The 5 Best Ways to Automate Content Marketing Tasks

Marketing Morsels is a series of short and sweet blog posts for Marketing Managers looking for bite-sized knowledge hits that’ll help drive business. These blog posts have been shortened and adapted from their original home, InspireFirst.

 

We know as well as anyone how often marketing departments find themselves overworked (and maybe a little understaffed, too). As a marketing leader, a large part of your time is probably spent juggling multiple campaigns, vendors, stakeholders, and conflicting expectations. But, as they say, “there is no rest for the wicked.” 

One way to achieve each and every one of your goals without skipping a beat, burning yourself out, or compromising on content quality, is to automate content marketing tasks you find yourself doing on a regular basis. 

What might those be? We’ve got five for you down below:

1. Generating New Content Ideas

Tools like BuzzSumo and Hubspot’s content idea generator help you gauge content pieces against relevant keywords that have performed well in the past. You can add up to five short or long-tail keywords to search for topics. 

Another free tool to get your content ideation rolling Google Trends: simply type in a keyword to see how it’s performing in specific locations or worldwide. Once you’ve got a working headline, Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer will score it and even offer up suggestions on what you can improve.

2. Automating Content Creation Workflow

Streamline your entire content creation process using project management apps like Trello or Asana (many of which have integrations with other work essentials like Slack, Google Calendar, etc). 

Manage a team of freelancers? Make it hassle-free: automate invoicing (and other financial stuff). 

3. Automating Content Editing and Proof-Reading

Tools like Grammarly can automatically detect errors in a comprehensive way. Whether you’re writing PR news, social media updates, or long-form articles, editing tools help make your content error-free. 

4. Promoting Content ‘Automatically’

In the process of figuring out who your target audience is? Leverage tools like Hubspot and  Aritic PinPoint to help map out a 360-degree profile of your users. 

Speaking of targeting your audience, when it comes to SEO, Google Analytics is your best bet for keyword (and competitor) analysis.

How to automate your content promotion

(i) Social Media Automation for Content Marketing

Scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite automate posting across multiple social platforms. 

PRO TIP: Shorten the process even more by creating a workflow between your CMS and any social media posting tools you may use.

 

(ii) Email Campaigns

Emails have been around for over 40 years and continue to be one of the leading channels for lead generation and nurturing. Sure, you can use any email marketing tool, but putting your emails on auto-pilot is where the magic happens. This means setting up automatic emails that are triggered from a specific user action. Think: Welcome emails for new users, reminder emails (i.e. renewal notices), and/or even something as fun and simple as a birthday surprise!

5. Generating and Nurturing Leads 

Set up a pop-up form on your blog to capture new visitors. Another alternative to using pop-ups is placing a widget right inside your content. 

If you’re running Facebook lead ads, you can easily capture Facebook leads right into your Google Sheets or any email marketing tool you are using. 

From hereon, you can set up automated workflows like sending out a welcome email to every new lead.

These are just some of the day-to-day content marketing tasks that you’d benefit from automating. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more. Go ahead, get creative and save yourself some time!