Content

Content Marketing is a major driver of workflows. Organizations create content that they use to attract visitors with inbound marketing. Hopefully visitors find the page they have landed on so compelling that they want to download the content being featured. This content is often a pdf, like an ebook or case study, as they are easy to form block and later email to leads. However, content can also include infographics, blog posts, word or excel templates, even simple industry-specific calculators.

Forms

Forms are how you gather the information about leads for your CRM. They are embedded on landing pages and visitors complete them in order to gain access to content. Sharpspring has forms with “smart fields” (more on smart fields here). Smart fields are only displayed if the information in that field is not known about the person viewing the form. For example, if someone had already submitted their name, email, company and title on a previous form, the next form they view would display another set of fields, like budget, city or phone number.

Landing Pages

Landing pages promote a piece of content and then traffic is driven to those pages either by paid advertising, social media or organic search. In some cases, a series of landing pages may feature the same forms and content, but be optimized for different audiences. For example, an ebook titled “Marketing Automation for Dummies” might be featured on a landing page that is targeted to people interested in marketing automation for startups, marketing automation for SMB’s and marketing automation for non-profits.

Contacts and Leads

Marketing automation is used, in most cases, to gather leads and then increase the amount of knowledge that an organization has on those leads and nurture them along the sales funnel. Leads are created or updated in Sharpspring when the lead pays for a piece of content by providing their personal information. At its essence, the cost for an ebook is their first and last name, email address, company name and perhaps one or two other details. The content is not free, but it is a transaction that both parties consider to be a fair exchange of value. Leads can be private citizens, for example in the case of an Insurance Broker or Mortgage Broker, or people who work at a particular company, for example in the case of a SaaS startup that sells a B2B service.