No, content creation cannot be 100% automated. You’re talking to humans, not feeding robots algorithms and scripts.

I absolutely love automation. It has helped me save so much time that as a marketer, I could think about activating other channels for a company. In fact, as a marketing agency owner, it has helped us manage multiple products at the same time!

It’s pretty impressive if you think about what all marketing automation can help you achieve. Here are some of the processes it has definitely streamlined for us over time:

• Embedding smart lead generation forms on landing page and keeping track of all the data that comes through them
• Scheduling social media posts for days using social aggregators (you have no clue how relieving this is)
• Segmenting email lists and tailoring messaging to promote content through multiple campaigns at the same time
• Using automated email workflows for lead nurturing and customer engagement (think how long it’d otherwise take to manually follow up every lead that came to you)
• Leveraging behaviour analytics tools to look into how your audience is really engaging with your content
• And so much more!

While these automations sure have helped us all improve the effectiveness of content marketing, no doubt, there is only so much it can do. I’m not questioning the capabilities of marketing automation. Here me out!

You get one of those automation tools that promise to make content creation easy. What they essentially do is pull out content from different articles related to the topic you want to be writing on, put it all together and give you a publish-ready piece. Tell me, what do you feel is going wrong here?

One, this piece of content has absolutely ZERO of your personality – whatever happened to write like you speak?

Two, you’re going to end up creating something so impersonal that your audience is never going to resonate with it.

Three, you’re going to end up paying for a tool that is going to fetch you no results and get you to start blaming content marketing for not working!

The one thing – the most important thing, if I may say – in content marketing that you SHOULD NOT AUTOMATE is content creation.

You can use automation tools to streamline the process of content creation by using tools that help you aggregate data, create engaging charts in minutes and more. But when it comes to writing it out, it needs to be you. Scraping does not work!

If I had just scraped all these myths about content marketing from the net, you’d probably be huh-huh-ing on the first page and questioning by authenticity.

Making content marketing work is time consuming, yes. It is going to take up some of your resources, yes. But when you start using this tactic, it is important that you either dedicate the time required to create content that your audience wants to read, yourself or you hire a creative professional to do the task for you.

There is no shame in reaching out for help and definitely no shame at all in outsourcing!

(PS. As we speak, I do have a little team of my own that works closely with startups to help them navigate through this tedious content marketing process. If you’re interested in getting our help, simply hit us up on contensifyhq.com)

On the other hand, if your content marketing strategy includes content curation, I’d say go all out and automate it. It will get back so much more time to do other things!

Here’s what I usually go about recommending people – something that one of my friends has taught me – Automate things that are mundane and repetitive.

There is no need to spend hours doing something when you could use that time to create something authentic for another campaign. (It’s called time management, Karen!)