Bridging The Gap Between Content And Marketing Automation

by Hana Abaza, Director of Marketing at Uberflip

Today’s marketers know that content works. It brings in traffic, educates your audience, and gives them something they want to subscribe to.

We also know that content performs for your business when you pair it with marketing automation software; you can use content to build up email subscriptions, understand your audience’s interests, and nurture the leads in your sales funnel.

As marketers, we create and curate engaging content, broadcast it to all the right channels and measure how it performs. But marketers today still struggle with tapping into the potential that exists in content marketing.

Then there’s the question of trying to prove the ROI of your content. That must mean there’s something missing, right?

A lot of marketers are doing well in terms of authoring and distributing their content. But what that creates is a destination for your audience that they can simply move on from. If we transform that into a journey instead, we can do a better job of keeping visitors and customers engaged in a branded experience that lets us understand the buyer personas we’re targeting from the information we gather through metrics.

What’s missing is a bridge between content marketing and marketing automation, and that’s what we’re building at Uberflip with Hubs.

We’re building what we define as content marketing automation software. Our focus is on helping marketers create and manage a responsive content Hub that gives them real insight into how their audience engages with a content experience instead of separate media channels or content silos alone before funneling that data into marketing automation software like Hubspot, Eloqua, Marketo or MailChimp.

The Uberflip platform starts with aggregating all the content you create and curate. With your blog posts, white papers, eBooks, videos, slideshows and more all in one place, you can then organize it all into custom streams that give your audience a clear path to consume the content they want by topic, type or whatever you decide. This encourages them to stay inside the branded experience you build. Are they interested in learning about SEO? Serve up a content stream dedicated to SEO with a sign-up form to access a gated eBook about the topic.

With Hubs’ customizable Call-to-Action tiles, we want to empower marketers to strategically place links, sign-up forms and gated content so that they actually make sense within the context of the visitor’s experience in order to boost conversions.

The idea behind Hubs is to connect this content experience to your marketing automation software in order to fuel your lead nurturing initiatives and sales efforts with relevant data about how each visitor is actually consuming your content. All without replacing your company website or current automation tools.

Marketing automation’s role is to streamline your ability to reach out to leads and customers through email marketing, but the reality is that emails are getting ignored simply because they’re not targeting the right interests. Marketing automation is only as good as the data you feed it. However, content allows qualified leads to find you and for you to understand their motivations. When the two work together, both content and email marketing become more effective than they would be on their own.

Many businesses are starting to use content marketing in tandem with marketing automation.

But without a way to bridge the gap between content and lead nurturing, it’s sink or swim as marketers are forced to scramble across all channels and take a shot in the dark at real results. Marketers need a bridge to cross.

By catering to the audience’s experience and aligning that with the marketer’s goals, we can minimize leaks and distractions in the form of external social channels and content that has nothing to do with your brand. When marketers can see the bigger picture of how their content is performing and audiences can experience a brand represented as a whole through your content and receive relevant messaging, both sides end up happy.

Here’s some food for thought to end off with: we’ve been looking at our relationship with customers as B2B or B2C (and that latest one, H2H or Human to Human?). But with content marketing, there’s an even more important relationship to consider: A2A or Author to Audience. We can be excellent authors of content, but we need to start delivering that in an experience that makes sense to our audience so that we can make sense of it as marketers.

Hana Abaza is the Director of Marketing at Uberflip where she combines a metrics driven approach with an unwavering commitment to creating an exceptional brand experience. She has a knack for communicating inspired tech solutions to mainstream audiences and, with over a decade of experience in digital marketing, she gets results. Hana is also an energetic speaker and contributor to the Huffington Post, Marketing Profs, Content Marketing Institute and other industry publications.