The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a transformative strategy aimed at streamlining and enhancing the efficiency of marketing efforts. By leveraging advanced tools and technologies, businesses can automate the creation, scheduling, and distribution of marketing content, ensuring a consistent and engaging presence across multiple platforms.

This process involves generating high-quality materials such as articles and social media posts with minimal manual intervention, tailored to fit the unique requirements and preferences of each platform.

Currently, companies like Ardas utilize various tools, including Ahrefs, Content Captain, ChatGPT, and Grammarly, to research topics, generate content, improve text quality, and analyze performance. Despite the benefits, challenges such as maintaining publication frequency and reducing manual workload persist.

This article explores the existing content creation process, identifies key areas for improvement, and investigates potential automation tools to optimize marketing efforts and achieve the desired outcomes efficiently.

What Does Marketing Automation Do?

Marketing automation streamlines and enhances marketing processes by leveraging advanced software tools to automate repetitive tasks and workflows. This technology allows businesses to efficiently manage campaigns, track customer interactions, and personalize communications on a large scale. Key functions of marketing automation include:

• Content Marketing: Content marketing automation streamlines the creation, scheduling, and distribution of content, enhancing efficiency, consistency, and engagement.
• Lead Management: Scoring, nurturing, and segmenting leads to ensure that the right message reaches the right audience at the right time.
• Social Media Automation: Scheduling posts, monitoring engagement, and managing multiple social media accounts from a single platform.
• Analytics and Reporting: Collecting and analyzing data to measure campaign performance, track ROI, and make data-driven decisions.
• Personalization: Tailoring content and messaging to individual customer preferences and behaviors, enhancing customer engagement and loyalty.

Common Content Creation Process

The current marketing automation process at Ardas is designed to deliver consistent and engaging content across various platforms, focusing primarily on the company blog and LinkedIn. The process can be divided into several steps, each critical to maintaining the quality and regularity of publications.

Publications Ideas Research

Ardas leverages Ahrefs to identify trending topics and high-performing keywords used by competitors. This tool aids in choosing the most relevant themes based on user interests, ensuring the content resonates with the target audience. Occasionally, content is derived from upcoming events, company innovations, or unique insights that need to be communicated to customers.

Scheduling

Content is meticulously planned a month in advance using Content Captain. This platform schedules blog posts three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) and LinkedIn posts twice a week (Monday and Friday). This structured scheduling is a cornerstone of the marketing automation systems employed by Ardas, helping maintain a steady flow of content.

Creating Content

Most content is text-based, with images used sparingly. Ardas uses Content Captain's generative AI and ChatGPT to draft articles. While Content Captain offers a straightforward one-click content generation, ChatGPT is preferred for its superior text quality and interactive capabilities. This step is integral to the marketing automation process, allowing for efficient content generation with minimal manual input.

Improving Content

AI-generated content often needs enhancement to include specific facts, product mentions, or event details. This is done through further interaction with ChatGPT or manual edits by the content creator. Tools like Grammarly are then used to check and refine grammar, style, and tone, ensuring the final product meets the company's quality standards.

Adapting for Platforms

The primary content is prepared for the company blog, but it is also adapted for other platforms to avoid SEO issues and cater to different audience preferences. Summaries or shorter versions of the main content are crafted for platforms like LinkedIn, adhering to their specific length and style requirements.

Publishing

Currently, the content creator manually publishes posts on all platforms, followed by thorough checks to ensure accuracy. Content Captain automatically integrates widgets and call-to-actions into the blog, though this sometimes requires manual adjustments to ensure proper placement. Additionally, the content creator registers each publication URL in Google Search Console to expedite indexing.

Gathering Analytics

SEO performance is monitored using Google Search Console, while Content Captain provides analytics on widgets, call-to-actions, and podcast engagement. This data helps refine future content strategies and measure the effectiveness of the current marketing automation systems in place.

By continually refining these steps and integrating advanced marketing automation systems, Ardas aims to streamline its marketing efforts, reduce manual workloads, and achieve a more efficient and effective content creation process.

Best AI Content Creation Tools

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a powerful tool for creating, changing, rephrasing, adapting, checking, and analyzing text content. With each new release, it improves in performing these tasks. However, ChatGPT requires manual prompting, meaning the user must describe the task and the expected result format. While ChatGPT excels at text creation, it lacks integrated features for scheduling, auto-posting, and SEO analytics, necessitating the use of additional apps for these functions.

Content Captain

Content Captain provides a straightforward 1-click AI content generation process based on provided article titles and keywords. It supports a Brand Voice feature to adapt the generated content to the company's tone and style. Although the text quality is generally lower than that produced by ChatGPT, Content Captain's strength lies in its automation features. It automatically embeds widgets and call-to-actions like podcasts, summaries, and promotional videos into blog posts, requiring no manual effort from the content creator. Additionally, it offers basic SEO analytics and scheduling capabilities through a calendar feature.

Jasper AI

Jasper AI is a mature service focused on generating marketing texts. It offers an interactive editor with chat suggestions and AI autocomplete, supporting brand voice customization and SEO-friendly content creation. Jasper can optimize articles with target keywords according to SEO best practices. The tool also provides calendar and Kanban features for scheduling publications and integrates with social networks and automation services like Zapier or Make. However, Jasper's social media content adaptation capabilities require further testing.

Journalist AI

Journalist AI automates article generation and publishing with a focus on blogging. It offers a 0-click generation tool, auto-publishing content to your CMS or custom blog via API according to a predefined schedule. While it lacks an interactive editor, Journalist AI excels in platform integrations and scheduling features. From an SEO perspective, it supports internal and external linking and can automatically register published articles in Google Search Console.

AIContentfy

AIContentfy is designed for SEO-integrated content creation, offering 1-click generation and keyword optimization with tools like Serpstat and Google Search Console. While it does not provide an interactive editor, it helps with publishing articles to CMS and searching for the correct keywords.

HubSpot Content Hub

HubSpot Content Hub combines website building with AI-generated text and images. It supports a Narration feature to convert article text into podcasts and has announced a Remix feature to adapt content for different platforms, though this feature is still under development. HubSpot's primary strength lies in its ability to create structured pages and blog posts using building blocks.

	ChatGPT	Content Captain	Jasper AI	Journalist AI	AIContentfy	HubSpot Content
Publications Themes Brainstorm
Competitors Analysis	➖	➖	➖	➕	➖	➖
SEO Trends Analysis	➖	➖	➖	➖	➕	➖
Keywords suggestion	➖	➖	➖	➕	➕	➖
Publications Plan
Calendar	➖	➕	➕	➖	➖	➖
Kanban Board	➖	➖	➕	➖	➖	➖
Creating Content
AI Generated Content	➕	➕	➕	➕	➕	➕
Target/Personas	➕ (with prompts)	➕	➕	➕	➖	➖
Personalizing Content	➕	➕	➕	➕	➖	➕
Grammar Check	➕ (manually)	➖	➕	➖	➖	➖
External Editors Integration	➖	➖	➕	➖	➖	➖
Enrich Content
Image Generation	➕ (manually)	➕	➕	➕	➕	➕
Summary	➕ (manually)	➕	➕	➕	➕	➖
Podcasts	➖	➕	➖	➖	➖	➕
CTA/Widgets	➖	➕	➖	➖	➖	➖
Internal Links	➖	➖	➖	➕	➕	➖
External Links	➖	➖	➖	➕	➕	➖

Sum Up

Marketing automation is a powerful strategy that can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts. By automating repetitive tasks and leveraging advanced tools, businesses can maintain a consistent and engaging presence across multiple platforms.

However, to fully realize the benefits of marketing automation, companies must address challenges related to content quality, tool integration, and workflow optimization.

As technology continues to evolve, the future of marketing automation looks bright, with AI and machine learning leading the way. By staying ahead of emerging trends and continuously refining their automation processes, businesses can achieve their marketing goals more efficiently and effectively, ultimately driving growth and success in an increasingly competitive landscape.