One of the most common problems that businesses face in their content marketing journey is the shortage of time. Businesses need to research, ideate, design, complete, and publish content. All this needs to be done before it loses its relevance.
The shortage of time is faced because most of the content marketing processes are done manually. Moreover, content marketing involves mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. So, how do you solve this problem?
The simple answer is content marketing automation. But what exactly is it? Let’s have a look.
What Is Content Marketing Automation?
Content automation is the approach of automating repetitive content-related tasks and it is one of the important parts in content marketing as a whole. Automating anything means removing the need for manual processes.
So, in the context of marketing, content automation helps produce marketing materials faster than traditional methods. This is done with the help of advanced software and tools. There are different tools available including those that don’t require coding.
For instance, a code-less content automation platform allows users to generate results even without knowledge on basic coding. All you need to do is feed in the data into the tool and relax. Every part of the website right from automating product badges to automating the omnichannel marketing of the website, the tool does it part with less to no human effort.
We have seen what content marketing automation is. We also had a look at how it can help businesses. Now, here’s a look at how you can effectively automate your content marketing.
How to Automate Content Marketing?
Content marketing automation can be applied to any stage of content marketing. Here are seven ways you can automate content marketing.
Decide the Content
You must first have a clear idea of what content you need to create and automate. You can use services such as Google Alerts for the same. The service provides results on the content that is being created based on the keywords.
It automatically sends email alerts for new results. The results include web pages, blogs, or news articles matching the search term. This proves beneficial when you want to create visual content like infographics.
Now you need to implement a workflow application to streamline content publication.
Implement a Workflow Application
Workflow applications are tools that simplify and streamline various business processes through automation. They help cut the manual steps involved in the content marketing process. A popular example of a workflow application is MailChimp.
MailChimp is a popular email marketing workflow application. It can automatically send emails to different individuals. For instance, it can send welcome emails to new customers. It can also send reminder emails asking customers to complete their purchases.
Other workflow applications perform various content automation tasks. They help you save time, money, and resources by automating the tasks at hand and carrying them out in an effective manner.
Leverage Social Media
After your content is created, you need to share it on different social media platforms aside from your website. You can use a content automation tool to manage your social media postings. Automation tools like Hootsuite can help schedule your posts across various social media sites in a few clicks. The posts get published as per schedule.
This helps save time and resources as you can manage all your daily, weekly, and monthly posts at once and schedule them for posting. You won’t have to look at them later as they will get posted without any issues.
Use Paid Promotion Tools
You need to supplement and enhance your social media marketing and content marketing. You can do this by paying for content promotion. The promotion tools help your content reach a wider target audience base in a few bucks.
For example, Instagram has a paid promotion service that shows your posts to people who don’t follow you but follow accounts like you. This can help increase business opportunities.
Google Ads can help you reach a wider audience. It shows your business on top of the Google search engine results page (as an ad) for particular keywords. However, you have to pay for the ad space on the search engine results page (SERP).
Automate Email Marketing
Email marketing has become a vital part of content marketing as it helps in customer engagement and retention. Thus, automating email marketing is crucial if you want to grow your business. As mentioned earlier, you can use an automation tool like MailChimp for this purpose.
For example, you can send out email newsletters to your customers every week. The emails can provide weekly updates about your business operations or other information. You can also automatically send personalized emails during special occasions. This makes the customer feel valued and special, helping increase customer retention.
Integrate Multiple Platforms
You gather data through different sources. For example, you collect information about new leads through your website, Facebook page, and other sources. Collating the data in a single place is essential for creating better marketing and business strategies.
You also need an automation tool that can help you track all your social media channels in one place. Managing your social media through individual apps can become tiring, and you may miss out on important things.
Thus, you need to integrate multiple platforms so that it becomes easy for you to manage different aspects of your business.
Consider Your Analytics
Having a content marketing strategy and posting content according to it is not enough. You also need to consider the analytics periodically. Analyzing the analytical data helps you understand what’s working and what’s not. You can then change your marketing strategies accordingly.
Google Analytics is a popular tool for analytics. It provides detailed reports about various metrics of your content marketing strategy.
Takeaways
Agreed that content marketing is essential for increasing your brand’s presence. It also helps in building long-lasting relationships with customers and growing your business. But that doesn’t mean that you dedicate your entire time and resources to it. If you do so, content marketing will become a liability rather than an asset.
Thus, implementing an effective content automation system is essential. These seven tips mentioned above will definitely help you improve your content marketing.
So what are you waiting for? Automate your content marketing as soon as possible!
