Amidst the long list of marketing strategies, content marketing is of imperative importance. There’s a reason why it’s said, ‘Content Marketing is the only marketing left!’ Not only because it’s highly efficient, it educates your customers about your expertise and authority in the industry. It does not directly say ‘Buy me’, unlike other marketing techniques, it talks to your customer and in the conversation delivers the message.
However, there’s a very common notion attached to content marketing which proclaims that it is just limited to content creation. If it was so, then why would it be used along with the term marketing? There is so much more to it.
Initial research, creation, promotion, reporting – everything is a part of a complete content marketing cycle. For all the beginners, here’s a quick warning – content marketing is not easy, but if done right it is sure to bring you unimaginable benefits. And if you are already worried about the manual workforce that it will demand, along with the resources – here’s your guide to automate 6 major tasks with the help of tools and technology.
- Proofreading
To err is human, and especially when we are talking about content marketing that requires hours of research, and even more hours to draft it – mistakes are bound to happen. But silly mistakes like grammatical and punctuation errors can immediately turn off your customers reflecting your carelessness. The reason why proofreading is on the list of priority tasks for your content marketing team.
Manual proofreading can cost you both hours and dollars. In spite of that, some mistakes are still unrecognizable to human eyes. There are a few apps like Grammarly and Hemingway app that helps you automate the process. These apps not only help you identify the common mistakes which we mentioned above but also help you improve the quality of your content with additional features like recognition of complex sentences, wrong usage of speech and even overuse of adverbs or passive verbs. Yes, of course, you can have a manual check to ensure that each piece of content meets your team’s standards.
- Content Promotion
Promotion makes next to our list, and why not, after creating and editing your content you need to promote it. Efficient promotion is an imperative part of your content marketing since it helps you reach out to your target audience. What’s the whole purpose of crafting content with so much of hard work, if the people you designed it for, are still unaware of it?
Here is the good news for you; you can automate this process as well. If you try to do it manually – let’s be real, there’s a particular circle beyond which your reach becomes really difficult. Automated tools like HubSpot helps you pop this bubble with its automated blog promotion services. For instance, with HubSpot, you can set automatic email notifications for your subscriber list. These notifications can be daily, weekly, monthly or at any other time duration. You can also publish your blog updates to all your linked social media platforms.
- Email Marketing
Emails are said to be the most effective form of marketing. But here is the thing, if you try to execute every task associated with email marketing all by yourself, it will cost you a lot of time and resources. Your team might be the most efficient team in the industry, but why not utilize their expertise for better purposes?
And trust me, with apps like MailChimp and HubSpot it is a matter of a few seconds. You surely have to draft your content and select a trigger for the first time. Once that’s done, your emails will be automatically sent to your subscribers’ list on the selected schedule. HubSpot also enables personalization in your emails, through the use of tokens and do you know personalized emails deliver a 6x higher transaction rate?
- Social Media
The power of social media is a secret to none. In today’s generation, a strong social media presence is immediately correlated to your efficiency. But well, we all know the kind of efforts it demands – creating images, crafting captions, posting them on stipulated time to ensure maximum visibility. Thankfully, tools are there to help us. For graphic generations we have tools like Canva to create every sort of graphics, your social media platform needs. For automating these posts to schedule on your social media platforms, we have Buffer and Hootsuite.
These tools help you schedule posts on all your social media accounts at once. For Instance, you discovered that Friday at 4:53 PM you record maximum discoverability – you just need to create a slot in these interfaces and schedule the image or blog post you want to post. And if you think, all of this might seem to be robotic, making your content marketing plan devoid of the desired human connect – well, I just have one thing to say, how many of you can differentiate automated social media posts from the manual postings? 😉
- Keyword research
Keyword research is the very foundation of any SEO strategy, the better your keyword research is the more likely you are to accomplish your desired goals.
Earlier marketers invested days, sometimes months to identify the right keywords to target. Since the advent of technology and the invention of these keyword research tools like Keyword Research, SEMrush has automated the entire process saving them both time and effort. They help you identify keywords in your niches based on search volume and click potential. Additional it also helps you analyze your competitor’s keywords and long-tail keywords.
- Reporting
Once your content marketing plan completes the entire cycle, you need to create a report with detailed metrics and analysis to help you recognize the techniques that are working and the tricks that still need improvement. The only reason why this is the last on my list.
The idea is, why will you create manual reports, with extra effort and time, when you can get the same (in fact better) in just a few clicks? If you think I am talking ‘too good to be true’ try reporting automated tools like Databox, Google Analytics, HubSpot and SalesForce – you will know it’s all real. It weighs your efforts under different criteria, on different scales that help you analyze your content from different perspectives.
By now, you must have surely understood that automation can bring you a lot of benefits and help you gain an edge over your competitors. Matching industry standards is a must, and these machine-operated tools might be a little better than the manual efforts. But this does not take away the credit of you doing things manually. It is irreplaceable. Infact, the best results are achieved when both manual and automated efforts are invested in the right combination.
