Beginners guide to Marketing Automation and SEO

Marketing today is all about engaging content to the right audience with the optimal timing. In an ever growing landscape of tools, processes and definitions, it can seem impossible to fully grasp the when and what of content marketing. SEO in combination with marketing automation provides a new and innovative way for businesses to grow their brand without increasing ad expenditure. We call this the excellence mindset - and this is how it works.   

One might ask how such different disciplines, SEO and marketing automation, fit together in the vast world of inbound marketing. In this article, we seek to define both of these terms.

What is Marketing Automation?

Let's start with the youngest sibling in the group, marketing automation is a relatively new marketing branch that focuses on (though to various degrees) already converted contacts, giving them personalized content at scale, usually through email sendouts, in-app content cards, push notifications or SMS. 

Marketing automation turns the tedious tasks of marketing to completely automated workflows, and through that expands the number of possibilities for customer segmentations and personalized content. 

If you have reached a level of excellence in your marketing automation, you might have tried:

• Multi-channel approaches - interacting with customers through multiple channels with personalized messaging. 
• Target-based workflows - workflows that trigger on specific behavior taken by the customer, giving them the right message at the right time
• Hyper personalization - using AI modeling to show customers content unique to them, based on their buying patterns and preferences.   
• Dynamic Segments and content - adapting your website or emails to show content based on behavior or preferences or using your data to update customer paths as you go. 
• Predictive Modeling - use your customer data to analyze audience patterns to predict future buying behavior. 

Marketing automation has the possibility to increase overall out-put and free up more time for strategy, customer analysis and content production - in turn increasing the organic engagement with your brand.

What is SEO?

In contrast, SEO is a marathon, slowly but steadily improving content over time, optimizing it towards the search engine algorithms. SEO is all about being seen, and being the one who gets seen the most. To ensure optimal ROIs in marketing, one has to receive free press, and SEO is the way to achieve it. 

If you have reached a level of excellence in your SEO strategy, you might have tried

• Keyword optimization - mapping out the most commonly used search phrases and creating content based on that.
• Creating multiple landing pages - optimizing your website to cover all different variations of search terms for a certain product, making your content easier to find. 
• Building backlinks - ensuring that your content is referred to by high ranking domains, giving your brand a boost in visibility. 
• Structured data - creating markups in your website code to help the search engine interpret how your FAQ, product flows or reviews should be displayed when searched for. 
• Filling all the possible content gaps - continuously looking for the latest trends to make sure that your business can answer as many consumer questions as possible. 
• Analyzing your health score - making sure that you follow-up on each article, blog post and landing page to make sure they are SEO optimized. 

SEO is a discipline that helps leads find you by giving them the content they need - when they need it. In comparison to advertising, SEO is non-intrusive and activates upon a clearly stated interest - giving the absolute best ROI. 

Both SEO and marketing automation seeks to improve general awareness of the brand, but also acts as a support for leads to reach a purchasing decision. They work the best together, and share some similarities.