Time is a precious commodity for any content team. This is especially true for lean teams. Boosting productivity is essential for success, and you probably already use some type of technology to help you do that.
But are you leveraging content automation? Or maybe you’re still wondering if content automation would really save your team time?
Content automation, when executed well, can be a huge time saver. There are many benefits of content automation, but saving time is usually hailed as the greatest one. And content marketers agree, with a survey reporting that it’s the biggest benefit by far with 74% saying such.
But how exactly does content automation save you time? What can you expect from a content marketing platform that features content automation? Let’s explore the opportunities.
Planning with Content Calendars: Automate Key Areas to Reduce Time Spent on Operations
Content calendars are vital to keeping your team and production schedules organized. Having a content calendar, in itself, is a time saver. Why? Because it’s the central hub for all your content efforts and can be accessible to anyone all the time.
The constant back-and-forth conversations about what content is in the works can be eliminated. Everybody can clearly see the upcoming campaigns and asset deadlines.
With calendars created and being utilized, you can automate notifications about project status, deadline changes and employ other time-saving functionality like dragging and dropping to update production schedules. No longer will your team have to manually format or update a calendar kept on a spreadsheet.
You’ll be organized, transparent, and up to date with a dynamic content calendar. Plus, your content calendar can help you avoid missing deadlines.
Production Workflows Automation: Reduce Manual Activities, Get Back Time
By utilizing a platform with content marketing workflow features, you can significantly reduce manual activities by your team.
A content workflow is a list of all the tasks required to take a content piece from ideation to publication. These tasks are typically well defined and include who is responsible for them. For content workflows to save your organization time, they need to be repeatable and scalable. They will vary based on factors like the type of content and who is involved.
By creating a content workflow template, you can easily reuse it for similar projects. You could automate:
- Generating tasks
- Assigning tasks to team members
- Calculating your entire production schedule
These content workflows could revolutionize the time spent on projects, giving your staff more time to focus on strategy, content planning and creation.
Automating Notifications and Reminders: Communication Time Savers
Communication and collaboration are key to content marketing workflows. You’ll often have multiple people working on content from writers to editors to designers. How much time do you think is wasted every day because of inefficient communication between them?
Probably more than you’d like. If your team relies on email to communicate updates and changes, those notifications are more of a distraction than a help. Worse, they often take time to compose.
Instead, your content team could use a content calendar that enables automated notifications. These notifications are automatically generated for everyone who needs to see them.
With this functionality, your team won’t be bombarded by emails that go on and on and maybe even forget someone critical to the project. The notifications will be right there on their dashboard, so they can review them all in the same place and take any needed actions.
Automated Social Media Publishing Can Save You Hours Every Week
Having the ability to automate social media publishing can give your team back valuable time that can be invested in producing more content or engaging with users on social. Not every post should be automated, as there will be real-time occurrences that require on-demand posting.
Your content marketing software should provide you with the right functionality to make social media publishing easy and simple. This ensures your content gets the most exposure.
By automating your social media efforts, it’s estimated you’ll save more than 6 hours per week. Think of what your team could do with all that time back!
As an aside, don’t over automate. You should have a content strategy in place that dictates how much you’ll post on profiles and what type of posts—promotional, educational, or third-party.
Blog Publishing Automation Saves Time, Too
Along with automating your social media posts, you can also automate the publishing of your blog posts through your content marketing software. Most software products, like DivvyHQ, integrate with WordPress. WordPress still remains one of the most frequently used content management systems.
This integration enables content creators seamlessly transition blog content, images and metadata, then schedule posts to be published based on your content calendar.
This means your team can load up multiple blog posts for the month and simply set them to publish. No more back and forth or waiting until the last minute. This functionality can save your team considerable time by not having to copy/paste or import content between platforms, and publish manually.
Automate Email Campaigns: Keep Buyers Engaged without the Time Investment
Based on different criteria, you can automate email campaigns to your buyers to keep them engaged. There are many opportunities for email automation, including:
- Autoresponders when a new prospect completes a form or downloads a piece of content
- New blog posts: set-up emails to be sent automatically to those who’ve subscribed to your blog
- Nurture campaigns: depending on a prospect’s actions, like if they open an email or not, you can automate a nurture campaign to keep them interested
Setting up these types of emails could provide your team with much needed time back that they can then spend on evaluating your email successes to improve future efforts.
Automated Reporting: Dynamic Data All in One Spot
Imagine having all your content analytics in one location. If all stakeholders could log into one system to see content analytics, you’ll no longer have to worry about all the time it takes to aggregate data from multiple sources.
DivvyHQ, in particular, provides preconfigured dashboards for each content channel, including web, social, email, and SEO. You’ll have access to real-time data and can pull on-demand reports that can then be shared by stakeholders that have an interest in understanding your content marketing efforts.
If this is an area your team struggles with having enough time to cover, then automation is the answer for saving time.
Ready to learn more about how to use content automation to save your team time? Try out the many automated features available on the DivvyHQ platform today!