5 Ways Integrating CMS and Marketing Automation Software Can Benefit Your Business

At this point, you’ve certainly heard what content marketing can do for your business. Heck, since you’re here, you’ve most definitely heard the acronyms CMS (Content Management System), and MAS (Marketing Automation Software).

You might not know exactly how each one can benefit your business, but what you’ve probably heard is that using them can boost the impact and return on investment of your content marketing efforts.

All too often, these tools are recommended separately from each other. A content management system like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla allows you to power-charge your website, and makes managing it a piece of cake. Marketing automation software helps you to increase productivity by making it easier than ever to create and automate campaigns, evaluate data, and more.

By themselves, they each offer outstanding benefits in particular areas of content marketing. When integrated properly, though, they have the potential to become the powerful tool that your business needs to truly turbocharge your content marketing efforts.

Now that we’ve piqued your curiosity about using both marketing automation software and a content management system, here are 5 ways that integrating the two of them can benefit your business.

#1. They complement each other.

Using a content management system like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal simplifies content creation and management. It adds consistency to your website, enables you to track changes to your content, and makes it easier than ever to manage workflow.

Marketing automation software, on the other hand, is great at marketing your content – getting eyeballs on the content you’ve created, gathering data about your readers, and then using that data to create prospect or customer profiles.

Yes, a CMS can help you market, and MAS can help you with the creation of content, but at their core, they’re designed to do different things. To get the most out of each, you’re better off using them in tandem with each other.

#2. They allow you to serve your existing customer base while also reaching out to new prospects.

This goes hand-in-hand with the first reason. A CMS makes it easier for you to create and manage content designed to reach out to and inform your existing constituency.

While most content management systems offer some level of SEO optimization for your content, they are specifically designed to significantly boost targeted traffic. With the available plugins and themes, a CMS makes it easy to boost the eye-appeal of your website while presenting easy-to-read content to your existing customer base.

Chances are, you want more than to just service your existing customer base – you want to grow it. That’s really where marketing automation software shines. It allows you to automate the processes of driving new targeted traffic, capturing leads, and getting your message out to the public.

Simply going with one or the other, a content management system or automated marketing software, might offer you some benefits, but for most business owners, they’ll fall short at maximizing return on investment. Together, however, they’ll turn your content marketing efforts into a well-oiled machine.

#3. Your MAS can guide your content strategy.

An MAS can help you speed up your marketing, and when you have it working at full speed, it will give you lots of feedback about your content. You can learn what information was searched for when bringing users to your site, which of your posts are getting the most traction, and what kind of content leaves people cold and ready to turn away.

All of this is useful for shaping your content moving forward. By identifying what your audience wants and developing target customer profiles, automated marketing software enables you to personalize your content and give your users something they’ll want to share. Finally, It also lets you know when a content strategy has run its course, and it’s time to switch gears.

A CMS working on its own can give you rudimentary data, but it struggles to compete with the enhanced insights that a high-quality MAS can offer.

#4. Your MAS can learn from your CMS, and vice versa, giving your audience a personalized experience.

If you hook your contact database up to your site, your MAS can give each visitor contextual content – meaning the actual experience changes to be super-targeted to their habits and needs.

This is what Amazon does, for example. It recommends content to you based on what you’ve browsed or bought previously.

Some MAS options allow you to do the same. This way, if a committed customer is coming to your website, they can skip any marketing and go straight to the content that meets their needs. Likewise, a prospect will have marketing targeted to them, and they’ll be shown content based on what they’ve already identified as being of interest to them.

#5. Using them together allows you to decrease the sales cycle.

Because MAS and CMS give you incredibly accurate data on your customers and prospects, you can use this information to dramatically reduce the sales cycle. In fact, you can keep a close eye on your leads, so that you know exactly when to use a given message.

For example, as a prospect enters your sales funnel by visiting your website, you can monitor his activity and see what content he’s accessing. You can continue marketing to him and sending him targeted content, until he gets deeper into the funnel – say, to a sales page.

Then, your MAS can re-classify his “temperature” and transfer his info from the marketing department to the sales team. This gives your salesmen hyper-targeted and red-hot leads to work with, as well as increasing the efficiency of your marketing.

Without a strong CMS to back up your marketing automation, however, many of your leads would fall through the cracks before they ever got this far.

For Best Results, Combine Your CMS with a Proven MAS

As strong as your content marketing efforts may be, they could always use a little boost. Getting the extra “oomph” that a marketing automation software can provide could make the difference in turning a visitor into a customer.

If you’re looking to take your business’s content marketing to the next level, try integrating your CMS with a strong, proven MAS. As powerful as both types of software can be on their own, they’re exponentially more effective when used together.