As a content marketer, you’re invested in storytelling and imagination, so the rise of automated tools and AI might feel daunting. You want to keep the soul of your work intact. At the same time, there are only so many hours in a day. You know time spent on repetitive tasks is time lost to more meaningful creative work. This is where content automation becomes your ally.
In this guide, you’ll learn what content automation means, how to automate parts of your content creation process, which automation tools deliver results, and best practices for getting started.
What is content automation?
Content automation is the use of technology to optimize your entire content marketing workflow—from generating content ideas to summarizing performance insights—by handling repetitive, time-consuming tasks. While automation tools reduce the need for manual work in the content creation process, they don’t necessarily replace human workers. Instead, these tools can reduce the time spent on menial, time-consuming tasks, so your team can focus on strategy and creative work.
Ways to automate content
- Keyword research and clustering
- Content generation
- Content editing
- Visual content creation
- Content distribution
- Tracking and analytics
There are several ways to make your content work on your behalf. Here’s how to automate and optimize your content:
Keyword research and clustering
Keyword research is how you identify the terms your target audience uses when searching for your products or services online. It’s an important step in content strategy, as it helps you generate content ideasbased on your audience’s interests.
Keyword clustering includes grouping keywords into themes (or “clusters”) based on search intent or semantic relevance, so a single piece of content can rank for multiple terms—rather than optimizing one piece of content for one keyword. Clustering can improve your topical authority in search engine algorithms, which control where your content appears on results pages.
Manually sorting through endless keyword lists, analyzing search volumes, and testing semantic similarity eats up hours that could go toward strategy. Today, AI-powered SEO tools like Semrush can automate much of the manual work in the search engine optimization process: analyzing competitors, identifying high-volume keywords, suggesting clusters, drafting briefs, and tracking performance.
Content generation
Generating content is one of the most transformative and recent forms of automation. Instead of spending hours staring at a blank page or searching for relevant images, you can use AI-powered content generation tools to produce written and visual assets in seconds. These tools can speed up and expand your production—whether it’s overcoming writer’s block by generating content ideas or repurposing existing content across platforms.
Content generation tools produce content by analyzing input text and predicting the most relevant phrases, based on patterns learned from vast amounts of data. Take ChatGPT, a popular, user-friendly content generation tool with free and paid versions. Give ChatGPT simple prompts to brainstorm ideas or write and refine outlines, blog posts, or website copy. While automation tools like this are impressive, they’re most effective when paired with a human who can review content for accuracy, brand voice, and strategic alignment.
Content editing
Content editing involves assessing and improving content quality, such as proofreading for grammar mistakes, improving clarity, or brand voice and tone alignment. Content editing can also mean enhancing or altering visual content, like editing a photo or graphic’s colors, size, or composition.
For example, Grammarly is an AI writing assistant designed to improve and polish everyday writing. With free, pro, and enterprise options, the tool offers seamless integration with mobile keyboards, web browsers, and more than 50,000 apps.
Visual content creation
Image generators are automation tools that create visual assets without the need for technical skills or additional software. Don’t have graphic design skills yourself? No problem. You can operate these generators with text prompts alone. As long as you can describe what you’re looking for, you’ll get a decent first draft to work from. After that, you can continue using text prompts to tweak the initial design—the same way you would for a human designer on your team.
You might use one to create a new logo, product image, or hero banner for your website to announce an upcoming sale. Image generators are also useful for editingexisting content—such as swapping out a product image background to show it in various settings (e.g., someone’s home).
Shopify Magic—a set of AI tools within the Shopify platform that includes image generation—can create or edit assets in seconds and export them directly to your store for free. The tool can generate visuals in multiple formats up to a maximum resolution of one megapixel (MP).
Content distribution
Content distribution is promoting and sharing existing content across various channels, including owned (like your website or email lists), paid (like ads or sponsored content), and earned media (such as press coverage or social media shares). Content quality means nothing without visibility—if your audience can’t find it, your effort goes unrewarded.
Automation tools can streamline distribution by reducing manual work, expanding reach, and improving targeting accuracy—which means higher click-through rates and better return on investment (ROI) on your content investments.
Content distribution tools can handle tasks like:
- Channel selection, by suggesting the most relevant platforms for distributing your brand’s content
- Audience targeting, by using algorithms to serve personalized content to specific users, based on their behaviors, interests, and demographics
- A/B testing, by simultaneously generating multiple formats, headlines, and calls-to-action on different channels to determine top performers
- Budget allocation, by dynamically shifting spend to the highest performing channels or users
- Campaign management, by letting you launch, track, and report on campaigns across various channels from a single platform
Tools like Nativo automate distribution across a vast network of premium publishers, with custom formats that look and feel like integrated content rather than disruptive ads. According to Nativo, this provides a better experience to users, which has led to a 50% higher click-through rate than traditional display ads.
Tracking and analytics
Your team probably spends hours every week switching between different platforms to compile performance reports. That’s time that could go toward content strategy instead.
Content analytics track performance data—such as views or conversions—to identify trends, impact, and opportunities. When you understand how your content stacks up against marketing goals, you can use the insights to evolve your content strategy by identifying which formats, topics, and distribution channels deliver the best results.
From there, you can double down on high-performing content, refine underperforming pieces, and adjust your messaging to better align with audience behavior.
Content analytics automation tools help turn raw data into actionable insights faster than sifting through rows of data in spreadsheets or switching between platforms to design comprehensive performance reports. Tools like Reporting Ninja can automate your entire content data workflow, integrating with all major content marketingplatforms, pulling real-time metrics into custom dashboards, and creating tailored reports.
Best practices for content automation
- Define your goals
- Identify areas ripe for automation
- Choose the right tools
- Train your team
- Optimize your workflow
Just because you can automate a task in your content marketing workflow doesn’t mean you should. Most businesses start small—testing and adopting new technologies one at a time. Here are five best practices as you explore how and where content automation makes the most sense for your business:
Define your goals
Before investing in any tools, develop clear goals for your content automation initiatives. Every goal should ladder up to your larger business and marketing objectives to help guide your decisions and measure success.
For example, if your company is launching a new product line, you might need support developing personalized content for specific target audiences. Once you know what and who you’re after, it becomes easier to see what you can automate and what you’ll need additional help with to achieve conversions.
Identify areas ripe for automation
Start by identifying the most error-prone or time-consuming tasks on your plate—especially ones that reduce bandwidth for more valuable or fulfilling creative work. Invoicing, scheduling, customer follow-ups, and various HR processes are all easy ones to start with, but you can also use generative AI to help you with crafting marketing campaigns overall.
Launching your automation efforts in these high-impact areas can give your team time to adjust, experiment, and build confidence, enabling you to gain internal buy-in around content automation, while also demonstrating value to executives faster.
Choose the right tools
Research different platforms and tools available to compare features, costs, and compatibility with your existing system. If you see content automation as a long-term investment, consider how certain tools or platforms can scale with your business over time.
Let’s say you’re focused on increasing the SEO content volume on your blog. You might invest in the paid version of a content generation tool like ChatGPT to draft articles based on your research and briefs, which your team then edits and publishes. Alternatively, you could invest in a platform like SEOBoost, which offers a suite of automation features, including research, generation, editing, auditing, and performance.
Train your team
Comprehensive training is a key part of incorporating automation toolsinto your operations. After all, these tools will only be effective if your team feels confident using them. In addition, training can address potential fears or hesitations about content automation by clarifying how tools are designed to assist employees with their work—rather than replace them.
Offer hands-on experiences, such as trials, shadowing, or test runs, so employees understand how to get started, troubleshoot issues, and incorporate new technology into their existing creative work processes. Pair this with clear success metrics to measure both tool performance and user proficiency. Track the content volume against production time to understand your return on investment.
Make sure your team keeps you in the loop about how the new tools are working for them. Cultivate feedback loops that allow your team members to share questions, suggestions, and challenges to improve training and content automation implementation.
Optimize your workflow
As you scale your content automationprocess, you may find your team relies on multiple tools throughout the content life cycle—from content production to content publication. While each tool can be a time-saver on its own, switching between different platforms to do repetitive tasks like tracking data, copying and pasting content, and generating reports can quickly eat into those saved hours.
Centralize tasks by picking tools that integrate with each other or investing in workflow optimization software—like Make Grid or Trello—so there’s lesstime spent switching between tabs and more time focused on high-value tasks like content strategy.
For example, Make Grid is a tool that gives you a visual map of your entire automation landscape, so you can get a holistic view of your team’s content tools, workflows, and performance. With real-time insight into the connections between tools, you can simplify processes, catch errors faster, and improve collaboration.
Content automation FAQ
What is an example of content automation?
AI tools like Shopify Magic and ChatGPT use natural language processing (NLP) and data analysis to generate human-like text and visuals in seconds—from website copy and blog posts to product images and logos.
Does content automation work?
Yes, content automation works in many ways, depending on your business objectives. Automated tools can help you scale the volume, scope, and reach of your marketing campaigns—from generating content ideas to summarizing insights about content performance. That said, automating your entire content workflow isn’t always ideal. Focus on high-impact areas—like time-consuming or error-prone tasks—and use tools that can grow with your business.
Does AI-generated content work for SEO?
Yes. You can generate search-engine optimized content with AI-powered tools. Remember, AI tools have limited knowledge and can make errors. Many marketers review output first to ensure accuracy, quality, and brand voice.
