Automating Your Content Marketing Strategy (Six Tips to Help You)

Carl Taylor | August 12, 2019

You need quality content to keep people moving through your sales funnel. The challenge lies in creating a strategy that works well without taking up all of your time. That’s where automation comes into play.

 

90% of businesses now use content marketing as a lead generation tool.

That shows how far online content has come over the last two decades. It’s about much more than writing keyword-stuffed articles to try to manipulate search rankings. Your content has to offer true value to the reader or they’re going to click away and forget about you.

That’s why you need a content marketing strategy.

You need to deliver content that’s tailored to people at every stage of your sales funnel. That means creating targeted pieces that hit the right points at the right time.

After all, 47% of people will view between three and five pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. If yours doesn’t hit the mark, you’ve potentially lost customers and revenue.

It’s a lot to deal with. And if you’re trying to do it all manually, you’ll find yourself spending more time on content than you do on your service.

That’s why you need to make automation a part of your strategy. These are the six tips to help you leverage it effectively.

 

Tip #1 – Use Monitoring Tools

 

Think back to the last piece of content that you created.

How well did it perform? How many people clicked through to your website after reading the piece? Did you get any sales from it?

If you can’t answer those questions, you’re going to struggle to build an effective strategy. Part of content marketing involves monitoring the pieces you produce to find out what works and what you need to do better.

The good news is that there are tools available to help you automate this process.

Google Analytics is the most obvious one. You may already have it installed on your website. If not, the tool collects a ton of data about your website visitors. You can use it to see how many people view a piece, how long they spend looking at it, and where they go next. If you see that a piece has a high bounce rate, that’s a sign that you need to change something.

You can also create custom reports inside Analytics that collect the data you want to focus on automatically. That means less time spent searching through all of the data.

Tip #2 – Automate Your Scheduling

 

You’ve created your content calendar.

You know that you’re going to post two pieces to Facebook, one to Twitter, and one to your blog.

Then, a big task comes in. Your focus gets pulled away from your content. Before you know it, the end of the day arrives and you haven’t posted anything.

If that situation sounds familiar, you could benefit from automated scheduling.

There are plenty of tools that can help from the social media side of things. Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social all allow you to schedule your posts. They’ll post them automatically at your specified time.

If you have a WordPress site, you may be able to use a plugin to create an automated content calendar. Send a ticket to the Automation Agency Concierge service to see if this is an option for you.

Tip #3 – Curate Content Using Tools

 

Did you know that you don’t have to rely solely on the content you create as part of your strategy?

In fact, carefully curated content from other sources can help you to build a larger following on social media. And of course, a larger following means more people see the content that you create yourself. There’s a school of thought that says that 50% of the content you share on social media should come from other sources.

Of course, you don’t have all day to spend on searching for relevant content.

That’s where tools like Scoop.it become useful. You enter a topic or keyword and it delivers an array of relevant content pieces. Integrate your social profiles into the tool and you can share any relevant content at the touch of a button. It also includes an alert feature that highlights new content every day.

This saves a ton of time that you’d otherwise spend on searching for useful stuff to share.

Tip #4 – Automate Your Lead Magnet Creation

 

A lead magnet is anything that you use to get people to send you their details.

A typical one might be a giveaway that you offer via a landing page. For example, you may offer a free report in exchange for some details from the customer. Those details then enter your CRM and the customer starts to move through your funnel.

Now, you won’t automate the content creation aspect of a lead magnet. That’s something that you’ll have to dedicate time and effort to.

Automation comes in as part of what happens with the data. Once someone enters their details, you can use automation to port that information straight into your CRM. You can automatically tag the source and even move it into a specific audience segment. Then, you can automate email campaigns and other advertising based on the data you’ve collected.

These are all things that Automation Agency can help you with. Send a ticket to the Concierge service to set up audience segments, create a messaging sequence, or to build your landing page forms. We can also help you with the design of your lead magnets.

Tip #5 – Automate Email Marketing

 

So many businesses struggle to maximise their email campaigns.

You may have a subscriber list that contains 50,000 people. Each one of those is in a different place in your sales funnel. Some may have just entered, which means they don’t want to see the sales pitch just yet. Others may find themselves ready to buy, which means they just need a little direction.

However, you send the same email to all 50,000 people. The content doesn’t align with where many of the subscribers are in your funnel, which means you lose potential sales.

Part of your content marketing strategy involves creating content for each stage. But you can use automation to make sure the right people receive the right emails at the right times.

Audience tracking and segmentation work well here. Break your overall subscriber list into segments based on their interests, stage in the funnel, or where they came from. Create email sequences for each segment and use your CRM to automate the sending.

This is something that Automation Agency can help you with.

You could also create a lead scoring system that determines when a customer moves from one sequence to another. Again, this all happens automatically, with the system pulling from a bunch of sequences that you create in advance.

Tip #6 – Use Tools to Come Up With Content Ideas

 

Coming up with ideas is the biggest problem that many face with content marketing. You may feel like there’s only so much useful content that you can share. Or, you spend so much time coming up with ideas that you don’t have any left over to create the content.

That’s where a tool like Buzzsumo shows its value.

Much like Scoop.it, you can enter a topic and see a bunch of articles related to the topic. However, Buzzsumo also offers up some engagement metrics so you can see which article types work best. Use that information to come up with content ideas that your audience will find useful.

You can set up alerts for brands, keywords, topics, and competitors so you get automatic updates. Again, use this information to build out your own content marketing strategy.

 

Automate to Save Time and Money

 

You know how valuable content marketing is to your business. The problem is that you don’t feel like you have the time or money to dedicate to it.

That’s why automation is so valuable to you. It can help you to save thousands of hours that you’d spend on coming up with ideas and managing campaigns.

That means you have more time to work on other areas of your business.

Automation Agency can help you to build automation in your content marketing strategy in several ways. We can help you to automate your email sequences, design your lead magnets, and integrate different tools into your CRM.

Just send a ticket to our Concierge service to learn more.

And don’t fret if you’re not a member yet. Just chat to our Right Fit Chatbot to find out if we can work together.

About the author 

Carl Taylor

Carl Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Automation Agency. For the past 10 years Carl has been building businesses and marketing them online through the use of Sales Funnels, Email Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, and Wordpress Websites. Carl is also a #1 author and highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted thousands of businesses across various industries worldwide.

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