How to automate content marketing in 2019? an easy and helpful guide to saving your time

Content marketing is a tedious and time taking task. Especially when the deadlines come closer and creating quality content becomes a challenge, marketers desperately look for some way to automate content marketing. When it is true that content creation can never be truly and completely automated, there are some parts of the content marketing process that can be done by taking the help of some automation tools. This article contains an in-depth detailed discussion on how to automate content marketing, its steps that can be automated and popular automation tools that you can rely on to automate some tasks to save a great amount of your valuable time which you can invest in other aspects of your business.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic digital marketing approach for promoting a brand mainly through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. or the brand’s very own website. It builds trust amongst its audience through creating and providing valuable relevant and consistent content to turn the audience into customers. 

Content marketing encompasses both content creation as well as its distribution and quality checking. The fact of the matter is, here user experience is more important than the quality of the content. Let me explain it with an example if you serve a well-cooked tasty preparation for a person who is not hungry, he may not relish the item. So, here quality of the content was not the issue as the target audience was wrong.

Why it is important to automate content marketing?

Creating content is an important part of any business system. The success of a company is hugely dependent on good quality content generation. And it is also the most difficult part. Presently a large number of business houses use several automation tools for content generation and curation and it is increasing at an astonishing rate.

The infographic below presents some statistics revealing the stupendous growth of automation in marketing industries

According to the Social Media Today “state of marketing automation survey report 2019” 75% of total marketers currently use at least one type of marketing automation tool.

An automated content creation process makes a huge difference as it saves a lot of your time which you can invest to improve your content quality. Several aspects of content creation, content curation and distribution can be automated through efficient use of different automation tools available. Artificial Intelligence (AI) also playing a key role in automating content creation nowadays. 

Different important steps to automate content marketing

Content creation

This is very important in content marketing according to L2’s content and commerce report. Creating quality content is the biggest challenge in content marketing as it takes considerable time to write a detailed informative blogpost or well-designed infographic.

Content creation can be automated using AI in combination with Big Data and Natural Language Processing, all of them are buzz words in the data analytics industry in recent past years. Many business houses are using AI-driven bots to create content. For example, news websites like Washington Post and The Associated Press are taking the help of bots to automate creating in-depth articles mainly based on data structures.

They are so efficient to create a full-length article based on data provided to it that they even pass Turing tests! Which means articles written by a boat are very similar to one created by human. And, they are constantly improving and advancing in all aspects to give a close fight to human creation.

Further, the whole content creation task can be divided into subcategories as given below according to their suitability for automation.

1. Topic selection

The selection of topic or ideation is the first step and most important step to start content creation. The topic you select must be of interest to your target audience and of course relevant to your brand and business. 

But it is a hurdle for marketers to find out such a topic.  You can automate the ideation process with the help of tools like Buzzsumo.

2. Keyword Research

Keyword research is of utmost importance for implementing a successful SEO strategy. But this process is quite time-consuming. It was estimated that for a medium-size business typically takes almost 12 hours for conducting keyword research.

But the good news is that there are very popular tools are already there to help you out. Like SEMrush and Ahrefs; both of them are a very popular choice of content marketers for SEO tasks. These tools streamline the processes of identifying winning keywords preferably long-tail keywords, keywords used by competitor websites and backlink analysis.

 3. Typing

It is the most tedious and time taking task while creating and writing your content, especially if you are a slow writer. Tools like google doc’s voice typing can be a big relief and ease the typing task for you. You just voice type the whole content and at the end, just proofread it and correct any other mistakes.

 4. Content management

Content Management System (CMS) is an automation system that enables you to create, curate and publish your content all at the same place. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world powering almost 25% of all the websites. This website also uses the WordPress content management system

Content curation

It is a comparatively easier step than content creation. Curated content is more focused on your target audience and gives an edge to your content over other competitive websites of your domain.

Content curation tasks like handling social media activity, scheduling posts,  finding new content ideas, etc. can also be automated using some tools. As these time taking but mechanical tasks are taken care of by automated tools, you can focus on creating high-quality content.

Content curation can further be divided into subcategories as below:

1. Proofreading

If your content has grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes and problems with sentence construction, then the content is straightway rejected by your audience. Content with such errors can not win the trust of its readers. Hence, proofreading is an essential part of content curation and can be easily automated. Grammarly is one popular and very effective tool to proofread your content be it written in MS Word or Google docs.

2. Plagiarism checking 

It is about checking the originality of your content and is of utmost importance. Google’s new algorithmic changes can detect any copied content in no time and can blacklist your post if it has been blindly copied from other websites. To check the originality of your content you can take the help of tools like Grammarly Plagiarism Checker.

3. Interest monitoring

This is simply analyzing the topics you are serving to your audience if creating enough interest among the readers. This analysis will further enable you to curate your content. Tools like Headline analyzer helps you to automate this task by analyzing headline scores and suggesting word patterns.

Content distribution

This is the final step in which the content created by you placed before your target audience mainly through social media. Here also automation tools can play a key role by posting the content as scheduled by you; particularly a chosen time of day when most of your audience becomes online.

Further, there are several steps of content distribution that can be automated to save time. These steps are as below:

1. Repurposing

Repurposing is using the same content for different purposes. The articles already written by you are cut down and restructured to make them suitable for posting on different social media platforms or for writing ebooks and other content. 

2. E-mail marketing

Content marketing is heavily dependent on email marketing for its content distribution. A recent survey revealed that it takes almost one week to generate a compelling email marketing newsletter for almost 68% of business houses.  It takes quite a significant time and labor to create at least 3 to 4 marketing newsletters per week.  and again the task is a mechanical one and can be automated using tools. Automation can reduce the required time to compose a mail significantly and I allow you to concentrate on other vital tasks. 

Lead nurturing in email marketing

Lead nurturing is an integral part of email marketing. Email marketing is not all about compelling a reader to signup for your newsletter, rather it starts there. If any email receiver is yet to read your email and open it, you should send him a reminder and if he has already read it then send him another piece of information about your product.

Some examples of tools that can be used to automate the whole email marketing processes are Buzzbuilder Pro, MailChimp, etc.  These tools are discussed in the automation software section below. 

3. Social media marketing

Social media have witnessed a meteoric rise in the last few years and become the main channel of content marketing. You might have come across news reports about celebrities earning a significant portion of their earning only through promotional content on Instagram or Facebook or in other social media.

Any marketers now days heavily rely on their brand’s social media presence considering the huge amount of online content consumed by people. But maintaining a quality presence in no. of social media channels at a time is not an easy task and also quite time-consuming. Also, social media posts are time-sensitive, which means the particular time of the day you post your content decides how many visitors are online and receive your content. This is also a mechanical task and can be better handled by an automation tool than a human being. But fortunately, this task also can be done through content marketing automation tools like Sprout social’s content publishing tool.

4. Outsourcing website

In case if you don’t have enough hands to tackle the whole content marketing process, you can outsource the whole content marketing task right from content creation to content distribution to any other professional companies. Once it is outsourced, the professional will automate all hiring and management tasks through their websites. You just sit back and give deadlines. 

Some important automated content writing tools

Here we will discuss some popular tools which help us in each step of content marketing.

Content creating tools

Buzzsumo

It helps you to choose a topic of interest by recommending keywords related to your marketing areas. It also helps you to identify earlier posts and keywords used by you which are well acclaimed by page visitors.

Headline analyzer

Keyword research tools like SEMrush/Ahrefs. Beside these paid tools, several free keyword research tools like google autocomplete, Ubersuggest, etc. are also available and very effective.

Grammarly

It is a very popular tool providing proofreading capabilities to your wordprocessing platforms. With the help of this tool, you can easily and quickly correct spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, wrong selection of words and even detect problems in sentence construction. It has its free version too and comes as a chrome extension. So, very easy to use, you can add the extension and start writing your content in google docs in a fly without being worried about proofreading.

Content curating tools

DrumUp

Finding content ideas that are relatable to your brand and curable is not easy. DrumUp is here to help you streamline your social media activity, allows you to discover new content ideas for each social media accounts.

You can also edit your original post, ad images, and the best part your post can be scheduled through it too. But again a word of caution is don’t rely on this tool blindly, always perform a check by yourself to confirm if the content ideas are in line with your business and not promoting the ideas of your rival.

Feedly, Pocket & Sniply

All these tools are content curation tools that suggest you with topics relevant to your brand ideas. You just provide them with your topic keywords and start finding interesting and relevant articles.

Swayy

Its a collection of sorted and recommended articles from several authentic professional platforms like LinkedIn. At one place you will be provided with tons of articles of your interest in content curation. You don’t have to jump from one site to another in search of relevant articles and thus your valuable time saved. Additionally, Swayy provides a very simple and effective analytics dashboard showing the trend and performance of keywords of my choice and also rank the sources.

Content distribution tools

CrowdFire & Hootsuite

It is a tool to manage multiple social media networks at one go.  It includes almost all popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. You can schedule your posts on all these platforms using CrowdFire.

Buffer

It is also a social media management tool like HootSuite only with a more sleek and clean dashboard showing a que of your scheduled posts only. Both of these tools help you to merge and monitor social media platforms and manage your content posting. 

Buzzbuilder Pro & MailChimp

These are automation tools for email marketing. The MailChimp tool helps to automate the scheduling of emails and generate auto-response for users, like a “thanks” mail if the reader who chose to accept receiving the newsletter. It ensures as you create any new content, your readers get notified. It provides a prebuild mailing template to welcome any new reader who has subscribed to your newsletter if you want you can also send personalized mail created by yourself. 

Whereas Buzzbuilder Pro helps you to run a professional email marketing campaign for lead generation with more personalization capability. Hundreds of its prebuild templates save lots of your time in designing outbound emails. Thus these tools help you sell more, get your customer more connected and engaged as well as improve productivity.

Sprout social’s content publishing tool

It comes very handy to automate content posting on multiple social media platforms at a time. You can take the help of its inbuilt calendar to schedule your content posting at a particular time of the day as you find suitable and accessible for the maximum number of visitors.

Conclusion

You can automate many business tasks that are redundant and mechanical in nature but content creation really needs creative juice of a human brain. That to say, content marketing can never be truly and completely automated. No automation tool can ever produce a deep and insightful article readers prefer to read. So automation is not a replacement of the human brain and never will be.

You must need a human brain to create high-quality content which is relatable, free-flowing and engages the audience. Companies that want to project them as thaught leaders are less likely to take the help of any content creating automation tools to maintain their brand uniqueness.

There is already 60% website content that fails to truly represent their companies’ brand message and let down that 84 % of consumers who really want quality content through which they can relate and know about companies’ offerings. In this situation automating content creation can make it worse. 

So my advice will be to don’t go for automating the creation of whole content as it will negatively affect your thought leadership. So, better you take leverage of automation tool for selective tasks as mentioned in this post for content marketing. Even if you automate these parts only, you will be able to save a big chunk of your precious time and can focus to add more value to your content.

So, go on to create your content… I wish you all the best 🙂