5 Content Marketing Automation Tools You Must Try

What we are witnessing in the digital space right now can only be termed a content explosion. Most businesses today have realized how important it is to have a content marketing strategy. But the content that wins is one that forges a genuine connection with the readers. It’s important to understand that your target audience is looking for content that addresses their pain points and needs head-on. And with the right content marketing and social media scheduling tools, creating this kind of meaningful content becomes significantly easier.

Whether you are looking to streamline content processes, schedule your emails, or trying to save time with content publishing automation, good content marketing automation software can help you glean more value from your efforts. The following sections will take you through some excellent content marketing automation tools for streamlining your existing workflows.

What is a content marketing automation tool?

A content marketing automation tool is a type of software that can be used to automate any stage of the content lifecycle. It allows you to predefine your content workflows, whether it is for content creation, proofreading, publishing, or any other part of the content lifecycle. The purpose of a content marketing automation tool is to handle some of the routine content marketing tasks without the intervention of the human marketer.

Now that you are familiar with content marketing automation tools, let’s take a look at some of them.

5 Content Marketing Automation Tools

1. Narrato

If you’re looking for an all-in-one content automation software, then this content workflow platform is the one for you. Narrato offers a range of automation features for every stage of the content lifecycle, from content creation, and research, to publishing and even workflow management. This single tool can take care of all your content needs, from beginning to end, which means that you do not have to depend on multiple tools for your content process.

Here are the content marketing automation features of this tool –

• SEO content briefs: With this Narrato feature, content research and planning become significantly easier. All you have to do is enter your topic, and the tool automatically generates an SEO content brief, complete with word count, keyword suggestions, competitor references, and more.
• AI Writing Assistant: This feature is especially useful when you’re feeling stuck with a content piece. Narrato’s AI writing tool generates automated content for a variety of use cases, which can help you speed up the content creation process.
• Grammar and readability suggestions: As you’re creating content in Narrato’s powerful content editor, the tool automatically provides you with relevant grammar and readability suggestions to improve your content quality. It also provides you with a readability score, which keeps updating as you write your content.
• Publishing automation: With Narrato’s content publishing features, you can publish your content directly from the platform to any examples of headless CMS of your choice (WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, or others). Besides this, you can also build your own integrations using the Narrato API or Zapier integration to publish social media content too.

• Workflow automation: This amazing feature on the Narrato Workspace allows you to automate your content workflows. You can automatically assign tasks to team member(s), move due dates, and send notifications whenever the task status of a content item is changed.

2. SmartWriter

SmartWriter is an AI-based tool that can be used to generate personalized and targeted cold emails at the click of a button. With the simple tool, you can automate all your outreach and email marketing efforts 40 times faster and at the fraction of the cost.

Here are the key content marketing automation features of this tool –

• Personalized cold emails: With SmartWriter, you can leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to create tailored and personalized cold emails for your prospective clients. It creates personalized email introductions by going through your client’s online data.
• Deep enrichment: With SmartWriter, you can have your complete customer resource database at your fingertips, which allows you to leverage new prospects at scale.
• Personalized LinkedIn messages: You can also create personalized LinkedIn messages that are not only compatible with your connection, but also help you stand out from the crowd.
• Backlink request emails: This tool uses the content in your blogs to create targeted backlink request emails.

3. Tailwind

If you’re looking for a content automation solution for social media marketing campaigns, then Tailwind is the answer for you. Specifically designed for visual social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, this content automation tool assists with everything, including the creation, distribution, and promotion of visual content. Its automation features allow you to create content for all your social media platforms at once. It also comes with a content discovery tool that makes it easier to find relevant content based on certain keywords.

Here are some more features of this tool -

• Hashtag suggestions for Instagram posts
• Bulk images upload
• Content publishing to multiple Pinterest boards at the same time
• Link in bio tool

4. HubSpot

Anyone who’s been in the content space for some time is familiar with this name. HubSpot is a customer relationship management platform that offers several products, one of which is the HubSpot Marketing Hub. The Marketing Hub offers a content marketing automation tool that is a great fit for SMBs looking to do more with their content marketing processes.

Here are the key content marketing automation features of this tool –

• Automated lead nurturing: After creating beautiful emails on the platform, you can choose between several actions, triggers, and conditions to streamline your email drip campaigns.
• Targeted workflows: HubSpot makes it easier to create targeted workflows. You also have the option to decide which team member gets involved in which part of the content workflow, and when.

Automate numerous tasks: HubSpot does a lot more than automating email drip campaigns. You can use the targeted workflows to score leads and set up webhooks.

5. Grammarly

When you think of content marketing automation tools, Grammarly might not be the first name that comes to mind. But this proofreading grammar checker tool does an excellent job of automating the most tedious part of content creation – optimizing for grammar and readability.

The tool uses natural language processing to analyze your content for grammar, punctuation, and spelling. And all this is done in real-time, which makes it easier to rectify any errors and refine your content for word choice and voice of tone. Grammarly also goes one step further to use content-sensitive analysis and advanced algorithms to check the originality of your content piece, making it very useful for plagiarism-free essay writing.

Why use content marketing automation tools?

Content marketing automation is the need of the hour. Most modern businesses have realized how useful these automation tools can be for streamlining their content workflows. According to a Forrester blog, spending on content marketing automation tools is expected to reach almost $25.1 billion by 2023.

If you’re still not convinced, here are some reasons why content marketing automation tools can prove to be a valuable investment -

1. Manage any content marketing bottlenecks

The right content marketing automation software can help you manage any weak spots or bottlenecks in your content marketing process. Since these tools are able to automate an entire content process, there are no concerns about any manual errors. Not only that, but the content marketing automation tools also help in speeding up the process significantly.

2. Makes content research faster and easier

Some content marketing automation tools specifically built for content creation can help you speed up the process of content research too. Whether it is finding the right content topic, identifying keywords, or studying the market trends on a topic, a good content automation tool removes all the time-consuming aspects of this process. Using content automation tools for research will not only help in creating content faster, but will also make it easier to organize content in a way that engages more traffic.

3. Cost-Effective

The great thing about content marketing automation tools is that they help you do more with your content without having to recruit any new people to the process. It essentially lets you do more with less, which makes it a cost-effective solution in the long run. Besides helping you cut down the costs of hiring new employees, content marketing automation tools also take care of all the labor-intensive tasks of content marketing. This would give your content teams more time to perform activities that are important for your company’s growth.

4. Improves your business’ bottom line

As we’ve explained in the previous point, content marketing automation tools can help in freeing up the valuable time of the content team. Without these tools to help, your team would have to spend hours on content creation, optimization, publishing/sharing. When all of this is taken care of, your content marketing team has more time to come up with new strategies for lead nurturing. Over time, you’ll be able to see a greater return on investment, and a definite improvement in your company’s bottom line.

How to choose the right content marketing automation tool?

It’s clear that the choices for content marketing automation software are many, but how do you know which tool is the right fit for your operation? Here are some features you should be looking at –

• Adapts to the content marketing process in real time: Content marketing automation tools that don’t adapt to the content processes in real time cannot be trusted when it comes to providing accurate information. When you’re choosing a content marketing automation platform for your business, make sure that it provides real-time updates and on-the-go adjustments. These kinds of content automation tools will help you create truly dynamic content that engages your readers.
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• Easy integration: There is nothing more disappointing that adopting a new tool, only to realize that it can’t integrate with some of your existing systems. Besides the possibility of wasting money and time, such content marketing automation tools can also hamper your team’s productivity. Make sure that the tools you choose is able to integrate with your existing tech stack.
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• Content personalization at scale: When your audience comes looking for content, they want something that is personalized for their needs. In fact, a McKinsey report found that a large majority of consumers (almost 76%) feel frustrated when the businesses and brands they choose don’t offer content personalization. If audience-centric content is a non-negotiable for you, it should be a non-negotiable for your content automation software too. The right content marketing automation platforms will ensure that your content is tailored to the needs of a specific audience segment.
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• Do more with less: This is probably a no-brainer, but it’s always a good idea to choose a content marketing automation tool that supports automation at various points of the content lifecycle. Look for tools that don’t only help you with content research, creation, and optimization but also with publishing, sharing, and more. This means that you can depend on one tool to take care of multiple stages of the content lifecycle.

Wrapping Up  

It's clear that implementing content marketing automation can be beneficial for your content operations in a number of ways. The key lies in choosing a content marketing automation software that's the right fit for your content operation. Hopefully, the tools listed in this article will help you dip your toes in the world of content automation.

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