Creating engaging sales enablement content is a top priority for content marketers. Such content nudges prospects to be sales-ready. This works best when the content has personalization, which means content teams must produce a wide variety of different pieces based on your personalization strategies. This can quickly become overwhelming, especially at the scale of a large enterprise. However, there are options to streamline this with sales content automation.
To help guide you through the selling part of content marketing automation, we developed this rundown of best practices and critical information.
What Is Sales Content Automation?
First, let’s start by defining what sales content automation is. We’ll break it down into parts.
Sales enablement content is any content that is typically needed or beneficial at the end of the buyer’s journey. It’s also commonly known as BoFU (bottom of the funnel) content. Simply put, it’s about selling your product or service and typically provides validation as to why customers should choose your brand over competitors.
Examples of BoFU Content
- Case studies
- Product sheets
- Pitch decks
- Video interviews/testimonials
- Comparisons (your brand vs. competitors)
- Pre-onboarding content (i.e., explainer videos, implementation guides, etc.)
Content automation is the use of technology tools to minimize or eliminate human intervention in some parts of the content creation process. It can refer to several different aspects of content marketing workflows.
With both segments defined, sales content automation is the automating of parts of the BoFU content cycle. BoFU content can be especially challenging to produce, so introducing automation can increase your content throughput.
Why Sales Content Should be Personal
Sales content will have an edge if it’s personal. Content personalization can be tricky to do at scale, but that’s where the automation piece can help. Personalizing can pay big dividends. A recent study revealed that 93 percent of companies using personalization said it led to revenue growth.
At this point in the relationship with the buyer, they are ready to make a decision. The more tailored your content is to their specific need, the more likely they are to convert. They’ll likely find your company trustworthy and credible when the content they receive resonates with their specific situation.
To reach personalization at scale, you’ll need some level of automation. Otherwise, it’s not sustainable.
What Can You Automate in Sales Content?
There are a few different segments of content automation. One side speaks to internal processes; the other is the automation of the actual content.
Internal Process Automation
For an enterprise content marketing team to accelerate production and be ready to answer sales teams’ needs, there are lots of tasks involved. Simplify these content workflows by bringing in an automation tool. Here’s what you can automate when using a content marketing software platform:
Production Workflows
Create templates that automate generating tasks, assign them to the appropriate team members, and calculate the production schedule.
An example of sales content automation would be building out automated workflows for product collateral that consistently get personalized for various industries and translated into several languages. With that workflow built, starting a new product sheet project would trigger the automated workflow and now your team just has to work the plan.
Content Calendars
Content calendars are the hub of your content marketing. If you aren’t using a central content calendar and still rely on spreadsheets, then I’d bet much of your job is just maintaining those spreadsheets. You and your team doesn’t have time to be stuck in the weeds. Instead, leverage a dynamic content calendar that automatically recalculates deadlines and sends updates when changes occur, and is accessible to all.
Content and Social Media Publishing
One of the most common types of content automation is publishing. You probably do this to some degree now, but it may not be on one platform. If not, then your team is wasting time here, as well. Using a platform that automatically pushes content to your downstream publishing platforms/networks is very helpful.
In the case of sales enablement content, you need to be strategic in planning what and when you post. If there are certain times of the year or triggers for your audience, push BoFU content for the best results.
Email, as a channel, is crucial to converting prospects. It’s also the channel where you have the most opportunity to personalize. However, manually setting up campaigns is labor-intensive. The ideal situation is to use a robust email marketing system that allows you to create a variety of automated emails, including:
- Drip campaigns that have multiple emails that start with a trigger.
- Autoresponders that send after a buyer takes a certain action.
Reporting
The last part of task automation relates to content analytics. Having all your analytics on one dashboard and inclusive of all channels—social, web, email, and SEO—provides visibility and results. Automated reporting means you don’t have to aggregate data separately, so it’s much more efficient. What you learn from this data can then inform your future sales content.
Content Automation: Leveraging AI and Machine Learning
The second part of sales content automation is using technology to create the content. This activity is still in its infancy, but artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are in use right now to do this.
Big publishers are already doing this, including The Washington Post, Forbes, and Bloomberg. In most situations, however, robots aren’t going to be writing your sales enablement content. The type of content AI is producing now lacks the human connection, empathy, and user engagement, which are all central to content marketing.
There are still opportunities to automate some parts of content that remain the same. If you go back to the example of product sheets and making them industry-specific, you may have certain aspects that stay the same, like charts, tables, or images. It’s possible to use technology to insert those static pieces of content while your writers develop new content that speaks to that specific industry.
Content translation is another area that is quickly becoming more of a reality as machine translation software can dramatically speed up and scale the process. We may only be a few years away from being able to take a piece of content, select the languages we need, hit go and get back next-to-perfect translated assets in minutes.
Content automation technology will certainly improve, and it’s something to keep in your peripheral, but overall, AI isn’t “smart” enough to be a content marketer.
Sales Content Automation: Scale and Succeed
To truly leverage sales content automation, you’ll need the right strategy and tools. By automating many of the processes and some of the actual content, you can grow your library of BoFU content and deliver sales-ready prospects. Check out how DivvyHQ empowers automation by trying it out at no cost for 14 days.