How to Use Automation for Content Marketing Results
Learn how to improve your inbound marketing with automation for content marketing to boost engagement and reduce time spent on creation and outreach.
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Simple fact – there is a lot of repetition in online marketing and by understanding how to use automation for content marketing you can drastically reduce time spent on these tasks while increasing the effectiveness of your overall strategy.
The great thing about technology improving so rapidly is that it provides businesses with the tools to better engage their audiences and do it much more efficiently.
Marketing is probably the area that has most benefited from automation. There are powerful tools out there, that can help marketers at almost every step of the way. In this article, we are digging into the benefits of automation for content marketing, and more importantly the tool and guidance to implement it for yourself.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation mostly refers to employing some kind of software to aid marketers in some aspect of marketing. And as marketing campaigns are multifaceted and complex activities, there are many different tools employed at different stages. What marketing managers usually want is to relieve their teams from repetitive tasks. As these activities waste a lot of time and don’t require any creativity or human involvement, it is much better to hand them over to the machines.
There are many things that machines can do better. For example, data collection and some segments of analytics.
Therefore, tasks such as social media scheduling, routine email correspondence, and posting ads are usually entrusted to some kind of software.
The single biggest problem with automation is ‘personalization’. Marketing automation simply can’t be a solution to everything. People can feel the difference between speaking to a machine and to a human being. That’s exactly why we’re going to show you how to use automation for content marketing in the most effective way possible.
How does automation contribute to better content?
There are many ways technology can help make better and more impactful content. Let’s examine some of the top potentials automation for content marketing has for boosting inbound marketing results. The great thing about looking at automation for content marketing in this way is that we can also break down the best tools for each area.
1. Customer Retention
In order to increase sales, marketers have two options:
One is to get new leads. Obtaining new customers is desirable, but it is also costly. The other option is to build strong and lasting relationships with the existing customers. Customer retention strategy is, in essence, finding new ways to make satisfied customers even more satisfied.
How do automation tools help us out here?
Well, one of the ways to utilize automation for customer retention is for boosting email marketing. Firstly, these tools will track customers’ interests and suggest personalized cross-selling and upselling ideas. Also, these tools will automatically detect complementary products and services. The software will try to guess what will a customer need in the future, based on their purchasing habits in the past.
Secondly, the software will automatically inform all customers of any discounts or incentives applying to them.
Except for email marketing, automation can help with blog content as well. For example, experimenting with an SEO tool that provides internal link opportunities could make better connections between the content of your blog. In turn, customers that regularly read your blog can get to know the blog even better, and find more useful tips and resources.
Best Customer Retention Tools:
To generate strong customer relationships, scale operations, and improve the bottom line, all these steps require small businesses’ resources to be allocated in the right areas. And that is where the Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) comes in.
Top CRM’s:
2. Analytics
Keeping an eye on traffic is endlessly important for marketing in general. Referral traffic data help marketing teams understand how users first learn about your website. Only when we know that we will be able to optimize our content and write meaningful CTAs.
On the other hand, if we want online visibility, we have to track organic traffic. Collecting and properly interpreting organic traffic data is a precondition of successful SEO optimization. Namely, this type of data provides crucial insights about strong and weak keywords, market segmentation, and similar.
Other than that, marketing automation tools allow us to track a variety of chosen KPIs. We need to track these indicators in order to learn about the effectiveness of our actions. Additionally, KPIs provide us with the necessary feedback on our content. Understanding them enables us to learn from experience. Machines are much more diligent, precise, and bias-free, and this is of utmost importance for properly interpreting KPIs.
Top Web Analytics Tools:
3. Lead Generation
The lead is a person who provided their email, name, and surname, showing their interest in what we have to offer. Once they entrust their personal data to us, they become MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads). Marketers put a lot of attention on these people because they are our potential customers in the future. Their goal is to figure out how these people’s needs and interests can be answered in the best possible way so that they decide to buy something and become SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).
How can automation help in this regard?
In the contemporary world, when most people are present on various platforms, the most common approach to get qualified leads is a multichannel outreach. That means that there are many new customers waiting, but we have to find them through social media, advertising, and SEO content. Automation tools help us identify specific needs and pain points our target audience has. Then, the same tools can help us create optimized content and then offer it to only those people who are interested in it. In such a way, we avoid spamming and save a lot of time and money.
Top Lead Generation Tools:
4. Buyer Persona
Personalization of content is of great importance for content marketing, and it is something automation tools can help with as well.
Defining a buyer persona is a vital step in the execution of any marketing strategy. It is a model of your target audience member, a prototype of a person you are addressing in your campaign.
The buyer persona has the same demographic characteristics, values, problems, and goals as the core of the target audience. Copywriters and marketers need a buyer persona, in order to adjust the content to the audience.
A variety of automation tools are of great use in the creation, curation, and distribution of content. In terms of creation, a good example are several platforms that offer AI-based content writers. While it is a sci-fi imagination that algorithms can replace humans in writing content, it is true that they can help them become much quicker and more productive. Also, addressing a buyer persona on social media might require witty graphics. In that case, you can hire a web designer, or use a free online graphics maker.
Some tools, such as ContentStudio for example, are able to identify and assign third-party content relevant to our audience as well.
Finally, the properly structured and written content should get to the right users. People are spammed by ads on a daily basis, and we don’t want them to remember us as spammers as well. That’s why we use automation tools to make sure our personalized content reaches only those who are interested in it. For example, a tool could send automated emails and ads through multiple channels to people belonging to predefined market segments.
Best Email Marketing Tools:
5. Marketing and Sales Departments Coordination
Businesses heavily depend on these two departments, and their mutual coordination is crucial for overall performance. Although their teams are trained to collaborate, it often happens that the actions between these departments aren’t properly aligned. If this happens, then the marketing team’s efforts might be of no use for the sales.
The two departments should regularly check in with each other, in order to make sure that the quality of leads stays at a satisfying level.
Many CRM tools such as Microsoft Dynamics are compatible with many marketing automation gadgets. This is important because by integrating different tools, teams can share information and thus perform much more effectively. For example, the transition between MQLs and SQLs is smooth and properly guided.
There is also an option to use a marketing tool as a CRM platform. This is often a cheaper and equally functional option.
By the way, content optimization is so important nowadays, that even UI/UX design companies integrate SEO services in their offer.
Best Project Management Tools:
6. Strategy Design
Making a general marketing strategy is a very demanding process, and marketing managers need all the help they can get.
Some automation tools are extremely helpful for understanding the market. They provide managers and creatives with valuable insights into:
- a particular audience needs
- hot topics
- current industry trends.
Therefore, using the software at an early stage of marketing strategy design is highly recommendable and fruitful.
If campaign goals are properly defined, it will be much easier for creatives and writers to provide good quality content later on. Creatives and writers need to be clear with what they are supposed to do, and the given goals have to be realistic and achievable. In that case, the team members will be motivated to produce the best possible content, which will soon translate into leads and sales.
Best Tools to Research Your Competitors:
Conclusion
As you could see from the above, there are many facets to automation for content marketing. When it comes to using marketing automation to generate leads we know that automation is beneficial in streamlining this process. Finding the right path to achieving success isn’t alway so easy even with the amount of tools available in automation for content marketing. It is important to pick them wisely, and have realistic expectations. This post should provide you with the insight and the right tools to get their quickly.
