Content marketing automation solutions: how good are they actually?

Learn what content marketing automation is and if it’s right for you.

The sheer volume of content needed to feed present day marketing campaigns has made automation a necessity. But what is automated marketing and is it all it’s cracked up to be? And what is the best content marketing automation tool for you? We take a look below.

What is marketing automation?

Content marketing automation is the approach of identifying repetitive content marketing tasks and then automating them through tools and applications. The goal is to make content marketing more efficient and improve the effectiveness of the marketing strategy by nurturing potential or returning customers or audiences.

Automated messages target your audience based on their reaction to online content and emails, through email, web, texts and social media. These messages are activated according to workflows, ensuring that the correct messages are sent at the optimum times. By automating these repetitive tasks, marketers can spend more time focusing on value added tasks, such as fine-tuning campaign strategy, building brand and improving customer experience.

Content marketing involves a complex process of strategising towards goals, producing and distributing content, and then analysing the results. Software and online applications are utilised to effectively market multifunctional campaigns across multiple channels automatically. When carried out effectively, marketing automation increases leads and subsequently revenue, while maximising efficiency of human and digital resources.

What to consider when designing a marketing automation strategy

First thought should be your audience: who are they, what type of content do they like and how do they react to the different types of messaging. From there you can start to explore the content that is most likely to prompt your desired action, whether that is to subscribe to a service, download a whitepaper or visit a certain page on your website.

Automated messages will vary according to the channel in which they are displayed. The confines of social media, for example, means that messages are snappier, whereas an outbound email leaves room for longer explanations and multiple CTAs. Furthermore, some content can be tailored and personalised far more than others depending on the permissions given and information gathered on your audience.

Deciding when automated messages will be triggered gives you the power to guide and nurture leads into taking an action, which may include making a purchase or downloading a whitepaper. This means you can provide a consistent and positive experience without overwhelming your audience to the point that they stop engaging with your messaging. The best way to establish an effective automated content campaign is to test, analyse and learn, using A/B testing to refine aspects like subject lines and CTAs and then leveraging results for each group of your audience.

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

Automation allows you to maintain control on campaigns while freeing up human resources to focus on value added tasks. The result is also higher quality content, as members of your team are freed from essential yet monotonous tasks and can instead apply themselves to refining content.

Automation also means your campaign is controlled centrally, ensuring reliability with a defined strategy that uses streamlined systems and processes. As time goes on and data is collected and analysed, your use of automation will become increasingly effective and personalised, seeing an increasing return on investment.

Another benefit of marketing automation is your constant contact with your audience. Greater customer reach means more eyeballs viewing your content, therefore resulting in more leads and sales.

Marketing automation: potential downfalls

Initial outlay can be high, meaning decisions needs to be made on when is best to implement marketing automation. Most agree, however, that when done right, any costs are more than made up for by the freed up human resources. Automation does also require a lot of work to monitor results of campaigns, create content and then update where necessary. The automation systems need to be managed and strategy requires continual assessment and improvement.

To ensure marketing automations are worthwhile, an external expert partner is required to bring expertise and creativity to the campaign, using their experience of automation to enhance strategy and content. If this is not done, there is a danger of wasting the investment in the automation solution as it cannot be used to its full capability.

An area where it is particularly important to have excellent copywriters is email marketing. If an email campaign lacks engaging subject lines and engaging copy then it will be a wasted enterprise, annoying your audience with repetitive emails rather than engaging them.

How do copywriters enhance the effectiveness of marketing automation systems?

Marketing automation is a hugely powerful tool that many brands are utilising – and for good reason. Popular tools include Hubspot, Dotdigital, Marketo and Pardot. These provide businesses with the opportunity to take control, increase productivity and drive revenue growth.

Copestone’s experience and expertise with strategizing, managing and writing for automated campaigns speaks for itself, with many returning customers that have benefited from excellent return on interest when using us in combination with automated marketing solutions.

As an experienced, knowledgeable team, we can provide flexibility in campaign management to ensure strategy suits you and content engages your audience. It is not a matter of if you should use marketing automation solutions, but which you will choose, and when you’ll get started.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you create and refine your marketing automation strategy and provide the engaging content your audience want to see.

If you need support to write engaging, audience-driven content for your B2B brand or agency, contact Copestone today.