Content Marketing vs. Marketing Automation; The Best of Both Worlds?

We’re pretty big fans of marketing automation here at Solutions Review. The benefits it provides are numerous and we’ve discussed them at length in the various articles around the site. After a good amount of research, it seems like there’s no reason to use anything but automation in all your marketing endeavors, right?

Wrong. Content marketing, by all metrics, remains one of the most effective methods for securing leads and maximizing conversions. And content marketing and marketing automation, while both great tools for the modern marketer are almost diametrically opposed to each other. That which separates them is fairly obvious once you break down each concept to the barebones details.

Content Marketing By the Numbers

The simplest definition of content marketing is the creation of material that is engaging and attractive to the demographic you’re looking to market to. That could be anything from blog posts, to helpful video materials, to informational booklets and everything in-between. That’s content marketing in a nutshell. But just how effective is this?

The answer is very effective if you go by the statistics.

According to reports provided by the Content Marketing Institute, enterprises engaging in a content marketing strategy saved 62 percent more money using the strategy and exhibited 434 percent more search engine-indexed pages than those eschewing the practice, with conversion rates six times higher. Additional studies also revealed that the public is shifting to be more receptive to content marketing. A report by PageFair last year stated 615 million devices are currently using Adblock software, effectively crippling traditional advertising efforts. Pew Research purports nearly 50 percent of 18-50-year-olds exclusively use the internet as their main source of news, and that demographic is more open to taking product suggestion from blog posts.

So taking all of these numbers into account, it’s pretty clear that content marketing is worth looking into, to say the very least. Gaining new leads, avoiding adblockers, and securing more conversions all sound like a marketers dream come true. But getting there may require you to reassess your automation strategy.

Alterations for Automation Strategy 

The gist of marketing automation is basically letting a machine take over certain key marketing functions. Being that this is a site dedicated to automation, we’ve discussed at length the functions of automation software like lead nurturing, behavioral tracking, multi-campaign management, and lead scoring and more. The automation software currently available on the market can do a lot of a market’s job for them by eliminating the need to spend time on certain tasks

But no solution can do everything for you.

Despite their near all-encompassing usefulness to the modern marketer, automation products cannot offer any competencies toward content marketing. Though automated solutions can provide you the host of functionalities as previously described, no solution, AI-powered or otherwise, has the creativity and complexity to generate content leads are going to find useful and want more of. For marketing material of that caliber, you need the intuition of your team.

Content and automated marketing strategies are, by their nature, pretty separate concepts which can each yield their own ROI when used exclusively to each other. But the true potential of each method is unlocked when you learn to juggle them both and maximize their effectiveness.

Why Can’t We Have Both?

Automation and content marketing don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Automation may not be able to write a blog post or make a video for your enterprise Youtube channel, but it can give you the time to do that on your own. Automation software does the tedium that you can do, but would rather not. Freeing up some of that busy work gives your team time to work on more engaging content. While your solution sends out emails en masse, you can craft an article about the finer points of your enterprise. Your solution can send follow up emails to leads linking them to a tutorial video you made.

The long and short of it is although automation cannot yet create your marketing content for you, it can help facilitate its creation by giving your team more free time to make the perfect product to show the world. You could go so far as to say an automated solution will indirectly improve the quality of your content marketing efforts. The ideal strategy would be to automate all the marketing processes you can via a marketing solution while having your team simultaneously work on producing attractive and engaging content to best reach your target demographics.