How to Automate Your Content Marketing Effectively

In the digital marketing world, we like to think that the days of manual management, oversight and hands-on work for every little process and task are long gone. Fortunately, we’re right.

A big part of marketing success nowadays is the ability to do more work and deliver more in less time. While this seemed impossible a mere decade ago, nowadays, with the aid of automation, marketers are able to achieve amazing results in record time.

This advancement is great for the higher-ups who want to see better performance from their teams, and is also a game-changer for solopreneurs and agencies working with multiple clients at a time. Even though automation in content marketing is a good thing, it can also be a real money pit if you don't know what to automate and how to do it right.

So, without further ado, here’s how to effectively automate content marketing without breaking the bank.

It all starts with prioritization

Experienced marketing leaders and business owners understand the importance of goal-setting and prioritization when it comes to integrating new solutions, processes and changes overall. Implementing automation solutions is a big change for a company, so you need to know what to automate and when to automate it, and then prioritize new solutions.

Start by analyzing your content marketing processes and how you create content for your audience and different channels, noting the repetitive and menial tasks. These tasks will be the first on your list to automate, but you have to keep in mind a few other important factors.

Consider your key marketing objectives and goals, and the marketing channels you need to invest in to achieve them in the long term. Keep in mind that marketing automation is a long-term investment, so don’t just think of the short-term—your goal is to automate processes for the future.

Once you have a list of priorities and understand the needs of your team as well as your customers, you can start automating.

Personalize the content on your site

While content automation tends to start with scheduling posts or automatically proofing articles, you may want to start your automation strategy with your website. After all, your site is your brand’s biggest selling point in the online world, and a key to generating and retaining customers is to continuously deliver value when they come back to your site.

This aspect of your site is where personalized and dynamic content comes into play, and it’s one of the easiest ways to get started with content automation.

Source

Creating dynamic content for your website is one of the best ways to improve web personalization and the user experience across the board. Automatically present new, fresh content on your homepage and other pages whenever a user returns to your site, based on their browsing history, behavior and preferences.

You can also include social media buttons and feeds, CTAs and newsletter sign-ups, questions and quizzes and other dynamic content that will further engage the visitor. All of these forms of content can also automatically collect valuable user data for your marketing campaigns.

Automate your educational campaigns and events

Educational marketing is one of the most powerful ways for any brand to build social proof and a trustworthy image in the competitive online world. Turning your marketing campaigns into educational content and delivering your messaging through educative messaging allows you to build a rapport with your audience and inspire them to become loyal customers.

The best part about educational marketing is that you can automate most of it. For example, you can automate your webinars through automated webinar software that allows you to schedule your events, register attendees and sell tickets and even have an automated post-webinar strategy.

Whether you’re automating webinars or any online events, or if you’re creating downloadable educational content, there’s a dedicated tool out there to automate some of its key aspects.

Use content promotion tools where necessary

Businesses that want to maximize the potential of their top content need to know when and how to invest in content promotion. Promoting content on social media and across the web manually requires a lot of time and effort, and more often than not you will lose out on some great engagement opportunities no matter how much you try.

Source

Automation is critical in this regard, and luckily you can use various automation tools to alert you to the best content and times to post, or to automatically promote the right piece of content on a website. You can promote your marketing collateral like a new landing page or embed your social media post on a popular website, or you can get an alert when a particular topic is trending, allowing you to act quickly and capitalize on the hype.

Automate your entire email strategy

One of the most powerful ways to deliver engaging messaging and content to your audience is via email. Fortunately, email is one of the marketing tools you can automate almost entirely, from the schedule and frequency to the CTAs and even some content.

Automating various parts of email marketing minimizes time waste while maximizing your reach, but you need to be careful with the level of content automation you employ. You can automate content curation for your emails, allowing the software to embed personalized content for different recipients to enhance their experience. When it comes to email, content marketing can still work wonders if you make it personal and relevant, but it’s best to use automation only for recommendation and ideation purposes.

Wrapping up

No matter how many automation tools and AI-based innovations hit the market in the coming years, content marketing will never fully become automated. The human element in content creation, storytelling and content strategizing is an inextricable piece of the marketing puzzle, after all.

That said, knowing when and how to use automation to your advantage can help you achieve amazing results for your business and your clients. Now that you know how to prioritize your automations and what you need to automate in content marketing, you can effectively scale your marketing efforts without breaking the bank.