“Content marketing” is quite possibly the most used marketing buzzphrase of the past two years, but with good reason. Simply put, content marketing has become one of the most powerful ways to grow your business through the power of digital marketing, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

With that being said, for you to succeed online, especially in saturated and rapidly growing markets, content marketing must be an important piece of your marketing puzzle.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the inner workings of content marketing, The Content Marketing Institute describes it as the following:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

If you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, that sounds exactly like what I need for my business”, you’re right. But then you probably thought about one millisecond later “Where in the world can I find time for all of this?”, and trust me, I feel your pain.

But the world is a beautiful place. A beautiful place filled with automation that can help you increase your marketing ROI, while decreasing the amount of time you spend on your content marketing efforts.

Let’s detail a few ways you can use automation in your content marketing starting right now.

But first things first.

Build a Content Strategy

Before we can automate our content marketing, we have to actually have a process to automate. That’s where forming a content marketing strategy comes into play. While the focus of this article is not to help you create that strategy, it’s important to note. Here are a few posts from around the web to get you started.

At this point, you should have at least an idea of where you want to take your content marketing. If not, do not move forward with automating your content marketing. I repeat. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

In all seriousness though, there is no point in spending your time, resources, and hard earned marketing budget, on an unproven and unrefined content marketing strategy. Ever heard of putting the cart in front of the horse? Yeah, it’s like that. The truth is, automating your marketing strategy, content or otherwise, won’t make it a better strategy in of itself.

cart-before-horse

The key is to refine your content marketing plan to the point that it works, and then introduce automation, allowing you to free up your time for more important things, like growing your strategy, your business, and your bottom line.

Automate all the things?

automate-all-the-things

This post will focus strictly on ways you can implement automation in your content marketing strategy outside of writing / creating content, and the reason for that is simple; There’s enough terrible content on this crazy place we call the internet, and we don’t need anymore of it. Focus your efforts; your valuable time and resources on the following:

  1. Creating a bulletproof content marketing strategy
  2. Providing constant value to your clients / customers / readers through the quality of your content

The rest, automate.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Our intent, to put it simply, is to shine a spotlight on the world of automation within content marketing, and help you brainstorm ways you can bring it all home. What you takeaway from this post should help you brainstorm, evaluate, and move forward on your own personal, tailored methods of automating content marketing, suited to your business.

If you feel like you could use a helping hand in that process, feel free to reach out to us at (866) 374.7945.

With that said, let’s get to it.

Zapier

Zapier is the de facto solution in the automation space, and therefore, we’ll be referring to it a lot as we work through potential areas of your strategy you can automate. If you haven’t already, make an account over there. You’re gonna need it. www.zapier.com

The 80/20 Rule of Content Curation

The 80/20 rule is applied to just about every industry and vertical, and marketing is no exception. When it comes to content curation, the 80/20 methodology is often a great starting point. What’s content curation you ask?

Curating content, in it’s simplest form, is the act of sharing content, whether on your website, social media channels, email list, or the like, that you did not create. This content will be relevant to your online audience, and compliment your created content.

This means that as a content marketer, for every one piece of content that you create and share with your audience, you should share four pieces curated from other sources. What’s the thought process here?

Well, there’s a few schools of thought, but it boils down to the fact that no one wants to read all about you, all of the time. Sounds childish, but it’s flat out true. Sharing valuable, actionable, relevant content from reputable sources can help to skyrocket your engagement with your audience, as well as your credibility in their eyes.

For some, the 80/20 rule works just fine; for others, it’s even higher; for many, much lower. Do you see what I’m getting at here? There’s no silver bullet when it comes to your create/curate ratio, and the key is experimentation.

Now that we understand that we need to curate content, how the heck does automation come into play here?

Well, where are you going to get all of that content to curate? If you created one piece of content per week, that would mean you’d need to share four pieces per week of curated content. That may not sound like a lot, but remember, quality is key, and careful consideration must be made when choosing a piece of content to share.

Automated RSS Content Auto-Curator

The first step is to peruse your industry to find top sources of content. If you are a doctor, maybe the personal blog of a few of the top PHDs in your field, or an online medical journal, the choice is yours. Remember to not only pick sources that contain content you might find appealing, but are relevant and appealing to your audience.

Track down the RSS feed of those websites and use a website called RSSMix to combine them into one feed.

Once you’ve done that, head over to Zapier and and create a Zap to take any new content updates from that combined feed, and send them to you instantly and directly, via a channel of your choice, be that email, text message, or instant messenger (like Slack).

Here are a few example Zaps to get you started.

Again, these are just to get you started. Do you research, and experiment!

Automate your Sharing

Another simple way to begin to free up time for the more important things is by automating the actual sharing of your content, whether created by yourself, or curated from others. There are many tools to help you do just that, like Buffer and Hootsuite. Each has it’s own pros and cons list, but they both (and other services) provide lots of value. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use Buffer as our tool of reference in this article.

If you aren’t familiar with these types of social automation tools, they allow you to create lists of content shares, updates, etc. that are aggregated to any number of connected social media accounts across a plethora of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, and more. Instead of posting the same status update or picture 10 times, add it to your queue once, schedule it for an opportune time, and get back to your regularly scheduled day.

Using external automation tools, however, we can take these services even farther by automating the addition of content to those queues!

For example, use this zap to automatically add Instagram posts to your Buffer queue for aggregation on other platforms.

Now, instead of having to create that post and drop it in a queue on your computer, simply post away on the ever simple and quick Instagram, and watch it magically appear on all your platforms.

Or, use this Zap to automatically add to your Buffer queue any new posts on your WordPress blog, saving you the time of doing it manually.

If you’re a YouTube star (or on your way there!), use this Zap to automatically add new YouTube videos to your Buffer Queue, and return to editing your next masterpiece.

Never be Satisfied

The best marketing strategy is one that’s always changing. Automation can help you streamline your processes, collect more data, and assist you in making the hard decisions about where to take your marketing. So don’t get complacent with “good enough”. While it’s important to balance your focus between all the aspects of your business, don’t let your marketing strategy become neglected.

Monitor your progress closely, tweak your strategy, and let automation help you take your content marketing to the next level.

Takeaway

If you learn anything from this article, let it be this: Content Marketing is hard. It requires a lot of insight, experimentation, hard work, and a little bit of luck (like all forms of marketing.) Automation is not the silver bullet to a perfect content marketing strategy, but it will help you take that plan, tweak it, expound on it, and scale like the wind. So put your thinking cap on, get in the automation mindset, and get to work.

If you need any assistance at all in forming, executing, or tweaking a content marketing strategy, our specialists would love to hear from you. Fill out our sign up form to get started, or call us directly at (866) 374.7945.