Like fish and chips, tea and biscuits or gin and tonic, some things are just better together. The same can be said for marketing automation software and WordPress.
While you can use a marketing automation platform on its own as a standalone software tool, and you can use a WordPress website on its own to publish content that will attract potential buyers, when you integrate them they become really powerful. The synergy between a formidable content publishing tool such as WordPress and the capabilities of a marketing automation platform cannot be underestimated. They complement each other to provide an optimised user experience for your website visitors, which makes for a digital platform that brings success from your marketing.
More than just the sum of their parts
Many companies choose to integrate their website at least with their CRM, so that the results of outbound email campaigns can be logged and tracked. But going one step further than that and integrating with marketing automation gives so much more. WordPress is widely considered to offer the best content management system. Not only is it highly customisable and great for integrating with third-party applications, such as plugins or bespoke solutions, but it also provides a superb platform for publishing content. As content sits at the heart of an inbound marketing campaign, then measuring and acting on how that content is accessed – using marketing automation – is the obvious route. Adding marketing automation to an outstanding CMS such as WordPress isn’t just adding one and one and getting two. In combination, they bring a synergistic quality, delivering much improved functionality for your website.
Your website as your agent
Even if you don’t sell via your website, it still acts as the main channel that can deliver information, engage prospects and capture leads. Therefore it makes sense that your website is like your agent, promoting and publicising your brand, your products and your services. You want to drive traffic to your website, and integrating a marketing automation platform with your WordPress website allows you to track visitors in real time, segment and prospects, and nurture leads, allowing your marketing function to hand over well-qualified leads to sales.
Attracting and understanding customers
WordPress is well-known for its SEO strengths. And if you add one of the respected SEO plugins to your WordPress installation, then its SEO capabilities are boosted even further. Together with this potent SEO functionality, a strong marketing automation platform can really become the driving force behind your marketing. They combine to deliver an integrated marketing experience for your customers that helps attract interested prospects to your website.
With inbound marketing, you can’t automatically know the people who are visiting your website. It’s not like outbound marketing where you address them by name and invite them to visit. But with the additional functionality that comes with marketing automation, you can discover who is visiting your website and even gauge how interested they are in buying from you. In turn, you can sell more effectively to your prospects.
Omni-channel marketing
One of the cornerstones of successful marketing is being present on all channels where your prospective customers may be. Your hyper-connected customers expect to be treated consistently across channels, without necessarily seeing the same message in all places. When you use marketing automation and WordPress together, you can not only give your prospects message consistency, but can also deliver a truly omni-channel experience by tracking their interactions on different channels and delivering content accordingly.
The bottom line
Both WordPress and marketing automation systems are strong tools in their own right, but together they deliver a truly great digital solution. The well-known marketing automation packages such as HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo all work seamlessly with WordPress. WordPress provides the platform and the content; the marketing automation analyses customer visits and interactions, and delivers the right content at the right time. Together, they inform you about your visitors and give you the intelligence to determine how interested they are in buying from you. They work together and combine to form a powerful digital marketing solution that ultimately means you can sell more effectively as more prospects come to trust you and buy from you. The bottom line is that WordPress and marketing automation can together add to your company’s bottom line.