Discrete content chunks and personalisation

Building an extensive library of content assets is the accepted way to ensure that you always have great content to offer your audience, but this can represent a lifetime's work. One particularly efficient way to get the most from limited resources ‘as you go’, is to create modular, bitesize, cross platform content that can be used in it’s own right, or assembled to create new assets.

Take an interview with an influencer, for example: The whole thing can be filmed, images from the film could be used to illustrate product, or other stories. The transcript of the conversation can be turned into several articles, looking at different topics - quotes can be extracted. Tagging all this information and carefully categorising it, means it can be picked up by human editors and automated systems to be used for maximum advantage. Personalisation at scale has always seemed hard to master - it’s more than just adding names to emails, particularly when it involves creating dynamic web copy or social media posts. However, using customer data and building personas, allows content managers to subtly alter content according to the context it appears in, and the platform it appears on.

Tagged, discrete content chunks, can be combined with rules-driven content deployment to build a personalised experience at scale for individual users, whether it’s online, in-app or via social media.

Aren’t the robots taking over?

In today’s AI driven, chat-bot and virtual assistant filled world, you’d be forgiven for thinking that advances in natural language processing mean that the content can literally write itself. Unfortunately, you’d be mostly disappointed. Whilst it is possible to automate certain pieces of content (like tweets, or fact-based templated content, such as weather reports) there can be real implications for authenticity and brand trust. After all, it’s hard to build thought-leadership credentials when your sentences don’t quite make sense.

For today’s content marketers, automation is more focused on repetitive tasks, such as scheduling and repurposing - this technology isn’t glamorous, but can deliver real benefits in terms of reducing costs, freeing up human resources, and reducing production times.

Creating and deploying content effectively

Creating a steady stream of content takes serious organisation. To assist, the concept of workflows - stepped, repeatable processes, by which a task is achieved - has been around for a long time - but they can be overlooked. Establishing workflows to facilitate and monitor the delivery of multiple content assets can increase outputs, simply by helping teams focus. Where such workflows are digitised, productivity tools - such as reminders, even time scheduling software - can all play a part in streamlining delivery.

Taking this one step further; automating all, or part of these workflows, can yield big returns. For example, from the point that a 150 word content snippet is created, it could be pushed to a website, deployed to platform-specific apps, and turned into a mobile optimised PDF document for sales teams to use. Previously, these tasks may have been subject to a wide variety of factors (staff holidays, heavy workload, training requirements, etc), all creating bottlenecks.

As demand for content builds, and consumer expectation of personalised content, device agnostic and high-quality experiences grows, implementing and automating workflows can give content-producing teams a real edge.