The rewards of B2B content marketing can be great as you build trust and awareness with your audience by providing them with valuable information. That content can come in many shapes and sizes, including white papers, videos, webinars, emails, blogs and posts.
But in chasing those rewards, it can be easy for the creation and management of content and content strategy to drain your time and budgets. Luckily, that’s where B2B content automation tools can come to the rescue. They’re tailor-made to help busy brands and marketers stay on top in competitive industries.
To optimize their content marketing, more than half of B2B companies say they use content automation systems. And B2B companies that realize the most success tend to invest heavily in content automation — in fact they say that they spend about 40 percent of their budget on it.
What Are B2B Content Marketing Automation Tools?
B2B Content marketing automation tools are platforms like BuzzSumo, MeetEdgar, Buffer and Marketto that can help you run successful content marketing campaigns using automation. They can take over tasks that are repetitive and/or time consuming, like sending, scheduling, tracking and analyzing content.
The Benefits of B2B Content Marketing Automation Tools
Advances in technology mean that B2B content marketing automation tools have more benefits than ever to offer brands and marketers. They include:
- They Can Boost Engagement
Compelling visuals are a key component of successful content. B2B content automation tools can help you add elements like videos, graphics and images to your content that make it more engaging. And higher engagement rates typically lead to a boost in site traffic, leads and sales. Content automation tools can also help you add links that bump up your reach too.
- They Can Help You Scale Your Marketing Efforts
Quick growth can be overwhelming for new businesses, especially if you have to scramble to make do with limited resources and staff. B2B content automation tools can make it less stressful by helping you scale your content marketing as you grow.
- They Can Make Your Workflow Faster and More Efficient
Content automation tools can make it easier for your team to find content, as well as share it and collaborate on it. It gets your content in front of your audience more quickly, which means faster website traffic growth, lead generation and conversions.
- They Can Help Prevent Staff Burnout
Growth is fantastic, but if you don’t have the staff to properly manage it you can end up with burned out employees and low employee retention. As your business is growing, the last thing you should be worrying about is the need to replace talented employees who’ve left for less-stressful pastures.
Fortunately, B2B content automation tools can help keep staff happy by taking over tasks and reducing workloads in the process. Staff members who have better work/life balance are staff members that stick around.
- They Can Free Up Time for Innovation and Creativity
When your team members have more time to focus on the big picture, they have more time to be creative and innovative. That means they have more time to come up with new ideas that solve problems and bring in more revenue.
- They Can Personalize Your Content
B2B content automation tools can personalize your content, like newsletters and reminders for your target market. Personalizing content brings better results because it shows respect and acknowledgement for the person it reaches. People respond more positively when they’re addressed by name.
- They Can Help You Target Niche Markets
B2B content automation tools aren’t just helpful in reaching broad markets. One of their key benefits is that you use them to target a number of different niche markets too. And you can do so with a variety of messages that are relevant to each niche.
- They Can Help with Scheduling and Distribution of Content
Keep your content’s editorial schedule organized can be frustrating. But luckily, content automation tools can help you schedule, post and send your content on a consistent basis. They can send reminders that are helpful both for you and for your customers and content ranging from white papers to videos, as well as invitations to webinars.
- They Can Help You Stay on Top of Social Media
Social media isn’t just for B2C companies. B2B is reaping the rewards too. But social media demands fresh, consistent, quality content on a daily basis, which can tax even the most dedicated social media teams.
Content automation tools can come to the rescue, helping B2B marketers plan and schedule content across social media channels. Whether it’s video for YouTube, tweets for Twitter or posts on LinkedIn, content automation tools can help establish your presence on social media. And they can help you keep pace with the competition too.
- They Can Help You Build Templates
Content marketing templates can help you automate repetitive tasks, from engaging and welcoming your customers to thanking them and retargeting them.
- They’re Cost-effective
Whether you’re a startup with very limited budgets or a well-established company with deeper pockets, cost-effective solutions are important to your bottom line. B2B content automation tools save money and time by doing the heavy and/or repetitive lifting for you.
- They Can Assist in Repurposing Content
One of the first steps in repurposing content is to audit your existing content, which can seem like a daunting task. However, it’s worth it. You can use content marketing automation tools not only to schedule your content, but also to reformat it for different social media channels.
- They Can Help You Measure the Results of Your Content
B2B content marketing automation tools can help you to measure and analyze the results of your content. They can also help you with elements of SEO like keyword research and to find valuable backlinks and analyze your competitors.
- They Can Help You Reward Your Best Customers
When content automation helps you analyze your results and engagement to tell you who your best customers are, it makes it easier to reward them. And customers who feel appreciated and rewarded are more likely to become and remain long-term, loyal customers.
- They Can Help You Find New Markets
Finding the best new markets means that you need to analyze your content data. Content marketing automation tools can analyze your results to help you discover the new markets that are responding best to your content.
- They Can Assist With Mobile Marketing
The mobile market is skyrocketing and should be on practically every business’s marketing radar as it allows them to reach buyers wherever they are. It has changed the B2B sales dynamic, resulting in fewer face-to- face interactions and more business conducted via smartphone.
But because the number of mobile channels is perpetually growing and the channels themselves are morphing, managing content marketing for them can be challenging. To complicate matters, the automation needs for mobile content marketing are very different than they are for more traditional content marketing like email. Fortunately, content automation tools can help you optimize your content for mobile use with features like in-app and push notifications, and messaging.