Marketing automation and CMS

The power of marketing automation activated by CMS

In the contemporary business climate, it’s not enough to simply excel at email marketing or to create content that goes viral.

Digital marketing is increasing in complexity every day and as a marketer, you must manage more channels, content, and data to meet ever-increasing consumer expectations through delivering personalized content.

You need to use a variety of tools to attract and engage customers such as a marketing automation platform, a content management system (CMS), and an analytics platform.

It is important to present a seamless experience to your customers and this means you have to work across all these different systems in the background. Your marketing automation platform and content management platforms are essential to your digital content strategy.

With your CMS you create, manage, and publish content on your website and mobile apps. Your marketing automation platform helps you control campaigns across email, website, social channels, and more.

Marketing automation software and content management systems each have their strengths. You cannot manage content in your marketing automation platform and you cannot create and run campaigns in your content management system.

Establishing an integration between these two systems will enable you to create a better digital customer experience. It will deliver the data insights you need to deliver a more personal experience to your audience.

Or better yet, you could select a CMS that provides you the insights you require and brings efficiencies to your marketing, sales, and service operations. We will cover this a bit later.

In this blog, we’ll explore the top benefits of using the marketing automation and integration power of a CMS and what you need to be aware of before you decide on the right approach for your business.

1. Lead optimization through marketing automation and CMS data

Timing is everything where it pertains to lead nurturing. Even a difference of just a few minutes in sending a message to a lead can result in a move closer to a sale rather than the relationship ending.

The margin for error is nominal to none and you need all the tools and advantages available to get your timing perfect.

Online data collected via forms, such as event registrations, newsletters, sign-ups, webinars, login registration, and product orders, is core for lead generation in your digital marketing strategy.

When a lead fills out a form, they essentially kick off the lead nurturing process. Their action shows where they are in the buying journey and they signal that they are open to your marketing materials and listening to your messaging.

Integrating the CMS form data into your customer relationship management (CRM) can enable you to send personalized but automated messages. In this way you can create an email campaign based on the consumer behavior demonstrated by your customers.

The form data can also update the CRM contact records with real-time data and create actions for your sales team. They can then focus their efforts on a short list of prospects that are further down the buying process.

Your leads will feel that they received a personal message instead of a bulk email that they want to unsubscribe from. It goes a long way in building a trusting relationship and helps the transition from selling to nurturing.

Monitoring the responses from leads will also help you review your content performance so you can make adjustments when needed.

2. Personalized user experiences with marketing automation and CMS enablement

As a marketer, you know that the drive for personalized content in your messaging that engages customers is endless. You also know that customers are ever more critical of content that seems automated.

This poses a major challenge as you need to automate your process, but you also need to engage clued-up customers on a level they perceive as personal.

The solution is to incorporate reliable data from your content management system. Selecting a CMS that collects high-quality data about the effectiveness of different kinds of content will help you refine your content strategy.  This way, you can hone in on the realities of the specific buying journey of your pipeline.

Using data, you can optimize your content to reach your leads at the right place and right time.

If, for instance, your content management system shows that a lead has viewed posts about two different models of a product, you could create a personalized comparison piece between the two and email them a summary. You could email personalized landing pages based on interests shown to entice engagement. 

The personalized user experience you can provide with each content interaction is one of the key benefits of marketing automation CMS technology. 

Other areas where personalization can be delivered are with ads and calls to action (CTA). A key conversion driver is a personalized CTA with enticing elements of each user segment. 

Link the functionality of marketing automation with the valuable data in your CMS to select the CTA that is best suited. This could include an invitation to sign up for an event, start a free trial, download your ebook, or contact you.

3. Accelerate buyer journey flow with marketing automation and CMS data

Using multiple systems to run campaigns results in multiple data sources to track and analyze. This siloed approach does not provide a complete overview of campaign data and limits the value you can extract.

Using a content management system integrated with your CRM and other tools enables marketing automation that puts you in charge of your customer growth with a unified approach.

An integrated CMS provides centralized reporting that reveals the complete buyer journey and identifies what content works and which campaigns show the most success. This will add more depth to your content strategy to fuel lead generation and lead nurturing efforts along the buyer journey.

You will know what your leads are interested in clicking on and what kind of personalized messages have the most impact. At any point in time, the exact position of your customers in the sales funnel will be clear.

These details will allow you to create a personalized experience for them and use your CMS to deliver the targeted content. This adds real-world value to impact customer decisions at each stage of the journey.

A content management system with automated moderation will also provide automated reports about positive and negative online comments to make changes that build trust with your audience.  A CMS can break down the silos that the sales, marketing, developers, and IT teams worked in to promote collaboration and improve the customer experience.

4. CMS as a centralized content management repository

In the pursuit of campaign excellence, you often find yourself using multiple systems. This means you have created unique and valuable content for use in different platforms, such as emails.

Often there is a lot of value in old content and being able to repurpose, customize, and reuse it can make your process more efficient.

Marketing automation systems, however, do not function as content warehouses, and finding content saved on various systems is time-consuming and unreliable.

A content management system with powerful tools for organizing content can act as a content repository for all your content. It will allow you to find the results through search and filtering functions. This makes it easy to find the content you need to add value to your audience.

Final Thought

While an effective marketing automation platform can enable you to personalize interactions with your customers, adding the best-suited CMS provides a seamless journey along the buying journey.

While pondering your options it’s essential to also think about the integration of any additional marketing automation solutions you might want with the content management system you opt for.

If you add up the cost and time spent on all the tools you use to execute and measure the success of marketing campaigns, you might find that upgrading to one CMS that includes all the functionality and data analytics in one platform is worth your while.

Do you need to improve the visibility, integration, and automation of your most important data and save your organization time and money?

Download our whitepaper on How to select a future-proof CMS in 2022 to find out more.