Writing and scheduling blog posts, sending emails, creating landing pages, tracking conversions… Yes, it seems like there are plenty of jobs in your hands – and you’re right. Marketing activities require a lot of manual work, dedication, analyzing, and doing it all over again.
Also, many tasks and aspects can be automated, so you can deal better with the creative job and surely enjoy the process. That’s why every content marketing strategy is a combination of creativity, analysis, automation, and repetition. Surely, you can’t automate content creation completely (for now), but you can surely schedule your blogs and social media posts, automate email newsletters and outreach, and track the website’s performance using appropriate tools.
Content marketing automation can help businesses save time and resources and produce more consistent and effective content marketing campaigns.
So, let’s see how it’s done.
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Content Marketing Automation Benefits for B2B SaaS
Running and tracking a content marketing strategy is not an easy thing to handle. From SaaS content distribution to automated email marketing for SaaS, things can get pretty boring and repetitive.
No matter how big your content team is, it’s better to focus on the creative and strategic approach and leave the boring tasks to the automation tools.
As a result, you’ll experience the following benefits:
Saving Time and Resources
Content marketing automation tools will help you save time and resources by automating repetitive tasks. That way, your staff will have more time to focus on strategic aspects, such as content creation, audience segmentation, and targeting prospects through various content distribution channels.
Consistent Performance
When automating the boring and repetitive tasks that take plenty of time to be done, you can be more consistent in publishing and distributing the content. Imagine dealing with manual email sending or time-consuming data analysis. Even though emails and data are part of content marketing, they’re complex and may take even days to be done.
If you automate these tasks, you can easily focus on campaigns, performance, and the need for adjustments. As a result, you and your team are more productive and efficient and bring targeted traffic to your website and other content channels.
Personalize the Content
While the automated tasks are running in the background, you can focus on getting to know the target audience better. What are their habits? How do they behave on the internet? What are their expectations? Do they have any specific worries your SaaS product resolves? Or maybe they’re looking for a solution that matches your product description.
Use the gathered data and analyze all these aspects. That way, you have more time to test various personalized approaches and target the audience accordingly.
Measure and Improve the Results
Content marketing automation can also help you analyze the metrics and discover patterns that help you improve the campaign results. For example, you can use the website traffic, generated leads, conversions, and sales as benchmarks to measure the campaign’s success later.
Content Marketing Automation Strategies for B2B SaaS
In this section, we’ll explain how content marketing strategies work and what parts you can automate based on that. Also, we’ll share some of the best content marketing automation practices you can embrace.
Create Content Relevant to Your Target Audience
The first step in every content marketing campaign is to determine what content formats work best for your target audience. While you can automate the data collection and analysis, the strategic approach is a creative process that requires attention and efficiency.
So, at this stage, the goal is to spot their pain points and decide how you’ll target them in your content.
Use Buyer Personas
The data analysis will help you collect information on where your target audience lives, their age, habits, and behaviors. Additionally, you can draft a general psychological profile and build a buyer persona around it.
Buyer personas are a fictional representation of your ideal customers. You can surely create more than one buyer persona and build your content strategy around them.
For example, you sell a SaaS tool to manage team efficiency. The ideal buyer would be a company that needs a solution. But you can’t really approximate the company with a persona. Instead, analyze the different roles within that company that may influence the decision to buy the product. Give them a name, a place to live, a job, and a psychological profile, and go on with your content targeting.
Segment Your Audience
Based on the criteria, you can semi-automate this aspect. For example, if you target a specific location and age, you need to use their language and cultural preferences to deliver your message.
There are many ways to segment the audience, but based on analytics, you can split them into several groups, including unaware, problem-aware, product-aware, solution-aware, and purchase-ready. So you get a precise idea of what content works best for them and how to deliver it.
Create Automated Workflows
Automated workflows help you be more efficient. For example, you can create a bunch of blog posts and then schedule the publishing. Next, create content for social media and use scheduling tools to cover a few weeks or even months in advance.
If you need to send a chain of emails, surely you won’t do that manually. Create contact lists and schedule the messages to be sent.
Track Your Results
By using Google Search Console, Google Analytics, or various marketing tools, you can set metrics and KPIs to track and check on the results accomplished with the particular content marketing campaign.
Based on that, you can make an informed decision for re-launching the campaign, stopping it earlier, extending the time, or re-targeting the audience.
Content Marketing Automation Tools for B2B SaaS
The current market is overwhelmed by various automation tools. Some of them are free but limited, while others offer plenty of features but at a high cost.
Depending on your SaaS company’s budget, specific needs, goals, and capacities, you can choose from a wide array of tools available to marketers:
- HubSpot Marketing Hub: Comprehensive suite of content marketing automation tools that includes features such as blog publishing, social media management, email marketing, and lead nurturing.
- Marketo: A marketing automation platform that offers a wide range of features, including lead scoring, campaign automation, and persona-based marketing.
- Pardot: A powerful automation B2B platform offering features like lead generation, nurturing, and advanced targeting.
- Buffer: A social media management platform to schedule and publish posts to multiple social media from a single dashboard. It also offers analytics tools to help users track the performance of their social media campaigns.
- Keap: A CRM and marketing automation platform that helps businesses manage their sales pipeline, send automated emails, and track customer interactions.
How to Choose a Content Marketing Automation Tool
You don’t need all the tools we suggested. That’s why you have to analyze what exactly you need and what you expect from a content marketing automation tool.
Also, you can consider the features your SaaS company really needs (not only the fancy ones). Then, decide how many people will be using the tool since most pricing options depend on that. And finally, determine the amount you can spend on this investment, as some tools can range in price from free to thousands of dollars per month.
It’s good to check a few of them by signing up for a trial and see if it fits your workflow. Don’t forget to read reviews and compare different tools before making the final decision.
Content Marketing Automation Final Words
Automating repetitive and boring tasks is the best thing you can do for your business. Avoid burnout and people getting too overwhelmed with manual work by embracing the automation tool or tools of your choice.
B2B SaaS means you provide services to businesses and, eventually, people to save time, be more efficient and productive, and manage time better. So, why not do the same for you, especially when it comes to content marketing tasks that can be exhausting if not automated?
