If you try to do everything related to content marketing by hand, you’ll go crazy by the end of the week.
For a successful campaign, you need to cover all bases:
Plan a content marketing calendar; Find the right keywords; See what your competitors are doing and do something better; Think of amazing headlines; Write top-notch content; Share it on several social media websites; Engage with the audience; Nurture leads; Observe the results…
The list can go on and on. Even if content marketing is all you do, it’s still consumes too much time. Fortunately, there are automation tools that make this work easier and more effective.
You’ll get to plan your content marketing plan more efficiently, and you’ll essentially make it better.
Cases That Prove How Content Marketing Automation Works
A case study published by Marketo showed how Panasonic benefited from a marketing automation program. The results were outstanding: the marketing’s contribution to the total revenues was improved from under 10% to 26%.
Another case study shows that B2B brands can benefit from automation, too. Opsview, a UK-based software company, automated the process of handling leads coming at the website.
They wanted to identify the ones who always used the free version and the ones who might be interested in the premium, subscription-based version.
The results were outstanding. The volume of leads pursued by sales was boosted by 55% when compared to the previous quarter.
Tips: How to Automate Content Marketing
Here are few tips on how to use automation to improve your content marketing campaign:
1. Use Automation During the Content Development Process
Does this mean that you should use one of those free article spinners? No. Absolutely not! These are completely useless tools that deliver not content, but something that doesn’t make sense.
The task of content writing cannot be automated. It still needs a human touch.
Other aspects of content creation, however, can be supported by different tools. For example, you can identify the topic that would get the attention of your audience. BuzzSumo is a great tool for that.
You’ll just provide your keyword, and the tool will give you a list of topics that got great engagement. You won’t copy these headlines, but you can address the same matter in a better way.
Speaking of keywords, you can automate the keyword research process, too. SEMrush, for example, will show you the keywords that your competitors target.
It will also discover new organic competitors for you, and it will observe position changes.
So we automated the keyword research and topic choosing process. There’s another element of content development you can automate: editing.
Tools like Hemingway App will make the final stage of the writing process much easier. This one identifies complex phrases and sentences. It recommends you to simplify the text, so it will be easier to read.
2. Automate the Publication of Your Posts
Let’s say you analyzed your audience and noticed that your Facebook audience is mostly active during the evening, but your Instagram followers like to scroll the feed in the morning.
Twitter, on the other hand, is active during work breaks.
Different platforms attract people at different periods of the day and week. That’s why it’s important to schedule your posts for publication during peak activity times.
How do you do this? Do you set multiple alarms throughout the day to share the links to your content?
You may do that, but you may also simplify your life by scheduling posts. You just complete the posts and use a tool that will automatically share them whenever you want them to be shared. AgoraPulse and HootSuite are nice tools that enable you to do that.
3. Lead Nurturing Automation Is a Must!
Lead nurturing is something that you cannot do “by hand” in content marketing. That would require you to contact each website visitor through the live chat, asking them for their email address and then manually including that address in your list of leads.
Then you would manually write an email for them. This just doesn’t work, given the fact that you want to get hundreds or thousands of leads in a short period of time.
In the case study we mentioned above, Opsview noted an increase of 30% in prequalified leads, quarter-over-quarter. Their trick? Automation.
LeadSquared is a good tool that helps you automate this process. It’s effective because although it automates the process, it still enables you to personalize it.
It will capture leads from your pay-per-click ads, website, social media, and even phone. It also has features that push leads down the sales funnel.
Those are autoresponders, email marketing, drip marketing, and more. Finally, it covers the aspect of lead nurturing, too.
4. Automate the Content Curation Process
Content curation is an important aspect of marketing. Due to the fact that you need massive volumes of content to meet the needs of your audience, it’s not smart to solely focus on content creation.
You can curate content from reliable and reputable sources, so you’ll deliver value to your audience. When you add your commentary to this content, you still have a chance to present your brand through it.
But when done manually, the content curation process may take a lot of time. You can automate that process.
Tools like DrumUp, Feedly, and Pinterest will do that for you. Just set your preferences to get content that’s relevant to the interests of your audience. Then, check these feeds daily to find content that would work, and share it to your social media profiles.
5. Automate Content Marketing Analytics
When you have that content ready and distributed, there’s only one thing left: analyze the results.
You won’t ask your audience how your content performs. You’ll get some answers, but not enough information. You need more data, so of course you’ll use a tool to provide you with it.
Proper analytics tell you who your reader is, when they are reading your content, and what content they like the most. Most of all, analytics inform you about ROI.
As always, there’s a tool for that. HubSpot, for example, will monitor the lifecycle stages of your customers, so you’ll see how they move through the sales funnel. You see how your content performs in each stage, so you can figure out if and where changes are needed.
Let’s not forget about Google Analytics. It tells you what the visitors are doing at your website, how much time they spend there, and what action they take from there on.
You see how much traffic you’re getting from organic search. That indicates how your content performs. With these analytics, it’s easy to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign.
When Done Properly, Automation Is a Brilliant Thing
As we said, it’s impossible to automate the entire content marketing process. You still need to create the content and communicate with your audience.
When you automate the things that can be automated, you get much more space for those essential elements of the marketing campaign. In other words, you get to make it more effective.
About the Author — People who love their job are truly successful at doing it. That’s exactly what Patricia Wilson, writer at Assignment Masters always tells others. Patricia is in love with two things – her lovely family of four and the ‘magic of writing’, making her a dedicated writer and even a lovelier mother.