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There’s a lot that goes into content marketing. Marketing plans and strategy, development, QA, publishing, distribution, and optimization are all a part of ensuring your efforts reach the right audience and have maximum impact.

It can be too much to handle with a small team and minimal resources. Plus, it can be challenging to scale efficiently for the same reason.

However, you can make it easier for yourself and your team through marketing automation platforms. Automation is the best way for marketers to effectively streamline marketing tasks, improve workflows, and increase ROI for their campaigns.

In this article, we’ll explain what content marketing automation is and how you can use it to boost the reach and effectiveness of your content.

What is Content Marketing?

But before we begin, what is content marketing exactly?

As stated in this ultimate guide to content marketing, it’s “a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a target audience online.”

Furthermore, high-quality content isn’t just there to be entertaining, it’s strategically designed to get the target audience to take a pre-determined action (fill out a form, attend an event, book a demo, etc).

The best way to sum up the curation of content marketing collateral is to say that through content creation, shareable assets are distributed in order to attract an ideal market.

The best content can take many forms depending on your business and your audience. It could be social media, blog posts, sales landing pages, LinkedIn ads, templates, checklists, case studies, whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, datasheets, and more!

Why is Content Marketing Important?

Content marketing is important because it allows us, as marketers, to use a piece of content to attract and appeal to a target audience. It’s a significant component of inbound marketing and extremely helpful for building brand awareness, authority, and nurturing relationships.

Content marketing is so effective that over 70% of B2B and B2C marketers implement a content strategy in their annual plans.

In fact, it’s rapidly becoming a key priority for businesses with recent predictions stating that the content marketing industry will be worth $412 billion by 2021.

But the bottom line is, if you want to squeeze the most results from your content without a time-consuming protocol or hiring a bunch of additional resources, you need to automate as much as possible.

How Does Content Marketing Automation Help?

You’re probably familiar with content marketing but maybe not with automation. Essentially, it’s the use of tools to publish, promote, and share content through various marketing channels automatically. Using automation makes implementing your content marketing strategy seamless and efficient.

Automation lightens the load for your marketing team to focus their attention on strategy, analytics, and creativity. It also helps you distribute the content more effectively than if it was manually executed.

By using automation, you can execute paid promotions to widen your audience while tracking progress and your budget.

Lastly, automation enables you to track traffic, leads, and conversions to improve your content over time. You will save money by not paying employees to manually perform these tasks, which will increase consistency and ROI.

What Content Marketing Efforts Can I Automate?

If you’re new to marketing automation platforms, don’t fret. We have a lot of great content that can bring you up to speed on various tools and the best marketing automation features.

To get you started, let’s walk through several content marketing tasks that you can automate.

Sharing Content via Social Media

Content sharing via social platforms, especially using influencers, is one of the easiest ways to advertise your brand. Having relevant content consistently circulating is crucial to getting your message out.

However, with so many social media platforms to manage, it can be challenging to keep up. Thus, creating batch content to reuse through automation keeps costs low and engagement high, leading your business to tremendous success, with minimal effort.

Paid Promotion for Your Content

Content creation isn’t the only part of content marketing, investing in how your content is promoted is another significant component. And tracking, monitoring, and scheduling your ad campaigns can be automated.

Not everyone will have the budget for paid advertising, but it’s a great way to boost your digital marketing strategy, particularly if you promote posts that are already performing well.

Additionally, paid media is a great way to get your new content out to a larger audience by utilizing strategic keywords that your target market is using when they search for services or products like those your company provides.

A fair warning though, paid media can get extremely expensive and money can be easily wasted if you’re not constantly monitoring your ad performance and making adjustments to optimize performance.

Ad monitoring and analytics tools like Google Analytics and Adwords, integrated with your marketing automation tool are critical for your success.

Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns are another thing you can automate.

Not only can you use your automation platform to either integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) tool or use its native CRM, like with HubSpot, but you can use your tool to nurture your email list of qualified leads through email outreach campaigns.

Scheduling your email newsletters or blasts for strategic times that are proven to increase open rates can help to boost their performance.

In addition, using A/B testing features in your automation platform will help you to track which version of your emails performs best so you can adjust what’s not working and double down on what is.

Additionally, your automation platform will include reporting features that will allow you to see what’s working well and what isn’t. Again, this point of this is to replicate what works and ditch what doesn’t land well with readers.

Content Marketing Automation Tools

But which automation platform should you use? There are several reputable platforms to choose from, such as Mailchimp, Pardot, and Marketo. Let’s take a look at a few of the ones we’ve enjoyed working with at Interrupt Media.

HubSpot

You might be the most familiar with HubSpot, given they’re the pioneers of inbound marketing strategies. Some great HubSpot features include list building, email management, lead tracking and scoring, lead segmentation, and many more.

Eloqua

Oracle’s Eloqua is an enterprise-grade automation platform used by B2B marketers to follow leads through the sales funnel and track their buying process.

It can help with lead management, targeting and segmentation, sales enablement, web marketing, social media marketing, and advanced tracking metrics.

Marketo

Marketo is another major marketing automation software that offers tools for SEO and content creation. Marketo also provides sales intelligence, lead targeting, scoring, and lead nurturing capabilities.

Pardot

Pardot is another marketing automation platform that combines email marketing, lead generation, lead management, ROI reporting, and sales alignment functionalities. Pardot is ideal for organizations with long sales cycles and those that already utilize Salesforce as their CRM platform the sales team.

SharpSpring

Last, but certainly not least, is SharpSpring. SharpSpring is another alternative marketing automation platform and the tool of choice for our own internal content marketing automation efforts and Interrupt Media.

This platform helps us automate our follow-up email marketing efforts, schedule social media, host our marketing assets, and more.

Need Help Implementing Marketing Automation Software?

Developing a content marketing automation strategy is one of the best ways to create a cohesive, streamlined plan across all of your efforts while alleviating time-famished employees and allowing them to focus on other important tasks.

At Interrupt Media, we have had a lot of success helping clients to implement marketing automation tools, migrate from one tool to another, optimize their content marketing processes, and even develop the content ourselves if you don’t have the bandwidth.

Let’s set up a time to chat to see how Interrupt Media can serve your needs.

Topics: B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing Tools