Enhance Customer Experience With Content Automation

At what point can you say that someone has become a friend? Looking back after years of company and laughter, it’s often hard to point to the moment when the relationship changed from acquaintance to something deeper. The process was ongoing, an increasing coming together of trust and understanding.

For businesses there is a clear line between lead and buyer. The moment that someone makes their first purchase, they’ve changed. You’ve persuaded them. Content marketing has worked its magic. You’ve created enough trust to turn doubtful curiosity into a trusting client.

But like a friendship, the relationship shouldn’t stop just when it’s starting to get warm. It should continue, becoming increasingly close and continuing to turn that trust into real value. From the customer’s perspective nothing changes as the relationship deepens except that the sense of brand loyalty becomes stronger. They enjoy their experience with the brand without feeling the purchases as points of change.

Content automation is an intrinsic part of that process, creating the experience that binds the customer to the brand.

The first goal of content automation is to deliver content at set times or according to determined touch points in order to enhance the lead or prospective clients and bring them towards a purchase.

The second goal of content automation should be to maintain that relationship and continue those sales by offering targeted cross-sells, up-sells and cycle-sells.

That trust-building gets easier as the relationship develops. Just as the longer friends know each other, the better they know each other so whenever customers interact with the brand—such as by making purchases—they give the brand information that can help to personalize the automated content they receive. Instead of only receiving information triggered by a date on the calendar or a touch point with which they’ve engaged, they can also receive information based on the actions they’ve already taken.

Today, that’s easier than ever. As clients interact with content on digital devices, they provide plenty of personal information that can help content marketers to deliver relevant information that suits their needs. As content strategists, our job is to take that data and use it to create and deliver content that brings the brand and its customers ever closer. Content automation takes the knowledge in our clients’ data and behavior, and uses it to deliver scheduled meaningful content.

What Touch Points Teach Brands

Imagine an online art store. They offer  a short, free webinar  with valuable content about watercolors to bring people in. People who take that class and hand over their details, then receive an email every week offering them a list of additional classes that might feel relevant to them: on the Expressionists; on sketching; on abstract art. Depending on which link the customer clicks, they then continue to receive information more closely targeted to their preferences. If someone decides to take a class on sculpture, the store automatically offers them a cross-sell that gives them a discount on modelling clay. If the customer buys that clay, they might then receive an upsell to include a set of specialist modelling tools. As they move farther in the sales funnel, the art store offers more and more valuable content to keep its artistic clients engaged along with a gold membership card that gives extra discounts and free shipping on art supplies from the store.

​As the relationships develops, the content can remain automated but it becomes better targeted based on touch points, dates and preferences.

Content automation shouldn’t be seen as a conveyor belt strapped to the sides of a sales funnel. It’s a tool that we use as part of a content strategy to support the brand’s overall sales strategy. It collects information that people share first as leads then as customers to allow brands to deliver a content experience that’s both personalized and always on time. It’s as reliable as a friend and just as trusted.

Click here and get your FREE copy of ASTELO's practical guide:
"101 Content Marketing - The New Face of Digital Marketing".