Did you know that 65% of digital marketers automate their email marketing efforts, 47% automate social media marketing, 30% use marketing automation in their landing pages, 25% use automation for campaign tracking, and so on? Well, these are not just figures to talk about. They tell a lot about the current scenario of content marketing automation.

While automation has overpowered almost every sector in the digital world, content marketing automation is the next big triumph for digital marketers. You must have come across situations where you have enough time to create the content but not enough for making marketing efforts or measuring its actual performance. This is where automating content marketing comes into play.

Let us discuss what content marketing automation is, the steps involved to automate content, and some popular content automation tools available in the market.

 

What is content marketing automation?

Until now, we have heard of automation of all kinds to simplify long tedious tasks. Content marketing automation is something similar. It is an automation technique where various aspects of content marketing are automated limiting the gigantic effort that goes after content creation and promotion.

Defining it appropriately, we can say that content marketing automation is the use of technology and software tools to automate various activities of content marketing. This includes automating activities including creating and distributing content, and analyzing the content for a more efficient and targeted content approach.

This can help businesses to save time and costs, enhance the efficiency of marketing activities, and generate better outcomes.

 

Why it is an important marketing strategy?

The fundamental purpose of automation was and always is to reduce the amount of effort for a given task. However, it can be said that it is much more than that. Content marketing automation is more about the efficiency of marketing efforts rather than saving human efforts.

So, among other benefits of content marketing automation, here are a few:

 

Reach a wider audience

The most essential purpose of content marketing is to reach audiences. Automating the content marketing process helps your business to reach a wider audience through automated publishing and distributed content. Content automation can be achieved by scheduling content distribution to various social media platforms, emails, or other digital channels.

 

Better lead generation

Wider reach, better lead generation. Content marketing automation allows your business to create lead magnets through platforms such as ebooks, or webinars. These lead magnets are then forwarded to prospective leads having an interest in your business. Thus, the process of lead generation becomes much simpler and seamless with automation.

 

Nurture leads

Lead generation is not the last word for a healthy business. To keep up with the tough market scenarios, you need to nurture your leads. This is easy with content marketing automation. Automation allows you to send automated emails to your customers.

These emails typically have relevant content which the targeted customer is already interested in. This keeps your customers engaged and hooked to your business. Such a strategy has a high probability to spark sales.

 

Increased sales

Content marketing automation may help your business to improve sales by offering insights into your target audience and their individual interests. This information may be utilized to develop material that is more likely to resonate with the target audience, as well as to target content more successfully.

 

How to automate your content marketing

Now that you are aware of how important content marketing automation can be, let us talk about the steps to automate content marketing.

 

1. Choose the content to automate

The key to successful content automation is to identify the type of content you would like to automate as the very first step. Carefully, go through the type of content you have been producing.

These may vary from blog posts, landing pages, and social media posts, to email newsletters. Identify automating which of them will be beneficial for your business.

 

2. Create a workflow for your targeted content

The next step is to customize the workflow for each piece of your content. You can do so by following these steps:

• Determine the final objective of the content. Whether the purpose is of customer retention, lead nurturing, or reaching a wider audience?
• Then, you have to identify the target audience and understand the stage of the buyer’s journey they are in to shape your content accordingly.
• Now, design a personalized message that may influence the customer to proceed forward to the next step in his buyer’s journey.
• The next step is to determine the various distribution channels you are going to use.
• After that, allocate due dates and distribution channels for the contents.
• Finally, you have to keep track of the optimizations and ensure that there is scope for updating content in the above steps.

 

3. Post on social media

You can make use of social media scheduling tools like HubSpot and Hootsuite to automate your posts. These tools help you to automate the process of posting on social media platforms in advance.

This way you can ensure that is posted regularly and on time to keep your business on the surface. Some marketing automation tools come with social media integrations helping in your content automation.

 

4. Make use of newsletters

Some automation tools such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact are built to provide you with email marketing solutions. These tools help you to templatize and create new email newsletters promoting your targeted content.

Further, such tools will allow you to schedule your business newsletters for future emails and also create email campaigns on your content.

 

5. Use paid channels for promotion

You must be well aware of how insanely important paid promotions are for your business. So, a must step in content marketing automation is automating paid channel promotions. Content promotion tools such as Taboola, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and CoSchedule can automate your paid content strategy.

Way more than email or social media solutions, these are highly effective automation tools for lead generation and engagement.

 

6. Monitor your analytics data

Lastly, you can monitor your insights by using automation tools. It works for updates to certain metrics and KPIs helping in determining the performance of your content. The automation may include metrics such as tracking engagement, time on page, number of clicks, and conversions.

 

Most popular automating tools for content marketing

There are different high-end content marketing automation tools available in the market, some of them are:

 

HubSpot

HubSpot offers a comprehensive automation solution for content marketing. It includes a wide range of features starting from content creation, distribution, engagement, and ending to lead generation.

 

Marketo

Another popular automation platform, Marketo is a powerful marketing tool that enhances the results of your content marketing efforts. You can automate your marketing tasks, personalize your campaigns, and in the end, track the results of your campaigns with Marketo.

 

Adobe Campaign Classic

A cross-channel content marketing automation, Adobe Campaign Classic will help your business by creating, delivering, and tracking marketing campaigns across various online marketing channels. This may include email, mobile, web, and social media marketing.

 

Salesforce Pardot

This top-notch online marketing automation platform was primarily designed for small and medium-sized businesses. However, it has been recommended by businesses of all sizes, from small to large enterprises.

This tool can help your business to attract, engage, and convert leads through features such as lead management, email marketing, social media marketing, and marketing analysis.

 

Conclusion

Concluding it, we can say that, content marketing automation is a powerful digital marketing solution that can help you to boost your business to a great extent. It can improve your content marketing results by automating repetitive tasks, personalizing promotional messages, and measuring the outcome of your campaigns. This will free up your time and help you concentrate on more strategic initiatives.