Marketing automation software has most definitely changed the game.

Just like Muhammed Ali changed boxing. Or Ender Wiggin changed Battle School.

Now, with marketing automation software, marketing campaigns have reached entirely new levels of power and strategy. But, like any good super-athlete/galactic soldier analogy, it cannot succeed alone. Even with perfectly crafted campaigns and nurture tracks, marketing automation needs the right content to make it valuable.

And by valuable I mean for your buyers, the people on the receiving end of your emails, and for you, the marketer with goals and deliverables to keep in mind.

But don’t take my word for it. I just referenced Orson Scott Card in a B2B marketing blog, for Pete’s sake.

So in case you need a little more of a reason to see the light, we recently interviewed content marketing experts about the perfect team (content and lead nurturing) and asked them why this duo is so key to modern marketing. Here’s what they said:

“Fundamental to our ability to succeed with marketing automation has been our ability to generate wide and deep, appropriate, audience-targeted content.” -Todd Wheatland, Kelly Services

“All of our content is designed against personas and is overlaid across all of our buying stages. So we have specific content that targets each of those personas at those different buying stages. And it’s become a tremendous resource for our business.” -Blair Lyon, Monetate

We’ve not only been able to double our pipeline almost every quarter, but the quality of that pipeline and the speed with which our sales reps can convert from initial interest and leads to sales qualified prospects to actually closed accounts has gone up dramatically.” -Dustin Grosse, DocuSign

“People are not answering their phones when people call to say, ‘Do you want to buy my product?’ You need to be giving them information about why you’re adding value to them in a digestible way…finding that balance is what this next generation of marketing is about.” -Barbara Saxby, Accelent PR

The importance of quality, targeted content within well-crafted marketing automation campaigns is not going unmentioned. Copyblogger is talking about it. So is Marketing Profs.

The point?

The game has changed, and the players are more equipped than ever to target the right people at the right time. Yet still, marketers continue to push product-centric emails and fill their target buyers’ inboxes with irrelevant content. These buyers may be clicking, but it’s probably “unsubscribe.”

Don’t be one of those players. You may not break the rules, but you certainly won’t win the game.

We also discussed this topic over on DemandGen Report, where you can read more and also watch a video on nurturing leads with content. But if you’re really hungry for information, Orson Scott Card wrote a thing or two about game changing decisions…

I know, I know. I’ll Bugger off.

(Apologies for the puns.)

Photo Credit: snow0810 via Flickr