Every year, employees lose over 200 hours doing manual, low-value tasks that could have been automated. Often, other team members have already done these tasks, leading to wasteful task duplication.
According to Asana’s 2021 Anatomy of Work Index, you might be wasting more than a couple of hours on repetitive tasks
Content marketing is hard work. Brainstorming, developing a content marketing strategy, writing, editing, and distributing content all demand a lot of brainpower. But what’s even more annoying and costly to waste time on are repetitive tasks.
Are you losing valuable time in your content marketing process? If so, it may be time to look into content marketing automation platforms. In this article, we’ll break down what content marketing automation is, highlight its benefits, and show you how you can start saving time with automation tools.
What is Content Marketing Automation?
Content marketing automation refers to setting up repetitive content marketing tasks and processes using specific software and triggers, with little to no personnel involvement. Common ways to automate content marketing include:
Project management tools like Trello re-assigning tasks automatically when you move them to another list
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Hubspot adding new email subscribers to a new spreadsheet
ContentOps tools like GatherContent migrating content to your preferred web content management system (CMS)
Content marketing automation takes care of those essential daily marketing tasks that require zero creativity but drain your time and energy.
Content marketing automation is more than just playing around with fancy tools; it produces tangible benefits for your team and business.
6 Key Benefits of Leveraging Marketing Automation for Content Marketing
Even if you enjoy monotonous tasks (some people do!), considering the benefits of content marketing automation for your business may make you rethink how you use your time.
Here are six benefits of using content marketing automation:
1. Lower marketing costs
Research has shown that automation can reduce marketing costs by 12.2%. Automating processes frees employees for more creative thinking instead of occupation with busy work.
It’s also easier to keep teams lean when time-consuming tasks are outsourced to automation. Working with leaner teams often means lower business expenses–even the most expensive automation software likely costs less than one additional marketing team hire.
2. Maintain consistency
The best B2B marketing teams win by consistent effort in the right direction. For example, automating your content marketing by scheduling content or regularly syncing and updating CRMs can help your team produce new content consistently and at scale.
Automation also helps to maintain the right content standards across multiple channels. For example, setting up content templates with GatherContent standardizes your posts and ensures uniformity for each content type. It also saves your team the time spentformatting every single post.
3. Reduce human error
Humans excel over robots in many ways, but avoiding error isn’t one of those ways–especially in tasks such as data entry. According to WorkMarket, 48% of employees report that automation has helped reduce errors in their work.
Once you’ve carefully set up the automated process, it’s often smooth sailing from there. Even when there are automation glitches, most software has systems for flagging such errors and sending notifications so you can rectify the issues.
4. Increase productivity
Tackling repetitive tasks all day can make each workday feel like an endless race on a hamster wheel–with no destination in sight. Besides being a massive time suck, it can negatively impact employee performance and lead to burnout.
On the other hand, automating tasks seems to increase workers’ productivity. According to one Zapier study, two out of 3 workers say that automation increased their productivity levels. More productive workers means better strategy and more effective content marketing.
5. Monitor analytics
Data is no fun when you need to generate it manually. The process is also time-consuming and a waste of billable hours. Automated processes are easier to track. James Parkinson, Head of Marketing Content at Personnel Checks, agrees.
Parkinson finds that,
“the data collected from automated lead-nurturing emails is more consistent and easier to analyze and tweak to make improvements.”
6. Drive more conversions
Isn’t this every business’s end goal? When you automate your content marketing, you lower your marketing spend and work more accurately, productively, and consistently. With a lower error margin and a closer eye on your analytics, you can be sure of successful content marketing campaigns that drive conversions.
But how do you automate your content marketing process? Let’s help you find some automation gaps you can plug right away.
How to Automate Your Content Marketing
Ready to bring some laser focus to the most crucial parts of your content marketing? Here’s how to automate those monotonous tasks and make room for what matters.
Identify bottlenecks
Not every process can be successfully automated, so the first step is figuring out which steps in your content marketing process you can entrust to the bots. I like to think of these as bottlenecks. Bottlenecks, in this case, are the tasks that:
You hate to do
Slow you down
Can be automated
Make a list of the tasks that match one of the first two criteria, and then do some research to discover whether there are tools to automate them.
Not clear on your bottlenecks? Eric Doty, content lead at Butter, says,
"I keep track of where I’m wasting the most time regularly and then find the most repetitive steps."
You can track time to see which repetitive tasks cut into your work time (and how much time you’re losing).
If you’re still stuck, research by Demand Spring shows that 79% of marketers automate email marketing, while 63% automate lead nurturing. Those could be great starting points.
Demand Spring research shows that email marketing is the most commonly used marketing automation platform feature
Record your best ideas
If you or your team struggle to generate content ideas or keep track of your genius marketing ideas, automation can also help you here. Use integration and automation tools like Zapier to automate idea capture. That’s what Eric Doty and his team at Butter do.
Doty says,
"When someone has a great idea for our product, our website, or our content, they post in our #ideas Slack channel. We automatically push those ideas from Slack to Notion using Zapier, which gives us a big list of ideas. Every week or so, we go in and vote on the best ideas."
The team records their best ideas in their content ideas backlog, where Doty can pick from the best blog topics when deciding on their upcoming content schedule.
Score high-quality leads
Content marketing is a significant part of inbound marketing. It’s essential to create top-of-the-funnel content (like landing pages and blog posts) that capture customers’ attention and help with lead generation. However, you still need to be selective while driving site traffic. Not every lead is a high-quality lead for your business.
That’s where lead scoring comes in. Some lead-capturing CRM tools like Hubspot, Lead Feeder, Marketo, and Pipedrive have lead-scoring capabilities. This means they can rate your leads using criteria like their location, demographic, behavior on your website or company to measure how likely these leads are to purchase from you.
Automated lead scoring takes so much labor off your plate and allows you to deliver a personalized customer experience that will boost sales and retention.
When you’ve found qualified leads (most likely to buy), you can then use automated email newsletters as a follow-up for successful lead nurturing. Sounds better than manually noting every lead who signs up on your landing page, right?
Improve your content workflow
Your content workflow can be a significant bottleneck in the content marketing process. From conceptualization to content distribution, having a pre-determined path for each piece of content will make life easier for all parties involved.
We created GatherContent to help you automate most, if not all, of your content workflow. Most content marketing teams have multiple tools for content planning, assigning tasks, writing, and publishing content. GatherContent can handle all of these.
Here’s how it works:
Plan content with GatherContent’s editorial calendar. It allows you to see assignees, and you can integrate your GatherContent calendar with iCal, Google Calendar, or Outlook.
GatherContent's editorial calendar provides a month-view of all your team's tasks
Manage projects as you would with project management tools. GatherContent is a true all-in-one content hub. You can assign tasks to teammates, set deadlines, and include your project’s description within the software. It also allows you to create a customized content workflow, so each team member knows the project stage(s). You can even set read permissions for each stage of the workflow.
GatherContent's content workflow helps you keep track of your projects' status
Create content templates. Whether your team creates blog posts, refreshes blog posts, or specializes in case studies, GatherContent allows you to build reusable templates for every kind of content. You’ll never have to format content from scratch again.
GatherContent's content update template keeps writers on track
Draft within GatherContent. You can now move on from Google Docs (which means dealing with a million document links). Everyone on your team can draft within the content hub. All they have to do is log into GatherContent, and all their assignments will be right there. GatherContent templates also allow for nifty content checklists if you’re outsourcing the writing to a contractor and need to follow a style guide.
A pre-submission checklist ensures that your content ticks all the boxes
Collaborate in real-time. Need edits on a piece? Your colleagues can jump in and leave comments on any piece of content–even while you’re working on the document.
Ship off to your CMS. No need for additional software to automate sending your content to a CMS. GatherContent integrates with popular CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal for easy publishing.
Migrate site content with ease. If you decide to run a site migration, having your content reliably stored on GatherContent will make the process a breeze.
What more could you ask for from a content marketing automation tool?
Analyze and distribute content like a pro
The final step is to get your content out there by distributing and ensuring that it’s successfully reaching your target audience.
Two vital distribution channels are social media marketing and email newsletters. With countless social media automation tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, it’s never been easier to batch schedule your posts and monitor their impact.
Email marketing automation like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor tools offer functionalities like A/B testing and segmentation, which allow you to monitor relevant metrics and nurture the customer effectively along the buyer’s journey.
Want to monitor your content’s performance on search engines? Jakub Rudnik, Head of Content at Scribe, recommends that you
Content marketing is challenging enough, and trying to do everything manually will only run you into the ground. Still, it can be tough to know what to automate safely. Think carefully about your content marketing bottlenecks and determine which automation tools can help you solve the problem.
One thing you don’t need to figure out alone? Automating your content creation workflow. GatherContent has that covered. Our software will help streamline your content efforts. You can now reduce duplicate tasks, maintain brand consistency, and improve content quality by collaboration.
Ready to give it a spin? Start your GatherContent free trial.
Every year, employees lose over 200 hours doing manual, low-value tasks that could have been automated. Often, other team members have already done these tasks, leading to wasteful task duplication.
According to Asana’s 2021 Anatomy of Work Index, you might be wasting more than a couple of hours on repetitive tasks
Content marketing is hard work. Brainstorming, developing a content marketing strategy, writing, editing, and distributing content all demand a lot of brainpower. But what’s even more annoying and costly to waste time on are repetitive tasks.
Are you losing valuable time in your content marketing process? If so, it may be time to look into content marketing automation platforms. In this article, we’ll break down what content marketing automation is, highlight its benefits, and show you how you can start saving time with automation tools.
What is Content Marketing Automation?
Content marketing automation refers to setting up repetitive content marketing tasks and processes using specific software and triggers, with little to no personnel involvement. Common ways to automate content marketing include:
Project management tools like Trello re-assigning tasks automatically when you move them to another list
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Hubspot adding new email subscribers to a new spreadsheet
ContentOps tools like GatherContent migrating content to your preferred web content management system (CMS)
Content marketing automation takes care of those essential daily marketing tasks that require zero creativity but drain your time and energy.
Content marketing automation is more than just playing around with fancy tools; it produces tangible benefits for your team and business.
6 Key Benefits of Leveraging Marketing Automation for Content Marketing
Even if you enjoy monotonous tasks (some people do!), considering the benefits of content marketing automation for your business may make you rethink how you use your time.
Here are six benefits of using content marketing automation:
1. Lower marketing costs
Research has shown that automation can reduce marketing costs by 12.2%. Automating processes frees employees for more creative thinking instead of occupation with busy work.
It’s also easier to keep teams lean when time-consuming tasks are outsourced to automation. Working with leaner teams often means lower business expenses–even the most expensive automation software likely costs less than one additional marketing team hire.
2. Maintain consistency
The best B2B marketing teams win by consistent effort in the right direction. For example, automating your content marketing by scheduling content or regularly syncing and updating CRMs can help your team produce new content consistently and at scale.
Automation also helps to maintain the right content standards across multiple channels. For example, setting up content templates with GatherContent standardizes your posts and ensures uniformity for each content type. It also saves your team the time spentformatting every single post.
3. Reduce human error
Humans excel over robots in many ways, but avoiding error isn’t one of those ways–especially in tasks such as data entry. According to WorkMarket, 48% of employees report that automation has helped reduce errors in their work.
Once you’ve carefully set up the automated process, it’s often smooth sailing from there. Even when there are automation glitches, most software has systems for flagging such errors and sending notifications so you can rectify the issues.
4. Increase productivity
Tackling repetitive tasks all day can make each workday feel like an endless race on a hamster wheel–with no destination in sight. Besides being a massive time suck, it can negatively impact employee performance and lead to burnout.
On the other hand, automating tasks seems to increase workers’ productivity. According to one Zapier study, two out of 3 workers say that automation increased their productivity levels. More productive workers means better strategy and more effective content marketing.
5. Monitor analytics
Data is no fun when you need to generate it manually. The process is also time-consuming and a waste of billable hours. Automated processes are easier to track. James Parkinson, Head of Marketing Content at Personnel Checks, agrees.
Parkinson finds that,
“the data collected from automated lead-nurturing emails is more consistent and easier to analyze and tweak to make improvements.”
6. Drive more conversions
Isn’t this every business’s end goal? When you automate your content marketing, you lower your marketing spend and work more accurately, productively, and consistently. With a lower error margin and a closer eye on your analytics, you can be sure of successful content marketing campaigns that drive conversions.
But how do you automate your content marketing process? Let’s help you find some automation gaps you can plug right away.
How to Automate Your Content Marketing
Ready to bring some laser focus to the most crucial parts of your content marketing? Here’s how to automate those monotonous tasks and make room for what matters.
Identify bottlenecks
Not every process can be successfully automated, so the first step is figuring out which steps in your content marketing process you can entrust to the bots. I like to think of these as bottlenecks. Bottlenecks, in this case, are the tasks that:
You hate to do
Slow you down
Can be automated
Make a list of the tasks that match one of the first two criteria, and then do some research to discover whether there are tools to automate them.
Not clear on your bottlenecks? Eric Doty, content lead at Butter, says,
"I keep track of where I’m wasting the most time regularly and then find the most repetitive steps."
You can track time to see which repetitive tasks cut into your work time (and how much time you’re losing).
If you’re still stuck, research by Demand Spring shows that 79% of marketers automate email marketing, while 63% automate lead nurturing. Those could be great starting points.
Demand Spring research shows that email marketing is the most commonly used marketing automation platform feature
Record your best ideas
If you or your team struggle to generate content ideas or keep track of your genius marketing ideas, automation can also help you here. Use integration and automation tools like Zapier to automate idea capture. That’s what Eric Doty and his team at Butter do.
Doty says,
"When someone has a great idea for our product, our website, or our content, they post in our #ideas Slack channel. We automatically push those ideas from Slack to Notion using Zapier, which gives us a big list of ideas. Every week or so, we go in and vote on the best ideas."
The team records their best ideas in their content ideas backlog, where Doty can pick from the best blog topics when deciding on their upcoming content schedule.
Score high-quality leads
Content marketing is a significant part of inbound marketing. It’s essential to create top-of-the-funnel content (like landing pages and blog posts) that capture customers’ attention and help with lead generation. However, you still need to be selective while driving site traffic. Not every lead is a high-quality lead for your business.
That’s where lead scoring comes in. Some lead-capturing CRM tools like Hubspot, Lead Feeder, Marketo, and Pipedrive have lead-scoring capabilities. This means they can rate your leads using criteria like their location, demographic, behavior on your website or company to measure how likely these leads are to purchase from you.
Automated lead scoring takes so much labor off your plate and allows you to deliver a personalized customer experience that will boost sales and retention.
When you’ve found qualified leads (most likely to buy), you can then use automated email newsletters as a follow-up for successful lead nurturing. Sounds better than manually noting every lead who signs up on your landing page, right?
Improve your content workflow
Your content workflow can be a significant bottleneck in the content marketing process. From conceptualization to content distribution, having a pre-determined path for each piece of content will make life easier for all parties involved.
We created GatherContent to help you automate most, if not all, of your content workflow. Most content marketing teams have multiple tools for content planning, assigning tasks, writing, and publishing content. GatherContent can handle all of these.
Here’s how it works:
Plan content with GatherContent’s editorial calendar. It allows you to see assignees, and you can integrate your GatherContent calendar with iCal, Google Calendar, or Outlook.
GatherContent's editorial calendar provides a month-view of all your team's tasks
Manage projects as you would with project management tools. GatherContent is a true all-in-one content hub. You can assign tasks to teammates, set deadlines, and include your project’s description within the software. It also allows you to create a customized content workflow, so each team member knows the project stage(s). You can even set read permissions for each stage of the workflow.
GatherContent's content workflow helps you keep track of your projects' status
Create content templates. Whether your team creates blog posts, refreshes blog posts, or specializes in case studies, GatherContent allows you to build reusable templates for every kind of content. You’ll never have to format content from scratch again.
GatherContent's content update template keeps writers on track
Draft within GatherContent. You can now move on from Google Docs (which means dealing with a million document links). Everyone on your team can draft within the content hub. All they have to do is log into GatherContent, and all their assignments will be right there. GatherContent templates also allow for nifty content checklists if you’re outsourcing the writing to a contractor and need to follow a style guide.
A pre-submission checklist ensures that your content ticks all the boxes
Collaborate in real-time. Need edits on a piece? Your colleagues can jump in and leave comments on any piece of content–even while you’re working on the document.
Ship off to your CMS. No need for additional software to automate sending your content to a CMS. GatherContent integrates with popular CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal for easy publishing.
Migrate site content with ease. If you decide to run a site migration, having your content reliably stored on GatherContent will make the process a breeze.
What more could you ask for from a content marketing automation tool?
Analyze and distribute content like a pro
The final step is to get your content out there by distributing and ensuring that it’s successfully reaching your target audience.
Two vital distribution channels are social media marketing and email newsletters. With countless social media automation tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, it’s never been easier to batch schedule your posts and monitor their impact.
Email marketing automation like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor tools offer functionalities like A/B testing and segmentation, which allow you to monitor relevant metrics and nurture the customer effectively along the buyer’s journey.
Want to monitor your content’s performance on search engines? Jakub Rudnik, Head of Content at Scribe, recommends that you
Content marketing is challenging enough, and trying to do everything manually will only run you into the ground. Still, it can be tough to know what to automate safely. Think carefully about your content marketing bottlenecks and determine which automation tools can help you solve the problem.
One thing you don’t need to figure out alone? Automating your content creation workflow. GatherContent has that covered. Our software will help streamline your content efforts. You can now reduce duplicate tasks, maintain brand consistency, and improve content quality by collaboration.
Ready to give it a spin? Start your GatherContent free trial.
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