Content marketers wear many hats. From researching content topics to writing engaging content to promoting content, there is a lot of work to do in order to run a dynamic content marketing strategy. But what if we told you that your workload could be lighter?
Learning what areas of your content marketing strategy that you can automate and identifying the content marketing tools you need to make it happen will save you a lot of time. You can use this time to focus on things you can’t automate like creating awesome content that resonates with your target consumers.
This post will take you through a few things that you can automate when it comes to your content marketing strategy in hopes of adding a little time back into your day.
Content Marketing Tools
1. Editing
Grammarly is a Chrome plugin that you can use to automate the proofreading of the content and even emails that you produce. This content marketing tool goes beyond spelling and grammar mistakes and alerts you when there are errors with your writing, style, or tone. While Microsoft Word or Google Docs will alert you of basic spelling or punctuation errors, Grammarly catches commonly confused words when they’re used in the wrong context.
Grammarly has a free plan and a premium plan. The premium plan offers advanced suggestions about word choice, run-on sentences, and more. The tool will even send you weekly updates on common mistakes that you’re prone to making so that you can learn from them.
Save time editing blog posts, emails, social media copy, and more with this freemium tool!
2. Content Digests
Automating news and blog posts to subscribers and leads can save you a ton of time and free up more time for you to focus on creating great content. FeedOtter is a content marketing tool that allows you to send weekly or monthly digests of the content your brand puts out. Choose from different templates and sync it up with your marketing automation platform so that distributing your content literally runs on autopilot.
You can hook FeedOtter up to any RSS or news feed. It even has a bookmarking plugin that allows you to bookmark content that you would like to put in your content digest. From there, insert a personalized greeting to show up at the top of your content digest email and let FeedOtter do the rest.
3. Content Curation
Sharing your own content on social media takes a lot of time, let alone sharing like-minded content to keep your followers engaged. Luckily there is a content marketing tool like DrumUp where you can automate your content curation. This tool recommends content for you to share on each of your social channels.
It’s super easy to peruse through and find great content to curate that will resonate with your social followers. After you find content on DrumUp, the tool allows you to edit the original post, add images, and schedule it on your social sharing platform. It even recommends hashtags to use.
4. Monitoring and Social Listening
In order to make the most out of your brand shout outs on blogs and social, you need to monitor for these brand mentions in real-time. Manually monitoring for brand mentions is tedious so we recommend using a content marketing tool like Mention to see all of the brand recognition that you’re getting.
Mention allows you to see every time that your brand is mentioned on social or in a blog with a streamlined dashboard. The tool even allows you to message and engage with the channels who mention your brand straight from the dashboard. To make sure you don’t miss any brand mentions, Mention will email you every time your brand is recommended or talked about.
In addition to monitoring your own brand, Mention allows you to track competitors.
5. Identifying Content Topics
Brainstorming and researching topics to write your content around can take a lot of time and work. You want to write something innovative and that will resonate with your audience but sometimes it’s hard to come up with new topics every week. There are content marketing tools out there that can automate the brainstorming process like BuzzSumo.
This tool’s content analysis reports allow you to look at how popular a topic is and how often it gets shared. It will also tell you which content types are performing better like infographics compared to video or “why” posts compared to list posts. Leverage content topics that are the most shared by your target readers to come up with a content topic for your next post that you know will resonate with your audience.
Final Thoughts
It’s no secret—content marketing strategies take up a lot of time. Luckily there are tools like the five we’ve listed in this blog post that can automate parts of your content marketing strategy and ease your workload. Learning what to automate and which tools help you automate your strategy are going to add a bunch of hours back into your workday.
Do you have a strategy or content marketing tool that allows you to automate pieces of your content marketing strategy? We’d love to hear from you on @Feed_Otter!
