Six Things Your Content Marketing Team Should Automate Today

Content marketing and its tasks can be at times confusing, and typically content marketers wear many hats. From content creation to promotion, and reporting, there is a lot to do. And all of those elements are vital to your marketing department’s overall strategy.

Naturally, this can seem overwhelming. But like other industries, automation has made marketing easier. There are several programs and methods to use to put more time back in your day. Here are different tasks you can automate to make your content marketing strategy and implementation more manageable.

Proofreading

Writing captivating blog posts, emails, and other content is imperative for your marketing team – but when it contains spelling and grammar errors, it quickly loses its credibility to your readers. That makes proofreading an essential part of your content marketing team’s tasks. However, did you know you can automate part of this process through tools like Grammarly and the Hemingway Editor?

This tools not only locate and correct basic spelling and grammar errors but also take it a step further than your basic Microsoft Word spellcheck by providing even further assistance. For example, Hemingway Editor lets you know when your writing is too difficult to read, whether it’s due to an overuse of adverbs or passive verbs. Likewise, Grammarly can tell you if a particular paragraph is monotonous and needs breaking up or if you’re using the same words repeatedly. So, utilizing these two applications after finishing copy can help erase any mistakes in your work.

Although, you should still run your copy by someone from your team to make sure it meets other company standards -- but your entire team will save ample time with the use of proofreading tools.

Content Promotion

After writing and editing your content, the next logical step is to promote it. When it comes to promoting your content, you can easily automate the process through various resources HubSpot, a leading marketing automation tool, provides. For instance, you can use HubSpot to automate blog promotion by:

• Setting automatic email notifications about a new blog to your subscribers. In HubSpot, you can choose to send instant notifications, daily notifications, weekly notifications, or monthly notifications to your subscribers.
• Immediately publishing your blog and its link to your social media platforms. You can link company accounts and personal accounts, so they automatically post your content on their accounts. These publish 15 minutes after your blog goes live and include the title, link, and meta description.

Email Marketing

Email remains a top mode of communication for businesses. But did you know 68% of companies spend up to a week producing a single email, including creating lists, writing content, personalizing it, and determining when and how to send it? That’s time you could spend on other aspects of your content marketing. Thankfully, that’s where HubSpot steps in.

With HubSpot’s email capabilities, you can automate your emails by following a few simple steps. For example, instead of manually pulling people from your records who’ve downloaded a content offer, you can set up a trigger in HubSpot, so those users receive emails automatically. You can set workflows like this for many triggers like pageviews to an individual blog, submissions to a certain form, downloads from a specific landing page, and more.

You will have to create the emails these users receive in each workflow, but you’ll only need to do it once. After you’ve written your emails and set your triggers, you won’t have to recreate the wheel. And what’s even better? You can save and reuse these campaigns for later or use them as a template for future campaigns.

HubSpot also allows automated personalization in emails through the use of tokens. That means you won’t have to dig through records to add a first name to every email, and you’ll reap the benefits of improved click-through and conversion rates.

Social Media

There are several social media applications, like HubSpot, Sprout Social, and HootSuite, that help automate your social media presence. With HubSpot, you can quickly schedule across multiple accounts far in advance. If you know you want to post an image or blog post to all your accounts every Tuesday for the next month, you can easily do so with HubSpot’s publishing tool. For busy content marketers, doing this in one swoop instead of remembering to post on three to four accounts at a certain time every week is a time-saving win.

If you’re worried this may make you seem too robotic, don’t be. HubSpot’s social media tool helps create a publishing schedule that looks natural and spontaneous by publishing posts at various times within 10 minutes of a pre-selected time.

Keyword Research

Your keyword research is the foundation of your SEO strategy but doing so can take a good deal of time. With free tools provided by SEMrush, you can cut down on that time by automating the practice of identifying your keywords, your competitor’s keywords, and long-tail keywords.

SEMrush’s tool lets you sort through thousands of keywords, see their volume, and click potential. The Keyword Magic Tool enables you to enter a combination of phrases then suggests the exact long-tail keywords people are using. After you’ve done all this work, you can export it into a report, instead of having to manually create a long spreadsheet of your own.

Reporting

Without reporting, it’s impossible to know if your hard work as a content marketer is working. But digging through metrics and crafting your reports can quickly eat up time. Through Databox – a powerful HubSpot integration – you can have a robust overview of your entire marketing strategy in a single click. The information displayed is pulled from several powerful analytics sources such as HubSpot, SalesForce, Google Analytics, and your social media platforms.

That may sound too good to be true, but it’s a fact. Databox has over 100 pre-built templates to see the ROI of a multitude of efforts, from blogging to Facebook advertising to SEO. You can view these graphical, easy-to-digest reports on your mobile, desktop, or TV. And once you set your reports, they update in real time so you’ll never miss an important KPI.

What You Shouldn't Automate

Everyone loves to save time – we get that. The above ideas can help you with that, too. But when it comes to certain aspects of your content marketing, you need to put in the work by yourself. Here are two areas where automation is not a smart idea.

Engagement

People are not fooled too quickly, especially when it comes to companies engaging with their users. In fact, 70% of the time, consumers can tell when something is not genuine. They’ll also unfollow brands on social media if they feel they’re inauthentic.

Hence, you shouldn’t go too far when it comes to automating.

While software and other applications exist to help you, nothing can replace a genuine human interaction. Replying to your users on social media, sending them a personalized thank you email, and taking the time to give them individual responses on chatbots are a must.

Content Production

Just like with engagement, your content should be genuine too. Some programs can write blog and social posts for you – but avoid them.

Your content should be original and written by someone from your team or a trusted freelancer. All the time you’ve saved by automating other tasks should give you the opportunity to create something of quality.

Final Takeaway

Automation is not going away, so it’s smart to embrace. You can begin by automating tasks like proofreading, scheduling, reporting, and email marketing. By automating these, you save time that you can use on your engagement and content production. The combination of these efforts should increase the success of your overall content marketing. If you feel you need more help or want a partner in any of these endeavors, contact us today.