The vast majority of businesses that have an online presence have already tapped into content marketing, and naturally, this field has seen a fair amount of automation. While content creation as such isn’t really the best field for applying automation just yet, there is a broad spectrum of activities where “machines” can be put to work, like pre-scheduling posts on various marketing channels or creating email marketing funnels.
Content marketing is undoubtedly one of the most powerful methods to spread the word about your business, we find that E-commerce is a field that hasn’t explored content sufficiently, let along automating it. Companies operating in E-commerce often have a limited content marketing strategy that implies to simple email marketing and customer relationship management hacks.
1. Hyper-personalization
Personalization is an essential component of a successful marketing campaign that includes information about some personal information about the user’s preferences and some transactional data like a customer’s purchase history a business’s interaction with their clientele.
When we’re talking about hyper-personalization, we’re referring to an even more profound level of personalization, which harnesses behavioral data, in order to craft a highly contextual interaction with the user.
For instance, basic personalization can be something like using a potential customer’s name in an email you sent them. This used to be a prevalent practice until users started being increasingly frustrated with it, which is why many reputable publications started suggesting businesses to stop mindlessly personalizing their email marketing campaigns.
On the other hand, technology allows us to go beyond this straightforward type of personalization and dig much deeper into the customer’s behavior. Here’s a standard scenario many potential clients go through:
1. A user has entered your E-commerce app
2. They spend around 10 minutes shopping around
3. They end up adding a few products to their shopping cart
4. They quit the app or leave the site without purchasing anything
Here’s an example of the kind of data we can extract from the user’s interaction with your E-commerce platform:
• The user prefers to shop for goods that are discounted
• They shop for sneakers
• The user predominantly uses your app between 12 PM and 2 PM during their lunch break
• They react positively to push notifications
You can use this data to shape your content strategy for this particular user based on the information you’ve collected from them. You can automate the creation of simplistic listicles with “the best-discounted sneakers of the month,” which would be delivered to them via push notification at the best time. This allows us to create a more seamless shopping experience. The year of 2019 is expected to mark the beginning of AI- and ML-assisted content creation.
2. Content editing
An E-commerce business should most certainly look into building a long-term relationship with a content writer that can successfully communicate the business’s values and speak the average buyer’s language. However, editing content is a totally different animal.
Editing is less about creativity and more about spotting patterns. People, unfortunately, can’t always totally eliminate all stylistic and structural issues from their writing. Therefore, AI-assisted editing is an excellent tool for any company to have up its sleeve.
Tools like Grammarly, Readable, and Hemingway can help writers and businesses automate structural and stylistic error flagging at a more sophisticated level.
When it comes to website copy or blog entries, basic mistakes can deteriorate the brand image and dissuade customers from doing business with you. Providing customers with spotless material will only enhance your sales.
3. Automated ideation
Ideation can be considered one of the most challenging aspects of your content strategy, besides creating the content, of course. If you fail to capture your audience’s interests, you won’t be able to create enticing content, no matter how well you write.
Content marketers will often find it complicated to find the right topics to write about, in order to provide their audience with meaningful and useful information. This is how automating your content ideation can make your life easier.
There is a large number of tools you can use in order to stay informed on what topics are the most important to your average customer.
A great example of a tool that can help you with partially automating your content ideation is BuzzSumo. It allows you to get a better understanding of what types of content are currently popular on the Internet by providing you with the total number of likes, shares, and other criteria.
This, in effect, will provide you with a better understanding of what content topics are currently hot in your niche or industry, which allows for a much easier and partly automated medium for content ideation.
You can also use tools like Google Alerts that is the search engine’s product designed specifically for social monitoring. All you have to do is feed it specific keywords, brand names, and other essential criteria, to get a better understanding of how particular topics perform on the world wide web.
4. Content distribution
One of the essential facets of content marketing is the mechanisms of content distribution. After you’ve taken the time to create and edit the content, you need to find a way to deliver it to your followers in the most suitable manner. Naturally, you’ll have to take on a multi-channel approach.
There are a few channels that are especially important to consider when creating a content distribution system. First off, you need to look into email marketing. Although a simple and almost rudimentary channel, it’s still the most efficient one, when it comes to delivering information to customers. More importantly, it’s incredibly cost-effective when done correctly.
Here are a few services you should look into if you’re looking to create a powerful email marketing campaign:
• MailChimp
• Litmus
• Reach Mail
Another crucial channel for content distribution is social media, of course. Whatever your niche is, whether its popular or obscure, given the vast number of users’ platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram amount to, you’ll most certainly find your audience and eventually convert them to your loyal customers.
However, when it comes to social media, having a posting schedule is absolutely imperative; and there are many excellent tools that can assist you with spreading the word across various sites.
Here are a few tools that will most definitely get the job done:
• HootSuite
• Buffer
• SproutSocial
5. Chatbots
A more modern content distribution channel E-commerce businesses should look into are chatbots. Consider how flexible they are and the amount of social data they have access to, chatbots can create experiences that are tailored specifically for individual users, according to their interests and preferences.
Chatbots can also humanize a brand, as odd as that may sound. Given that this nifty little “machine” will be programmed by skillful UX writers, it can have a personality of its own, which is In sync with your business’s brand voice and tone. There are now many writing services like Trust My Paper that can assist brands with dialogue design for chatbots.
More importantly, authentic and personalized experiences lead to higher engagement with the content and the brand’s products in general.
When used correctly, chatbots are more than just lifeless machines, they become a meaningful extension to your brand.
Conclusion
We are most definitely at the very beginning of a long and intriguing path of marketing automation. While there is a broad spectrum of actions within the general marketing framework that have been automated for the last ten to fifteen years, content marketing is yet to hit its automation peaks in the future.
Good luck automating!
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