Esse texto foi publicado pela primeira vez no dia 24/04/2015 no Medium

One of the main activities you can perform with a marketing automation software is Lead Nurturing. And Lead Nurturing is all about great content.

Every professional working with marketing and communication online have heard about this. Content marketing is a subject that each year becomes more important.

The search for the keyword “Content Marketing” is increasing year by year since 2011. This is happening because we are in an age that people don’t trust advertising and advertisers pushing their message anymore.

They have many ways to avoid being interrupted.

Because of that, marketers needed to approach the prospects in a different way.

Permission Marketing and Inbound Marketing

Seth Godin in 1999 started talking about Permission Marketing. His idea was that companies should offer something non-intrusive with high value to their prospects and by this invite them to receive the message.

It’s not about the pop-up banner, it’s about the content you will give in order to make the prospect connect with your brand.

Nowadays people are talking less about Permission Marketing and more about a strategy called Inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing relies on content marketing to reach the prospects and make them interact, engage and move along the sales funnel.

It’s based on using different online strategies like: SEM, SEO, Landing Pages, Email Marketing, Social Media, Blog posts, Webinars, Podcasts and ebooks. Most of those contents are used with Marketing Automation.

Creating the right message

Besides the technical part of some strategies, the key to success is delivering the right content to the right person in the right time.

You can have the best Landing Page with a nice Call-To-Action and fail to convert the prospect to a lead because you didn’t offer anything valuable. You can have a well structured website and fail to reach the first page of the SERP because you have poor content.

It goes like this to every strategy, including Marketing Automation.

The main reason to start using a Marketing Automation tool like Route is the need to track the prospects along the marketing and sales funnel and be able to impact them and make them move along the pipeline until they turn to a lead and to a customer in the end.

The way to do this is interacting with them according to their behavior. This interaction happens mainly by email and to engage them is necessary to create great content. The most common reason why Marketing Automation fails is not knowing how to produce and re-purpose the content.

Creating great content

When talking about great content is not only well written and produced. This is basic.

A great content is related to the context of your business and the of people that starts a connection with you.

You need to understand who are the people that visits your site and the way to do it is creating personas. Once you get to know who those people are you can start creating content that fit their needs aiming to make them engaged with your organization.

It’s not an easy task to always be creating new things and a good way to always keep on track is reading what other people in your market are doing. Take some moments of your day to read the news, to see what your competitors are doing, to listen to your clients to get information on things they might want to know.

You can re-purpose your own content, like creating an ebook based on blog posts that you’ve already written, making a webinar content in a series of blog posts and any other idea that you might have to create new things based on things you’ve done.

Use the content to attract prospects to your website, to make them give their email and convert to a lead and to make them come back and share the things you create giving you social proof.

Use it to educate your prospects about your market and your product or service and specially to help them move along the sales funnel through Lead Nurturing.

So, why is it important?

Up to this point you probably noticed that the best way to engage with your prospects and turn them to leads and customers on the web is through content marketing.

When you use a Marketing Automation tool you want to do exactly this: offering valuable content to people while they offer you their attention.

It wouldn’t help sending email periodically to them according to their behavior and characteristics if the content you offer it’s not the right one. If this happen they will leave your sales funnel and won’t turn into clients.

While their not ready to buy your product or service you need to nurture them and offer content to make them change their position in the pipeline, always aimingto make them become sales ready.

That’s why you need to structure your content in a smart way if you want to take full advantage of your Marketing Automation tool.