Content automation is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on removing the need for human intervention in the content lifecycle. The goal of content automation is to program, or automate, any process involved with content marketing that may be redundant, time-consuming or costly. Automation can be applied to any phase of the content marketing strategy, including planning, creation, publishing and monitoring.
Vendors in the content automation space typically focus on one of two business models. The first is to create simple tools with a singular functionality, such as Grammarly for proofreading content. The second is to offer an entire content automation platform that can be integrated into and customized with existing systems across the entire marketing strategy, such as Marketo or HubSpot.
How does content automation work
Content automation works by identifying repetitive content-related tasks and using tools or applications to perform them. Tasks that are often streamlined with content automation include search engine optimization (SEO), social media scheduling and tagging, target audience analytics and plagiarism checking. When the time it takes to complete these tasks is minimized, marketers can spend more time writing effective, original content.
Additionally, content automation tools that utilize AI and natural language processing (NLP) to generate static content or copy have begun to grow in popularity. For example, these tools use bots to write website landing pages, blog posts or social media captions. This is done by feeding a machine learning (ML) program related keywords that it can use to analyze and learn from articles that cover similar topics. It will then produce comparable but unique and optimized content.
Uses of Content Automation
Content automation can be applied to a variety of use cases, including:
- Proofreading content that has already been written for spelling and grammar issues.
- Gathering published content for and sending automated emails to relevant customers or leads.
- Sharing content across multiple platforms and social media.
- Monitoring and analyzing reader engagement.
- Optimizing content for search engines or similar competition.
- Translating content into other languages, audio or graphics.
- Creating a content creation and publishing schedule with notifications and reminders.
- Curating content from other sources to share on social media.
- Managing gated content and subscriber information.
- Writing content without the need for human intervention.
