With the rise of cloud-based research tools and services, content marketing has transformed from what it once was. However, no matter the scale of your business or the industry you operate in, creating new content on a constant basis can be tedious. This is especially true if you aim to deliver blog content on a regular basis and lack enough content creators to maintain the tempo.
Content marketing automation can solve those problems and more due to its numerous automated research and industry analysis opportunities. According to Social Media Today, 80% of content marketing automation users saw an increase in their lead generation, with 77% also noting a conversion rate growth.
Content marketing automation is more than a trend – it can make your production pipeline more effective and let your content creators breathe new life into what they create. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the best reasons as to why your venture needs content marketing automation to grow and develop organically as a business.
What Content Marketing Automation is (and what it isn’t)
Before we get started, it’s worth clearing the proverbial air in regards to content marketing automation and what it truly stands for. Automation platforms are not able to literally “automate” your content marketing processes.
Your content creators will still have ample opportunity to express their creativity through writing, design or social media posts. What content marketing automation platforms such as BuzzSumo and HubSpot can do for your business is offer valuable insight into trending topics, popularity of certain keywords or terminology, as well to let you know how you stack up against other companies in your industry.
In that respect, content marketing automation platforms are an invaluable tool for any website willing to streamline their production processes in order to make more quality content in shorter timespans and for higher overall RoI. With that said, let’s jump into the main reasons to integrate content marketing automation into your venture.
Focus on Original Content
Original content is very difficult to create, especially when it comes to online blogging where everything is yesterday’s news. This is especially true if your content department has to do manual SEO research and go through numerous industry websites by hand, looking for the perfect content ideas.
However, content marketing automation can eliminate the manual research and industry analysis from the equation, allowing your marketing department to focus on what matters. Combining what works best in your industry at any given moment will allow your content creators to make the most of your marketing campaigns or blog posts in order to attract more traffic to your company.
It’s always better to get creative and create original content without reiterating what industry leaders came up with first. One of the best reasons to give content marketing automation a shot right now is to free up valuable time for your writers and designers and let them flex their creative muscles.
Segment your Audience
Audience segmentation is an important part of content marketing – not everyone will like the same type of content. However, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what each target demographic likes or dislikes without some research. Enter content marketing automation, which can effectively draw up valuable data for your marketing department to analyze.
Platforms such as Customer.io can help you segment your customer base and deliver valuable content to each target group. Coupled with writing tools such as TrustMyPaper and Evernote, the right content marketing automation platform will allow you to launch campaigns in a fraction of the time it took previously. Not only that, but you will have first-hand insight into your content’s engagement and conversion rates through the automation tool itself.
As we’ve mentioned previously, your content creators will still have full control over what kind of content they create and for which audience segment. However, they will have far more insight and foresight into how a group might react to certain phrases, wording and tone of voice with content marketing automation tools readily available.
Eliminate Production Bottlenecks
The goal of content production is to be as streamlined and fast-tracked as possible in order to publish content in a timely and professional manner. The time your marketing department spends on research and data analysis can sometimes turn into serious bottlenecks.
After all, it’s quite possible to not find any viable solutions to content marketing for the campaign that you are about to advertise for. In that regard, automation platforms can not only speed up the process to search and pinpoint the best ways to approach content marketing but also eliminate any existing bottlenecks in doing so.
Latent problems such as a general lack of understanding of how email segmentation works or how you can approach content marketing production with SEO in mind can be entirely eliminated with automation tools. It’s also a good idea to invite guest writers, collaborators, and other agencies and businesses in your niche to help you create content for both your brands’ benefit.
Easier Schedule Management
Content calendars are typically what make or break a marketing campaign. Additionally, your marketing department will likely have to think about multiple ongoing campaigns and content production schedules at once.
This leads to inevitable multitasking where it can be very easy to make a mistake and publish badly optimized or misaligned content. With content marketing automation tools at your disposal, you will be able to make better use of management tools such as Asana or Trello to tackle important tasks.
While not strictly content marketing automation tools, these management platforms can also add some much-needed breathing space to your marketing department. Automated activities such as content trends monitoring and SEO analysis can be delegated to automation tools while your team can easily multitask on different projects.
More Learning Opportunities
Lastly, content marketing automation tools gather data on a constant basis. Whether you use them to find out what the industry leaders are up to or how your website is performing compared to others on the market, the tools you use will accumulate tangible information.
Depending on your industry and the depth to which you are willing to go with analysis, you can even set custom metrics for these tools to track and inform you of their latest happenings. This info can be used at any point in time to find out what approach to take with upcoming content production and how to attract new leads in the best way.
You can learn a lot from simply using content marketing automation tools since they are cloud-based platforms designed to constantly monitor the web. Over time, your content production timeline and activities can effectively transform into a more professional pipeline simply due to automation being present.
Mistakes to Avoid
Now that we have a clearer understanding of the benefits content marketing automation can provide, let’s tackle several issues which can crop up. These can severely hinder your content production’s effectiveness if they are overlooked, so make sure to keep them in mind.
Too Much-Published Content
Not using content marketing automation will slow down your publishing schedule. However, the opposite is also unwise, since too much-published content can make people perceive your brand as spam. Pace your content publishing carefully and don’t post too much content (for example, multiple posts a day) thanks to automation.
Lack of SEO
SEO remains an important element of search engine ranking and generating organic traffic. Platforms such as Google Keyword Planner and SEM Rush can help your content creators optimize any piece of content marketing materials before publishing them. This will increase your online visibility and bring an even better RoI to your company as a result.
Automation without a Goal
Lastly, content marketing automation should be done for a concrete goal. Whether you have issues with email marketing management, audience research or coming up with new content ideas doesn’t matter. Choose a goal for content marketing automation integration early on in order to have a clear idea of why you are using these tools. Clear goals will allow your marketing department to make the most of the platforms at their disposal without simply using them for the sake of novelty or industry trends.
In Summary
Content marketing automation tools work best when they are combined based on their specialty. Some work best for industry content analysis while others do wonders for email marketing, audience segmentation, and other automated tasks. Choose the tools that best fit your content production process and use them to up your game going forward – your audience will appreciate the effort.
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