales funnel. These insights can be leveraged to create personalized content and delivered through your MAS in a timely manner.
- One World View: The data collected by these two systems, when viewed together, give you a holistic view of your customer engagement strategy. For instance, MAS data can highlight the level of interest a customer shows in response to your specific email campaign or landing page. The CMS can show the different topics/keywords customers are showing interest in general, which are relevant to your products and services. The former has a microcosmic perspective while the latter focuses on the macrocosmic picture. Together, it enables you to create a responsive strategy to engaging your customers.
Nurturing Your Leads: How Docusign Integrated its CMS with MAS
Docusign, a San Francisco-based electronic signature and digital transaction management company, has effectively married its Content Management System with its Marketing Automation. It has curated over 36 different email campaigns to nurture their leads down the sales funnel, ensuring that content is personalized by industry and relevance. Content is mapped to each phase of the sales cycle and the content (in the form of white papers, peer reviews and case studies) is strategically delivered at periodic intervals, nudging the leads forward. This has helped them “double their pipeline, almost every quarter” and significantly shortened their sales cycle.
Docusign is not alone. Swedish furniture maker IKEA is king when it comes to integrating their Content with the Marketing Automation. Right from their website, which detects which country and what language you speak to taking detailed surveys of your demographics, it leverages this with uniquely targeted content marketing, as demonstrated in this blog by Jimmy Daly.
Wish to chat with us further about integrating your content management with marketing automation? Write to services@suyati.com.
