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Everybody wants smoother workflows and fewer manual tasks. And thanks to AI models, automation is at the center of conversations in marketing departments across all industries.

But most rarely get the results they’re looking for.

According to Ascend2’s State of Marketing Automation Report, only 28% of marketers say their automation “very successfully” supports their objectives.

While 69% felt it was only somewhat successful.

While this specific stat is from 2024, I imagine the broad idea is still true. Especially since there are so many more automation options and tools. It can get overwhelming to decide a go-forward plan and implement effectively.

So if you feel stuck in the camp of “not bad, but not great” marketing automation, you’re not alone.

The good news?

Once you understand the core building blocks, you can turn messy, half-automated systems into workflows that actually move the needle.

A good marketing automation usually involves four basic steps:

• A trigger: A catalyst event that starts the automation
• An action: One or more steps that happen in sequence after the trigger
• An output: The end result
• A loop or exit point: A new trigger, or an event that stops the automation

In this article, we’re going to discuss how to use these steps to automate:

• The mechanics of content creation (and no, we won’t just be telling you to “write it with AI”)
• Beyond the basics of email nurtures
• Your PR strategy
• Social media engagement

Automate the Mechanics of Content Creation

Content marketers are creative people. We don’t want to automate away the creative work that drives results.

That said, we can automate marketing workflows that come before and after creating. (So we can spend more time on high-impact work.)

Here are some simple ways to get started.

1. Basic Brief Builder

Tools required:

• Make (free for 1,000 credits per month, paid plans start at $9/month)
• Your favorite keyword research tool (plans vary)
• Project management platform (tools like Asana offer a free plan)
• Google Sheets, Google Docs (free plan available)

Every week, content marketers around the world spend hours researching keywords, pulling search data, creating new briefs, and adding tasks to their project management systems.

What if you could do most of that with one automation?

Here are the basics of how this works:

• Trigger: A new row is added to a Google Sheet (your new keyword)
• Action: That keyword is run through your SEO tool, which pulls keyword difficulty, search volume, related terms, and top organic results
• Output: A new Google Doc with the data inside, and a new task in your project management tool

In the end, the automation will look like this:

And if this seems scary, don’t worry: I’m going to walk you through each step to create this with Make. (Or, you can go ahead and copy this Scenario into your own Make account here.)

First, you’ll need a Google Sheet for your source.

Start with columns for your new keyword, status, brief URL, and task URL. To get started faster, copy this template here.

Next, add Google Sheets as the trigger step, and select “Watch New Rows.”

After that, select the Google Sheet you want to watch.

This runs the automation every time you add a new keyword to that sheet.

Now, it’s time to gather information from your SEO tool. For this example, we’re going to use Semrush. (You could also use an API like DataForSEO.)

Our first Semrush module will be “Get Keyword Overview.” (You might see different options depending on the specific tool you use.)

You can choose whether to see the keyword data in all regional databases, or just one region.

In this task, you’ll map the “Phrase” to the “Keyword” column from your Google Sheet. Then, choose what you want to get as an output. (In this case, I only want to see the search volume.)

Now, let’s create another Semrush model to “Get Related Keywords” to gather relevant keywords from Semrush.

Again, you’ll map the “Phrase” to the keyword column from our Google Sheet, and choose what data you want to export. (I chose the keyword and search volume.)

You can also decide:

• How the results are sorted
• Whether to add filters
• How many results to retrieve

Now, you’ll need to add a text aggregator into your workflow. This tool compiles the results from Semrush so we can use them in a Google Doc later on.

Here, simply map the source (our Semrush module).

Then, in the “Text” field, map the data as you want it to appear.

Next, we’ll create a Semrush module that runs “Get Keyword Difficulty.”

Again, we’ll map the “Phrase” to our keyword from the Google Sheet, and choose to export the “Keyword Difficulty Index.”

Next, run the “Get Organic Results” module from Semrush to export the sites that are ranking for your new target keyword.

Select the “Export Columns,” or the data that you want to see, and limit the number of results you get (we chose 10).

Since we’re getting multiple results, this module will also need a text aggregator to transform those results into plain text for our Google Doc.

We’ll set it up exactly the same way, but this time map the “Get Organic Results” module.

In the “Text” field, I’ve added “Bundle order position” (where that result is ranking in the SERP), and the URL of the ranking page.

Now, for the fun part.

It’s time to build your basic content brief in a Google doc.

Before you add this into Make, you’ll need to create a Google Doc as a template. This template should have variables that can be mapped to the results you get in your automation.

To show up as variables, you’ll need to wrap them in curly brackets. So, your template will look something like this:

• Primary Keyword = {{keyword}}
• Keyword Difficulty = {{difficulty}}
• Related Keywords = {{related_keyword}}
• Competing URLs = {{organic_result}}

(Want to save some time? Copy this template here.)

Now, you’ll create a new module in your Make scenario to “Create a Document from a Template.”

Once you connect the Google Doc template you created, you’ll see all of the variables you added in curly brackets as fields in the configuration page.

Now, all you have to do is map those variables to the results you’ve gotten from Semrush and your text aggregators.

Now it’s time to add this new brief into your project management tool. Make lets you connect several tools, including Asana, Trello, Monday, and Notion.

In this scenario, I already have an Asana project for content production.

So I choose the “Create a Task or a Subtask” module for Asana, and map that existing project.

I can also add project custom fields (like a link to the brief in Google Docs), choose the task name (like the keyword), and automatically assign it to someone on my team.

Lastly, I want to go back and update my original Google Sheet so that I can see which keywords have already been run, and where their briefs and tasks live.

So, I add Google Sheets again as the final step in the automation and connect the same spreadsheet that we had at the beginning. Under “Values,” I can map the brief URL from Google Docs and the new task URL from Asana to columns in my spreadsheet.

I also set this so the “Status” column is updated to “Done.”

Now, let’s run this scenario and see what happens.

First, I add a new keyword to my Google Sheet.

This triggers the automation to run.

The first thing that’s produced is a brand new Google Doc with all of the SEO data from Semrush. You’ll see this new doc appear in your Drive, and you’ll find the link in Asana.

Next, I’ll see a new task appear in my Asana project (with the brief link included).

And finally, the Google sheet will be updated to show us that the task has been completed.

Plus, it adds in the links to the new brief in Google Docs and the new task in Asana.

And there you go: you now have a basic content brief builder automation.

Are these complete briefs? No. But the information provides a great start, gives the writer SERP context, and frees up more time to fill out other important content brief elements.

 

2. Content Workflow

Tools required: Your favorite project management tool (paid or free options available)

Project management tools are great for organizing your content workflow.

But the more tasks you create over time, the harder it is to keep track of and manage those systems.

Many project management platforms give you built-in automation tools to help things run more smoothly. Let’s talk about automations that can help your content workflow specifically.

Triggers might include:

• A new task is added to a project
• A custom field changes
• A new assignee is added
• A subtask is completed
• Due date is changed (or coming up soon)
• A task is overdue

And actions could be:

• Add to a new project
• Auto-assign to a team member
• Update a status
• Move task to a new section
• Create a subtask
• Add a comment

For this example, we’re going to use the Rules system in Asana, but the same basic principles apply to almost any major project management tool.

To start, click the “Customize” button in the upper-right corner of your content management project, and create some custom fields.

Especially important here is the “Status” field. The options here should follow the steps in your content process, and will probably mirror the sections in your Project.

Once your “Sections” and “Fields” are set up, you can create some rules.

These can help dictate what happens when a new brief enters your content workflow and assign it to whoever is in charge of moving it forward in the process.

Use a Rule to auto-assign someone on your team (for example, your content manager or editor) to the task.

Now, let’s say a new article is now in progress with a writer.

Create a rule that moves the task to the corresponding section of your project when the status is set to “Writing.”

If your content tasks have subtasks (like “create outline,” “write article,” “edit,” or “design”), you can track completion and use that to move pieces forward.

In this case, you can set a rule that once all subtasks are complete, the task moves to the “Ready to Publish” section.

Once the task moves to that section, set a rule to auto-assign it to the team member who publishes posts.

Then, when the status is set to “Published,” the task could be moved into a separate project where completed tasks of published content are stored.

This allows you to clear the tasks from your main production workflow, but still keep them on hand in case the piece needs to be updated in the future.

What if a piece of content isn’t completed by its deadline?

Set up an automation that checks in with the team to see what the status is.

There are plenty of other automations you can run in Asana or other tools.

But these basic workflow automations will help your content production process have better handoffs and less friction.

We do this at Backlinko using Monday.com as our project management tool.

Read more about how we scale content creation here.

Go Beyond Basic Email Nurtures

Email nurtures are relatively easy to put together in any basic email tool: for example, sending a welcome email to a new newsletter subscriber, or a transactional email to a new customer.

But let’s talk about some ways to take those automations even further.

Email marketing automation involves:

• A trigger: Such as someone signing up for an email list
• An action: The new contact is added to a list or segment
• An output: They new receive a series of pre-made emails
• An exit condition: The sequence finishes once all the emails are sent, or once the contact takes a specific action, like buying a product

Exit conditions are especially important, because you don’t want people to receive another email from you after they’ve already completed an action. (Hello, promo email that arrives after I already made a purchase.)

Let’s walk through how to use marketing automation tools for email.

3. Behavior-Based Nurtures and Follow-Ups

Tools required: ActiveCampaign (paid plans start at $15/month, although other email platforms offer automation capabilities too)

When you trigger an email sequence based on real behavior, you’re catching people in the moment when they’re more likely to engage.

For example, if you want to help a new user get to know your platform, you can trigger onboarding emails based on the actions they’ve taken so far.

Or, if you want to reduce cart abandonment, you can send a special promotion for customers who have items in their cart.

This improved targeting can lead to better engagement from your email list.

All you have to do is match the right trigger to the right action. For example:

Your exit condition could be when the person:

• Completes their purchase
• Books a call
• Starts a free trial
• Replies to your email

For example, let’s say you want to send a series of emails reminding someone that their subscription is reaching its end date. It could look something like this:

• Trigger: End date is within 20 days from now
• Action: Send series of three emails up to the last day of their subscription (we don’t want to send too many)
• Exit condition: Customer responds to the email, or renews their subscription

Here’s a great example for home insurance renewal:

​​Or, let’s say a new lead just signed up for a free trial or freemium account.

You could create a workflow that pulls information from the onboarding survey in your tool, and builds a personalized, 1:1 email sequence.

Check out this example from HubSpot:

When I signed up for the account, I identified myself as a self-employed marketer. HubSpot pulled that information into this new trial campaign to make the email even more personalized.

So the question is: how do you get started?

Here’s a quick overview of how you could build a behavior-based email nurture automation in ActiveCampaign.

Let’s say you want to send an email sequence to a known contact who visited a certain page on your website. For example, imagine someone who subscribes to your email newsletter, but isn’t a customer, just visited your pricing page. (In other words, they may be close to signing up — they just aren’t quite convinced yet.)

Before you start this automation, you’ll need to enable Site Tracking on your account in ActiveCampaign. To do this, install the tracking code on your website so ActiveCampaign can see page views.

To start the automation, you’ll add new contacts who enter through any pipeline.

Now, when a known contact (someone who’s already in your database) visits a tracked page, ActiveCampaign associates that page view with the contact’s record, and can start an automation.

The real trigger is the next step: “Wait until conditions are met.”

In this case, the condition is that the contact has visited an exact URL on your website.

Next, set a waiting period from the time the person sees the page to when the email is sent.

And finally, write your email and add it to the workflow.

After that, you could:

• Wait a certain amount of time, then send another email
• Set an exit condition if the contact replies or makes a purchase

All of this effort turns into an email like this one that I received from Brooks after visiting one of their product pages:

This makes me way more likely to revisit the shoes I was looking at than a generic reminder email (or no email at all).

4. Webinar Lifecycle Automation

Tools required:

• Demio (plans start at $45/month)
• HubSpot (limited free plan available)

Webinars are an entire customer journey, including promotion, confirmation, reminders, and post-event follow-ups.

The trigger is normally one event: Someone signed up for your webinar.

The actions include:

• Confirmation email
• Day before and day-of reminders
• “Happening now” email
• Post-event replay email

For example, here’s a great reminder email from Kiwi Wealth:

Immediately after the webinar is finished, you might send an email like this one from Beefree:

And you’ll also want to follow up later with a replay and some action items for people who attended, like this:

So, how do you create this automation?

Most great webinar tools allow you to do this. Demio, for example, allows you to automate marketing emails when you create a new event:

​​

If you want to get really fancy, you can segment your post-webinar follow-up emails by whether or not the contact attended the webinar:

Demio’s built-in email is somewhat limited beyond an actual event.

So, you can connect it to HubSpot to add a new layer of segmentation to your lists.

Once this connection is live, Demio will import webinar attendance data into HubSpot.

For example, you can import data like:

• Contacts who registered for the webinar
• People who registered, but missed the event
• People who attended the event
• How long a contact stayed in the webinar
• People who watched the replay

You can even add new contacts to lists directly in Hubspot if they don’t exist there already.

This automation will help your pre- and post-webinar flows run more smoothly. And hopefully get you more valuable engagement with those webinars.

Grow Your PR Strategy

For small marketing teams, PR outreach can use up a lot of valuable time.

Here are some easy automations to keep doing inbound and outbound PR requests, without spending your entire week on it.

5. PR Radar

Tools required:

• BrandMentions (paid plans start at $79/month)
• Zapier (free for 100 tasks/month, paid plans start at $19.99/month)
• Google Sheets (free option available)

Want to keep an eye on new articles that are related to your brand that you could potentially get featured in or a backlink from? Let’s build an automatic PR radar.

This workflow looks like:

• Trigger: A new article mentions your brand or related topics
• Action: Pull all new mentions into one place to scan through them easily
• Output: A simple, regularly-updated list of PR mentions

There are several tools that do this, but for this example, we’re going to use BrandMentions.

Once you set up your account and your project, head into settings to adjust which sources you’ll collect data from.

Remove social media, and just leave the web option. That way, you’ll get a clean list of articles and webpages that mention your brand or the keywords you added.

Once this is set up, you can connect your BrandMentions project to Zapier.

This will trigger the automation to start when any new mentions are added.

You can choose whatever output works best for you: whether that’s a Slack message, a new row in Airtable, or an addition to an ongoing Google Sheet.

For this example, I chose Google Sheets as my output. All I had to do was tie the data pulled from BrandMentions to the right columns in my spreadsheet.

Once that’s done, the automation adds new articles like this automatically into my spreadsheet:

6. Media Request Matchmaker

Tools required:

• RSS.app (free plan available)
• Zapier (free for 100 tasks/month, paid plans start at $19.99/month)
• Airtable (free plan available)

PR would be nothing without the relationships we build with journalists and writers.

But it’s hard to know who’s writing about a topic that’s related to your brand. Or where your company’s internal subject matter experts can add their thoughts to promote your brand.

So, let’s build an automation to match new requests to your internal experts.

This involves:

• Trigger: A new media request that matches relevant topics
• Action: Classify new requests and match them to the internal expert with the most relevant expertise
• Output: New requests are automatically routed to the right person

One of the most frequently updated places to find PR requests is on X/Twitter.

Search the hashtag #journorequest, and you’ll see hundreds of writers asking for expert contributions.

To prepare this for your automation, start by setting up an RSS feed with the hashtag #journorequest or #prrequest along with a relevant keyword.

You can do this for free with RSS.app.

Then, you’ll get results like this:

For the simplest version of this, you can connect RSS.app directly to Slack and send a new message every time a new request is added to the feed.

But let’s be real: that could get overwhelming pretty quickly.

So, we’ll use Zapier for a more in-depth automation.

Start by adding “RSS by Zapier” as the trigger, and paste your RSS feed link into the configuration.

Next use “Formatter by Zapier” to extract the necessary information from the tweets.

First, in Formatter, choose the Action event “Text.”

Then, in the Configure menu, select “Extract Email Address,” and map the input to the description from your RSS feed.

Next, with another Formatter step, select “Text,” and “Extract Pattern.”

The input is still the same description (the original tweet).

In the Pattern box, in parentheses, add the keywords you want to track separated by a vertical bar, like this:

Make sure that IGNORECASE is set to “Yes” so that the search isn’t case sensitive.

Now, it’s time to add that to a system you can use to keep track of new requests and route them to SMEs.

For this example, I’ve chosen to use Airtable. If you want to use this exact database, you can copy it here and we’ll use it as we move forward.

This database has tabs to keep track of your SMEs, the topics they can respond to, and the new requests that come in.

So, let’s connect that Airtable base to Zapier.

Our first step will be to find the right SME for the topic of our journo request.

To start, set the Action as “Find Record,” and link your Airtable base. We’ll pull from the SMEs table, and for “Search by Field” we’ll choose “Topics,” where we’ve previously added our SME’s favorite topics into the Airtable base.

Lastly for this step, map the “Search Value” to the previous step’s result (the topic from the PR query on X/Twitter).

Now, we’re going to create a new row in our “Requests” table in Airtable.

Add Airtable as the next step in this Zap, and select “Create Record” as the action. Link the same Airtable base, but this time select “Requests” as the Table.

Then, map the columns in that base to the information you’ve gathered. In this case, that would include:

• Source = X/Twitter
• Raw Text = The “Description” from RSS feed
• Contact name = The “Raw Creator” from RSS feed
• Contact Email = The output from our first Formatter step, which pulled the email from the original post
• URL = Link from RSS feed
• Topics = The output from our second Formatter step, which pulled the topic from the original post
• SMEs = The “Fields Name” from our Airtable search step
• Status = New

In the end, it should look like this:

And a new record is added into Airtable, like this:

If you want to get fancy with this, you can dig down into:

• Which publications are requesting expertise, and rank them by their credibility
• Automate messages to your SMEs to let them know there’s a new request for them

Get the Most Out of Social Media

For busy marketers, social media can be an incredible time-suck.

Keeping track of trends. Trying to post consistently.

All without getting stuck in an infinite doomscroll.

But a few simple automations can help you get back some of the time you spend on manually managing your socials.

7. Video Clip Automator

Tools required:

• Zoom (free plan available)
• Dropbox (free plan available)
• OpusClip (plans start at $15/month)
• Zapier (free for 100 tasks/month, paid plans start at $19.99/month)

Short-form video has been gradually gaining a bigger voice in marketing.

In fact, 39% of marketers said that videos under 60 seconds are the most effective.

The problem: they take time to make.

If you’re already creating long-form video (or even just doing recorded interviews with in-house experts), we have a handy automation to help you create video clips faster.

Here’s how it works:

• Trigger: New Zoom cloud recording is ready
• Action: Auto-create clips, burn captions, and create a new task in Asana
• Output: You get social-ready video clips, and a new task to publish them

First, adjust your Zoom settings so your recordings upload automatically into a folder in Dropbox.

Next, head over to Zapier.

Your trigger step will be a new video uploaded to that folder in Dropbox.

Your next step will use OpusClip, an AI video editing tool. Select “Clip Your Video,” and map that new video file to the one uploaded in Dropbox.

OpusClip will then take your long-form video from Dropbox and use AI to clip key pieces. It also crops the video for vertical sharing and embeds captions.

You can also add your own brand template so that videos are edited with your brand’s colors and font.

Now that you have new video clips to share, it’s time to add a task to review and publish them.

So the final step in your Zap is “Create Task” in Asana (or your preferred project management tool).

You’ll tie this to a project you’ve already created in Asana, and link the project ID from OpusClip.

In the end, you’ll have a few video clips prepared and ready — all you have to do is download, review, and publish them to your social channels.

8. Comment & Community Nudge

Tools required:

• Social media monitoring tool (like BrandMentions, paid plans start at $79/month)
• Automation tool (like Zapier, free for 100 tasks/month, paid plans start at $19.99/month)

Are people talking about your brand online?

To keep positive sentiment high, you need to engage in those conversations. But finding the right conversations, and knowing how to reply, can take a lot of time.

Using a tool like BrandMentions, you can create a similar automation to what we built for the PR Radar earlier:

• Trigger: A new mention of your brand appears on Reddit, Facebook, or LinkedIn
• Action: Those new mentions are added to a Google Sheet, and you get a daily Slack message summarizing new mentions

To build this, all you’d need to do is swap out the Sources in your BrandMentions settings. Instead of Web, you’d include all of the social media channels you want to track.

After that, you can build an automation with Zapier, the same way we did in the PR Strategy automation above.

If you want to get notifications for every new mention, you could connect the workflow to Slack. Then, a new message will be sent in the channel every time your brand is mentioned.

This basic automation could work for smaller brands.

But when you start getting hundreds of mentions per day, this will quickly become chaotic.

Here’s an example of how one company faced with this issue was able to automate this process in a deeper way:

Webflow was getting over 500 mentions per day. Their two-person team couldn’t keep up with monitoring and responding (alongside their regular workload).

So, they built an automation.

With Gumloop, they monitor, analyze, and flag only the posts that require a response.

They started with a Reddit scraper to pull relevant threads.

Then, they added an AI analyzer to gauge sentiment, rank priority, and assign a category.

After that, they added a step that would send all high-priority mentions to Slack for a team member to handle directly.

The result?

After testing and scaling this process, they were able to build an automation that processes 500+ mentions per day and escalates only the 10-15 that need immediate attention.

If you’ve ever thought, “How can I use AI to automate my marketing tasks?”

This is a great example of an AI automation that works for you without taking over your job.

Is Automation the Right Move? Ask Yourself These Questions First

Automation is the hottest trend.

But it’s hard to know what’s going to save you time and money, and what’s just another fad.

If you’ve ever spent more time trying to automate a task than it would’ve taken you to do the task manually, you’ll know what I mean.

To weigh up whether an automation is worth building, ask yourself these questions:

• How much time does it take me to do this task manually every week?
• Is the automation available with a tool I currently use, or would I have to pay for a new tool?
• Is there a documented automation/integration I can follow?
• Would this task still require human intervention (even with automation)?
• Does this fit easily into our current workflow or process?

If the task:

• Doesn’t take much time to do manually
• Would still require human intervention even when automated
• Isn’t easy to build an automation for

…it may not be worth your time.

On the other hand, if the task:

• Is repetitive
• Uses up hours of your workweek
• Can be automated in tools you already have in your stack

…it’s probably time to give automation a try.

Build Your Automation Foundations, Then Keep Growing

The hype cycle of automation and AI can be overwhelming.

But don’t feel like you’re behind just because you haven’t automated away your entire marketing team yet.

Instead, focus on the automations that save you time and are sustainable.

We’ve just discussed eight different automations. Why not choose one or two that are most relevant to your business and team?

Start with the foundational automations that help smooth out your existing processes.

Then, you’ll have a better basis for building more complex automations.

To automate even more areas of your marketing workflows, check out our curated list of our favorite AI marketing tools right now.

The post How to Automate Marketing With 8 Simple Workflows appeared first on Backlinko.

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