In the world of online marketing, content is still king in many ways. Without high-quality, fresh, and consistently published content, businesses of all types will have a hard time standing out and attracting attention. Although content is crucial, it can be difficult for businesses to regularly develop and push content on all of their platforms. The following guide to content automation will help you connect with the right audiences through top-quality content that keeps your app or website in the spotlight.
Many manual processes are involved in content creation, making it important to automate content creation and publishing to get the most from each type of content and platform.
If you’re new to content automation, you might be wondering what the content automation definition is before getting started. Put simply, content automation entails using certain technologies that help eliminate certain manual content creation and publishing tasks. With the right tools and strategies, content automation can help streamline the creation process, along with other steps in content marketing, including curation.
Content is vital for building a brand, gaining the trust of audiences, and converting audiences into leads and customers. Without good content, a brand won’t be able to establish its offerings or its value to prospective customers. In creating and maintaining content, there are many steps involved that require sufficient attention and efficiency. However, without automated content marketing processes, it’s often challenging for businesses to get the best results from their content strategies.
By combining content with content marketing automation software, you’ll be able to maximize your chances of success with your campaigns. Using the right content automation tools, you’ll experience a number of benefits that keep you on top of your content strategy and above less agile competitors. These tools can help with a variety of tasks, including understanding your audience and what it wants from your brand, optimizing content to speak to audiences more directly, and ensuring content is consistently updated to remain relevant at all times, among others.
Automation is important for all facets of marketing, not just content. According to HubSpot, around 76% of companies use automation as of 2021. Additionally, Invespcro found that 80% of marketing automation users experience an improvement in lead generation, with 77% seeing a higher number of conversions. These and many other statistics show the value of incorporating automation into marketing, including content marketing.
Ultimately, with content automation, you’ll be able to save more time, energy, and money in the long run.
Through automated content generation, moderation, and curation, you’ll have the chance to get the best possible results with your content and content marketing efforts. To help you integrate an automated content marketing solution into your business, the following are some steps you can take and tools to use.
Developments in artificial intelligence have made this tool invaluable for marketing automation. Today, AI tools can automate content marketing in a wide variety of ways to help drive success. Some potential use cases for AI-driven content automation tools include:
The topics you create content around should be relevant and connect with audiences. A tool such as Google Search Console can use AI to help identify topics that are most likely to resonate with audiences. Google Search Console uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help identify words that are similar to each other based on the number of times they tend to appear together, giving context for a wide range of potential topics.
AI can also help automate content creation in certain ways, namely by helping to generate certain snippets of text, images, or audio using NLP in conjunction with natural language generation (NLG) technologies. However, content creation is still largely a manual process requiring human input.
AI technology makes it easier to tailor content to audiences based on their behaviors and preferences. Using the right tools, you can determine when to push content and how to gear language to establish a strong connection with each audience segment.
Plenty of AI-driven tools exists to help perfect content during the creation process, including tools like Grammarly, Hemingway App, and ProWriting Aid. These will help maximize the efficiency of the proofreading and editing process to get your content in front of audiences quicker than ever.
These are simply some of the areas that AI can cover when it comes to content automation. As technology continues to advance, AI will likely be able to achieve even more to help fully automate content marketing.
For app owners, creating and pushing engaging in-app content is crucial for retaining users. With the help of Storyly, you can automatically convert feeds into personalized stories that connect directly with users.
In-app stories present content in a digestible narrative format that helps develop a fully personalized experience for users. Through the incorporation of automation, you can easily turn product, and RSS feeds into stories into content that people see within your app. As a result, you can repurpose content such as blog posts and more to make it compatible with the app experience.
Storyly’s automated stories also offer plenty of ready-made templates to expedite the process, or you can create your own to fully customize your stories. Template Studio makes it super easy to create automated or personalized stories.
The best types of content are evergreen, which means it’s designed to last for as long as years after the initial publishing date. When developing blog posts or articles, think of topics in your industry that are likely to remain timeless as opposed to more topical subjects. People should be able to come back to your content as a resource long after you create it. Evergreen content is also easy to update as minor aspects change over time, with the core of the content remaining consistently relevant.
You’ll also be able to remain more consistently on top of search engine rankings with content that’s well-optimized with good search engine optimization (SEO). You can optimize your content for search engines by:
With a combination of evergreen content and good SEO practices, you won’t need to spend as much time updating content once created while audiences continue to find it and extract value from it for many years.
It’s best not to wait to get started on content strategies. If you only develop content as needed, you’ll wind up wasting valuable resources and time. Try to schedule your content way ahead of schedule to give you ample time to plan and make changes accordingly. If you can develop a content plan that ties into your business’s long-term goals, you’ll be able to get the most from your strategy.
One of the best ways to schedule content is to use a combination of evergreen content and topical content. With plenty of evergreen content developed and scheduled in advance, your teams will be able to spend more time and energy on whipping up and publishing high-value, time-sensitive content.
The longer you plan ahead, the more you’ll be able to regularly generate, publish, and curate content to drive results with it.
Using AI and other tools, you can gain a deep understanding of your audience, including what they want from your content. You can collect data around behaviors, demographics, and more to help guide your content in the right direction. Additionally, you can segment audiences into different groups and create content that speaks to each based on their preferences.
Over time, you’ll also be able to understand different trends and changes in audiences’ behaviors or preferences. This will help keep your content strategies agile while making sure it continues to connect.
Certain content automation platforms will enable you to determine precisely where your audience spends its time online. You can find out which social media channels and other platforms your audiences use most frequently. You’ll also be able to find out which types of content you publish and promote perform the best on these channels, which will help you further optimize your campaigns.
Knowing which channels yield the best results and which content pieces perform the best on each will give you some additional direction for your strategy as you continue to optimize it.
Social media channels are integral to content marketing strategies. In addition to other types of content, you should make sure your social media ads and posts are automated to consistently connect with these audiences.
You can automate social media content by planning multiple messages for each newsfeed. These topics could include questions, quotes, benefits of your brand and offerings, anecdotes, soundbites, and more. A wide variety of content lined up will keep your newsfeed fresh and engaging.
You should also craft different posts for each channel. For instance, you might use one type of message to complement a topic on Facebook to reach one audience, while messaging is tweaked to speak to professionals on LinkedIn. Also, make sure each post you share on various platforms is compatible with each based on design specifications, which you can achieve through the use of templates.
Of course, one of the best ways to automate social media content is to create a posting schedule for each piece of content created. Have a roster of posts ready to go in advance and schedule them based on when your audience is most likely to view them. For example, you might have a selection of evergreen topics to discuss, which you can schedule to post two days a week at a specific time when your audience is most active. Additionally, you can throw in the occasional topical post as needed without being overwhelmed.
Another element to automate on social media is reposting. Evergreen content is ripe for reposting, but the key is knowing when it’s best to recycle this content and share it on your newsfeed. For example, you might find that audiences continually engage with a certain topic on Facebook when you repost it every two months, while a platform like Instagram generates more engagement for previous topics after waiting close to a year to prevent people from seeing duplicate content in their feeds. You can experiment with different reposting intervals to see which length of time yields the best results.
One of the most effective ways to regularly connect with audiences is to use predictive analytics, which helps determine how people interact with content at different stages of the customer lifecycle. If you find that people are dropping off at a certain point, you can optimize your strategy to more effectively carry people along the buyer’s journey.
Using predictive analytics and content automation, you can provide audiences with more relevant content to improve the customer experience. In addition, you can determine which types of content offer the highest value throughout the customer journey. In the process, you’ll be able to figure out which content yields the highest ROI, which will make it easier to determine which content is worth investing more of your budget in as you optimize your strategy.
If you want to make sure your content marketing efforts drive your business’s success, content automation is absolutely necessary for today’s marketing environment. With the right strategies and tools, you’ll remain competitive and continue to attract and retain customers. As your business grows and your audience grows along with it, you’ll be able to deliver consistently engaging, relevant, and high-quality content that maintains a strong connection with prospects.
Content & Brand Marketing Strategist at Storyly. Writes about mobile user behavior, user engagement, and retention. A genuine Potterhead. She also loves succulents, cats, and aerial yoga.
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