Lead Nurturing

Another aspect of your campaign you can involve content marketing automation is the lead nurturing and management process. Let’s look at your email marketing efforts to demonstrate the benefits, here.

Getting a site visitor to sign up for your newsletter is only the first step of the lead nurturing process. It’s where things go from there that matter more. Establish triggers in your automation process to ensure your campaign sends out appropriate emails to your subscribers.

For instance, if a particular subscriber doesn’t open your email, you can send them a reminder about your latest newsletter. Similarly, if they did open your email, you can shoot them a complimentary content piece entice them into making a purchase decision.

Such dynamic emails can prove highly beneficial in delivering critical information at the right steps of the purchasing process. At the same time, such relevant and targeted content goes a long way to keep your audience engaged. Not to mention it works wonders to establish your thought leadership in your industry.

2. Content Curation

The second bucket where you can apply content marketing automation hacks is the content curation aspect of your campaign. We all know the importance and value of content creation and building a strong social media presence is concerned.

In recent years, social media has caused a meteoric rise in the amount of content that is being consumed online. Try as one might, relying on content creation, alone, won’t help to meet the increasing demands for content. Here’s where content curation can help you remain relevant and in the eyes of your audience.

Content curation, however, often proves to be a rather laborious task when done manually. Particularly so, if you have a presence on multiple social media tools. What’s the solution then? You guessed it. Content marketing automation is the solution. Not only will you save a lot of time and effort, but will bring in a factor of consistency in your curated content, as well.

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The biggest challenge, of course, when it comes to content curation is how do you discover relevant, curatable content. I’ve found tools like DrumUp to be particularly helpful in this regard. It provides you with content recommendations for each of your social media accounts. Simply peruse through them and decide which ones you want to be curating.

The tool also allows you to edit the original post, add images, and schedule it to be shared on multiple accounts. It even recommends relevant hashtags you can use, set custom publishing times, and more.

If you’re using such content discovery tools for your content marketing automation, do remember one key thing. These discovery engines rely on keyword search to provide content recommendations.

The issue with that is, not all recommendations are those of high-quality pieces of content. So, always remember to review the suggestions and don’t let your tool work in auto-pilot. Moreover, some of the content may not reflect the values of your business or worse still, promote your industry rivals.

These tools are meant to be used in an effort to reduce the energies you need to divert to these activities. They aren’t designed to completely eliminate the human aspect.

So long as you’re mindful of that, your content curation automation efforts will benefit your brand. No wonder more and more companies are adopting tools to automate their content curation.

3. Content Distribution

Another rather important aspect of content marketing is how you distribute your content to your target audience. The success of your campaign rests on whether or not you’re able to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

Even the most brilliant piece of content you produce won’t do your business a lot of good if you don’t have a holistic content distribution strategy. Despite optimizing your content to be discoverable by search engines, you may not be able to reach as many people as you’d like.

That’s why it’s critical for you to step up your game and not rely solely on old SEO hacks to improve your content engagements. That’s why owned media and paid media are an important facet to consider when devising a content distribution strategy. Newsletters, email subscriptions, ads, and social media are very effective channels you can use to amplify your content.

Luckily, there are a few content marketing hacks that can help you with this.

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Email Marketing

You’ve produced a great piece of content, shared it on your blog, on social media, and other avenues. But how do you get the word out about it? Often the simplest solution is the best solution. Just let them know that you’ve published a new piece of content that you think they might be interested in reading.

One content marketing automation solution you can employ to improve your content distribution is to use tools like MailChimp. Simply notify all your readers about your latest post and watch as your readership increases. Automated tools like these ensure that your content always reaches the right eyes and ears, that too all at once.

Most automation tools have pre-designed templates that you can send out to users at various stages of the sales funnel. For that matter, you can even create your own custom templates to use. So, for instance, when a new user subscribes to you, the tool automatically sends out a welcome email to them.

You can use such content marketing automation tools to follow up with your customers, source feedback, and more. These tools empower you to sell more, build customer loyalty, and improve productivity.

Social Media Marketing

Another great content marketing hack is to use tools to automate your content distribution on social media. Social media is, of course, one of the best channels for you to promote and distribute your content on.

By sheer number alone, the potential audience you can find on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. runs in the billions. No matter how niche a market you might be targeting, you’re sure to find an audience for yourself on it.

Having a proper posting schedule for your content sharing on social media is a good plan to have. Figure out your optimum posting times so as to maximize your engagement on individual platforms.

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But it isn’t always possible to share your content around those optimal timings. So, what do you do then? Here’s the part where content marketing automation hacks come handy. A social media management tool like Sprout Social’s content publishing tool is a great example.