Marketing automation is one of the things businesses are buzzing about these days. As it’s usually considered as a both highly creative and data-driven activity, automating marketing would greatly reduce overall business costs.
Content marketing takes up a major part of current advertising strategies. Finding a way to automate content creation would have the greatest impact on profits and significantly reduce business costs. As a result, businesses are constantly looking for content automation tools.
What is content automation?
Content automation is the practice of using software to remove the need for human intervention when creating articles, landing pages, advertisements, and other parts of the content lifecycle. These processes aim to reduce all the redundant, difficult, and costly parts of content marketing.
Intuitively, it may seem that content automation is all about creating compelling copy without involving humans. While it definitely is a major part of the activity, there are numerous other optimization avenues. Content automation can include social media publishing, email sequences, proofreading, and many other activities.
In general, anything that falls under the category of writing and publishing also falls under the umbrella of content automation. As such, there are a multitude of content automation tools available on the market that cover various parts of the production lifecycle.
Finally, even the idea part of content marketing can be automated. SEO tools are widely used in content creation practices, most of which involve some form of automation. Discovering keywords, suggesting topics, providing relevant content are all parts of the puzzle provided by SEO tools.
Benefits of content automation
Like with all such activities, content marketing automation aims to reduce overall business costs. These tools have a two-fold effect on businesses. First, content automation saves human hours and allows professionals to work on more creative tasks. Secondly, businesses need to hire less content strategy professionals to do the same amount of work
There are other content automation benefits, however. Some of these may be:
- Improved efficiency of current professionals. Content marketing automation reduces the amount of time professionals spend on menial and repetitive tasks. They can then work on providing more value.
- Reduction in human errors. A content automation tool removes the need for human intervention, which means less errors will appear. For example, scheduling tools reduce the likelihood that someone will forget to publish content at the right time.
- Optimizing content for search engines. SEO tools that use techniques like natural language processing can help writers create content that’s equally as enticing to humans while ranking better for search engines.
Content automation use cases
Social media scheduling
Social media platforms and many other websites have times when a higher number of traffic arrives than at any other point in the day or week. Scheduling tools make it easier to take advantage of the natural fluctuations in traffic.
Additionally, most scheduling tools will provide ways to reshare the same content over several websites and social media platforms. Such content marketing automation tools will reduce the overall burden on human resources.
AI-based proofreading
Humans are quite notoriously bad at noticing their own mistakes and copywriting is no different. Many businesses use proofreading tools that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to make textual predictions and pick out all the errors in any text.
Additionally, some content marketing automation tools have such an advanced artificial intelligence that they can suggest stylistic improvements for long-form articles, allowing writers to get better at the task faster.
Get content suggestions for SEO
A content automation tool can use SEO insights to deliver creation suggestions. They use various SEO tools and data collection methods to find gaps in the existing content marketing process and suggest improvements based on that.
Additionally, they may extract various searches, keywords, and other data from search engines to suggest ideas for content creation. As a result, the entire content lifecycle is made a lot simpler.
5 tools for content automation
1. Salesforce
While usually considered a CRM, Salesforce has a ton of features that also include content automation. There are numerous possibilities to create interaction-based triggers to deliver content, impact monitoring, and lead generation.
2. Mailchimp
One of the most widely used email marketing platforms that involve content automation. Mailchimp can help create entire emailing campaigns and sequences, provides templates for content creation and it can be integrated with various social media platforms.
3. Grammarly
A well known machine learning and AI-driven proofreading tool. Grammarly can automatically check any long or short form content, find any and all errors in text, and even provides stylistic and clarification suggestions.
4. SurferSEO
A slightly lesser known brand than the ones outlined above, but still a worthwhile one for content creation. SurferSEO uses various AI features to optimize the creation of outlines and articles, making writing a lot easier for both SEO professionals and content creators.
5. Wordsmith
Wordsmith is another AI-driven tool, which is mostly intended for short form content creation. It can create compelling ad copy, product descriptions, and many other pieces of writing. Wordsmith does struggle a bit with long-form content creation, so regular writers are best employed for that task.
