When it comes to content marketing, you don’t have to do everything by hand. Automated content marketing helps you to save some time, money and effort. It provides you with tools that perform marketing tasks more quickly than any human ever could.
You might think of robots producing videos and blog posts when you hear the phrase automated content marketing. Well, you aren’t entirely wrong. But, you haven’t quite got the full picture.
Content marketing automation can involve content creation. But it can also provide you with ways to streamline the content distribution and curation processes.
Automated content marketing isn’t just one thing or another. It’s a range of tools to help marketers and brands improve their overall content marketing strategy. The trick is choosing the best tools for your brand. Then, you need to understand how those automation tools help you reach your goals.
The Benefits of Automated Content Marketing
Perhaps the biggest benefit of automated content marketing is that it saves time. And time, as you know, is money.
Take a look at content curation — the process of finding and sharing content that you know your audience/customers will love. Content curation is amazing, because it allows people to look at your brand as a resource or thought leader. It also builds goodwill between you and the brands/publications whose content you’re sharing.
The downside is that, wow, does it take a long time to do by hand. First, you’ve got to find the content to share. Then, you’ve got to share it. Content discovery tools, which recommend content based on specific keywords, allow you to easily relevant content.
Saving time isn’t the only benefit of automated content marketing, nor is it the only way save money. Another benefit of content marketing automation is that it can often do the work of one or two people. For example, instead of hiring someone to manage a team of content creators, you can use a custom content platform that assigns projects to a team of screened and selected creators.
Automating at least some aspects of your content marketing will also help you sleep better at night. Since the system is handling whatever tasks you assign it, and is doing so automatically, you won’t wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat anymore, worried that you forgot to do something.
Ways to Use Automation in Content Marketing
You have a few options when it comes to automating your content marketing. You can automate things at several different points in the content marketing pipeline:
- Creation
- Curation
- Distribution
When we say “content creation,” we don’t necessarily mean hiring a robot or computer to write your company’s blog posts or create its videos (although such robots do exist). Instead, we mean tools that can help you come up with ideas for content, and tools that help you create the most impactful content possible.
One such tool is the headline analyzer from CoSchedule. To use it (it’s free, but you do have to hand over your email address and some basic contact info), you type in a headline. It spits back a grade and analysis of the headline, as well as tips for improving it.
Content curation tools rely on algorithms to mine content from across the web, and to recommend the content that’d be most relevant to your audience. An example of an automated content curation tool is DrumUp, which makes quick work of sorting through the billions of pieces of content that are online.
Finally, content distribution tools help to ensure that the most relevant pieces of content appear in front of the right people. Email marketing software, which sends out messages to customers based on their past behavior or purchases, is one example of automated content distribution.
MailChimp is one of the more well-known email marketing automation programs out there. It lets you put together campaigns, and will automatically send out new messages when people subscribe, or when people have abandoned their carts.
Putting Together Your Automated Content Marketing Strategy
Putting together an automated content marketing strategy is pretty similar to putting together any other type of content marketing strategy. The key difference is that you’re finding ways to use automation tools to help you achieve your goals.
The first step is to think of your goals or an area of content marketing where you’re struggling. Maybe your content sinks like a stone once you publish it, or maybe you need to find ways to get it in front of the right audience.
You also want to define your audience, so that you know what tools will best reach them. Email marketing might not work so well if your customers largely hang out on social media, for example.
Finally, you want to fire up the automation tool and give it a try. After that, you can take a step back and assess. Did customizing social media or email messages boost your leads? Are you seeing a lower bounce rate after using a software program to improve your headlines?
Once you know what automation tools are working and which ones aren’t, you can continue on, or make adjustments as needed.
