Can you increase engagement with content automation while staying under the radar? We say an emphatic “Yes,” and we’ll show you some ways you can do just that.
If there’s one word that describes the 21st century, it’s automation. Press a virtual button, and you’ve published an ebook. Press another, and you’ll have timed your latest blog post to land in inboxes just as the workday starts in various locations around the world. Convenient – just like the 60s TV show, “The Jetsons,” predicted.
Start with Integration
However, if that uber-futuristic automation can’t increase engagement, the convenience does you little good. The first step, then, is to find a content automation platform that integrates seamlessly into your entire production process from ideation to publication.
That’s not all. If your solution doesn’t align your content analytics with the numbers your sales and other departments generate, you’ll lose the convenience part. You’ll be switching back and forth among platforms, wasting time that you could spend creating engaging content.
After all, you want your content platform to help you increase engagement, not increase your frustration. Get this step right before you move on to the creation process.
Get Social
If you’re not publishing links to your blog posts from your social media accounts, you’re missing a chance to attract them to your website to learn more about what you can offer.
Social media is often the first place where prospects encounter your brand. Entice them with a teaser and a link to your blog itself. If the rest of your post is as good as the teaser promises, you can compel them to read through to the end of your post. There, they should find links to related posts about the same (or similar) topics and an invitation to sign up for your email newsletter.
You can boost the chances of people engaging with your posts if you use analytics to choose which people you show your post to. Make it easy for those who read your post to share it with their own followers and friends.
Show top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content to first-time visitors. Save more in-depth posts to show people who have already demonstrated an interest in your brand.
Finally, interact with your social media followers by answering their questions. Use links to your blog posts to provide them with more detailed information about the topic they referenced in their questions or comments.
Automate Advertising
Boosted social media posts aren’t the only way to attract people in the initial stages of their customer journeys. Google Ads provides you with a powerful tool to automate your message. Your options include:
- Responsive search ads: Google’s platform can create combinations of 15 headlines and four descriptions to show people searching for your target keywords. Then, the automated program tests the combinations to provide you with the optimum results.
- Responsive display ads: Like it does with search ads, Google creates ads using visuals to complement your text, automatically generating and testing the image-text combinations to boost engagement.
- Dynamic search ads: If your teams don’t have the time to write ads, you can take a shortcut. To create dynamic search ads, Google’s web-crawler “looks” through your website for promising texts to generate ads automatically.
- Dynamic remarketing: With the death of third-party cookies, it is becoming more difficult to target ads to people who have previously engaged with your website or mobile app as they browse other sites. However, if your prospects are using Chrome, Google will still show them your ads. With Chrome gaining a 64 percent share of the search market, remarketing ads can still create customer interest.
Use ads to draw prospects to your owned content, such as landing pages and blog posts. Always have a clear, appealing call to action on your pages and posts to nudge them further along their buyer’s journey.
Automate Translations
Corporations with a global reach likely need to translate their content into other languages. Although automated AI translations (such as Google Translate) can’t grasp the nuanced speech of native speakers, they can provide a rough version that your native translators can polish.
Using an AI-generated translation as a draft saves time and money, but exercise caution here. Otherwise, you might end up with something like this English-language translation from Turkish Airlines:
“Prepared for passengers with digestive system discomfort. It contains spices and low-fat products. Dietary fiber is low. Does not include spices…” (Emphasis ours). Oops.
Segment, Personalize, and Nurture
Once people have become email subscribers, segment them by their place along the buyer’s journey, their demographics, interests, pain points, and online behavior. Online behavior includes specific triggers, such as abandoned carts, ebook downloads, and other actions they have taken on any channel.
Nurture these segments with messaging that engages them and use relevant, actionable content that meets their needs. For B2C companies, for example, these messages might include mobile notifications about special offers when prospects are near one of their locations.
A robust email strategy, complemented by text messages, should be the hub around which your middle-of-the-funnel content revolves. With an ROI that brings in 42 times as much revenue as you spend, email increased engagement for 78 percent of the nation’s marketers in 2019. As millennials’ preferred channel, email will likely grow even further during the coming years.
Use dynamic content to personalize your messages. According to Forbes’ Blake Morgan, 90 percent of American consumers like personalized marketing messages, while even more to the point, 72 percent of them “only engage with personalized messaging.”
That’s a lot of business to leave on the table if you don’t personalize. Here’s where dynamic content can help move your prospects further along their customer journey. Dynamic content personalizes your messages not only to specific segments, but it can also create custom content for each individual.
Identify Recyclable Posts with a Content Audit
Research shows that on average, ~80 percent of your blog’s visitors are first-timers. Ours is even more than that (screenshot below). That means that the number of those who engage and move further along the sales funnel is constantly changing.
As your audience members enter and move further down the sales funnel, you need to direct them to content that addresses their needs at that point on their customer journey. Some of this content might be hiding among your older posts. Newer visitors wouldn’t have seen that content, and it could be the one-touch that drives them to convert.
Using automated content audit tools on an ongoing basis, you can quickly identify top performers at various stages along your prospects’ journeys. Pull them, give them an update, and send them out to work their magic yet again.
Automate and Personalize Bottom-of-the-Funnel Content
As your prospects reach the decision point, they’ll need specific, detailed content that shows how your product can help them solve a specific challenge. Product comparisons, detailed brochures, and white papers can provide them with that information.
For each type of content, create templates that include both general information and dynamic sections that you can tailor to various verticals. Store them in your content repository and then insert industry-specific content in designated sections. That way, when a prospect expresses interest, you can publish the customized content right from your content marketing platform.
If you’re a B2B enterprise, you can customize content for individual decision-makers at this stage of the buyer’s journey. Your templates can provide inspiration and structure that you can expand on for content that addresses each decision-maker’s personal interest.
For instance, you could expand a section on your pricing structure to include actual estimates of the ROI your prospect’s CFO could expect from her investment. The engineer, on the other hand, would appreciate a more detailed, technical explanation of your product’s mechanical function.
Regardless of where your prospects are on their buyer’s journey, you need to automate as many processes as possible. DivvyHQ is a one-stop content platform that automates many content processes and integrates seamlessly with a broad range of other automation tools. Try it FREE for 14 days starting today.