Content automation for customer engagement 2022 | CMS

Content automation helps brands to use branded content for campaigns and optimize them to drive better customer engagement and improve conversions.

As digital becomes the primary channel for customer engagement for consumer businesses, the competition to draw and hold user attention has gotten fierce. While large businesses have bigger budgets, large teams, and more elaborate processes at their disposal, smaller, growing businesses are unable to generate or manage marketing and streamline content in the same volume or speed. This is where technology, automation, and process expertise can help SMBs derive greater value from their marketing operations.

SMBs can trade large teams for faster and more focused data-driven tools to personalize and target their audience with greater granularity. Research suggests that 80% of consumers are more likely to engage and do business with brands that offer personalized experiences. By using custom platforms for content automation, measuring the performance of different campaigns and channels, SMBs can use a wealth of data to iteratively optimize their processes, resulting in high-impact campaigns that deliver the full value of digital channels for their brand.

What is content automation?

Content automation, which is a part of marketing automation, refers to technology that leverages business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA) data, and analytics to perform repetitive tasks and workflows pertaining to branded content management. Automated tools allow marketers to assign a predefined set of rules or criteria to different events, based on which the system takes a fixed action.

For example, consider an online direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand offering subscriptions for personal grooming products that have an average life of about 3 months. Using an automated system, the brand can send customers a personalized email at the end of 30 days to get their feedback and ensure smoother conversions at the time of renewing the subscription. Subsequently, they can also automate renewal reminders to customers days before their subscription ends, combining it with personalized recommendations to upsell or cross-sell items based on the products they are currently using.

Bigger enterprises derive value from digital marketing by regularly publishing a large amount of marketing content made and distributed by large marketing teams. With content management automation, SMBs can compete better by increasing operational efficiency and grow their revenue faster by switching to more data-driven processes and methods of creating, delivering, and optimizing their digital marketing campaigns.

Streamline and optimize customer engagement with content automation

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more SMBs and D2C brands have directed their marketing activities towards digital, thus opening up the possibilities of using content management and content automation for multi-level targeting across the customer journey. Automated data-driven systems help marketers attract and engage customers more effectively by personalizing their interactions with them across various digital channels.

Data-driven, automated systems can collect and target campaigns to strategically viable customer segments and channels, replacing scale by helping brands craft more customized messages to their audience. While larger enterprises generally focus on driving engagement metrics such as impressions, clicks, views, and shares for their digital campaigns, SMBs usually focus on maximizing conversions through personalization. According to a study, 53% of marketers saw conversions and revenues increase by more than 10% after they started personalizing campaigns.

Automation also enables brands to pace their campaigns and optimize campaign parameters, using patterns to find the ideal allocation to achieve desired outcomes, such as maximizing ROI on ad spend. With automation, B2C and D2C marketers can also assign actions to specific triggers based on audience behavior. For instance, if a customer abandons the cart during checkout, it can trigger an automated action wherein a follow-up email or text message can be immediately sent to them with a discount to increase the chances of converting them and preventing lost sales.

Further, campaign managers and marketers can refine their targeting based on data on how audience segments react to different messages and content. Automated campaign analytics further enable them to modify their strategy for converting leads after nurturing them. This way, brands can also target their leads during off-times such as holidays or weekends and avoid losing out on conversion opportunities.

How can your business make content operations more efficient?

Global digital ad spending in 2021 surpassed 2019’s pre-pandemic figure by more than $120 billion, setting new records. As e-commerce and D2C brands continue to grow exponentially, both established and growing consumer businesses are increasingly looking for solutions that help them derive maximum value from their marketing spends.

Businesses can leverage tools like Microsoft Power Platform, SharePoint, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to build more customized and flexible marketing workflows than with simple plug-and-play SaaS platforms. For instance, using Power Platform, they can automate the curation and distribution of social media and inbound marketing content such as blogs and holiday sale landing pages by automatically adding RSS feed items to selectively publish or share content on specific social media platforms.

Further, by integrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 to SharePoint and creating automated flows on Power Automate, marketers can create a cloud flow using any existing templates such as:

• Creating a list item in SharePoint when an object is created in Dynamics 365
• Creating leads on Dynamics 365 from an Excel table, and more.

Using connectors on Power Platform, marketers can send automated emails to customers through Microsoft Outlook 365, curate content from their Medium site, or post and share on Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms based on specific triggers at a fixed cadence. This helps marketing teams and operations not only create and automate lead/customer engagement campaigns on email or social media but also monitor and optimize them in real-time.

VBeyond Digital works with businesses from across various industries to help them build, deploy, and manage bespoke solutions that help them streamline their digital operations, reduce costs, and maximize business impact.

Are you interested in a content management solution to leverage digital media channels for better customer engagement and conversion? Reach out to us at and we’d be happy to assist you.