The goal of any small business is to grow; exponential expansion in both reach and awareness. Achieving this goal doesn’t come easy when you only focus on selling your products or services. You should also focus on raising your brand awareness through content marketing.
Content marketing is a proven business strategy in both its traditional and digital forms. Back then, this strategy covered print materials like newspapers, product brochures, and lifestyle magazines. Today, content marketing can be spotted easily in social media and, of course, on business websites.
Through this strategy, raising brand awareness essentially is based on two main aspects. One, you need to learn the ins and outs of search engine optimization (SEO). Secondly, you need to produce content consistently.
Consistent production of SEO-ready content is not a problem for established companies. As for small businesses, this task can undoubtedly be daunting. Without the right guidance, it takes too much time and manpower.
Here’s an easy solution for you: Content automation.
About Content Automation
The technology of content automation is relatively new in the industry. It uses artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, to custom create sensible and high-quality content with little effort from eCommerce store developers.
Automating content is not a narrow concept. It deals with automation of various forms of the content including creatives. These can be product images, badges and banners upto every block of the eCommerce website.
Every business, especially small businesses can benefit a lot from such storefront automation platforms as it does not need technical knowledge as everything already present and can be made use of readily.
Let’s look at how this automated process changes the course of your small business:
1.  Saves Resources
The overarching benefit of content automation is spending less on various resources. Understandably, small businesses run on limited capital. Smart investments are essential for small enterprises to prosper.
Investing in CMS software is one smart move. First of all, there is no need to hire a handful of writers to produce a ton of content within a period. For starting businesses, it is essential to build content consistently to increase recognition. This is also to increase the chance of landing a spot on Google’s search page.
With a CMS system, one or two writers can do the job of five or more. Those two writers can produce a week’s worth of content in a day. How’s that for efficiency, right? In this manner, the writers can focus on implementing and checking on-page SEO strategies on the articles before clicking on ‘Publish’.
With this strategy, you save time, money, and effort.
From a seemingly empty business website, you can expect to fill it up with years’ worth of content in a couple of months. You just need to couple the content automation system with extensive keyword and trend research, and you are good to go.
2.  Less Hassle Social Media Marketing
Much like the mass production of blog content for business websites, content automation software systems also reduce the hassle of social media marketing.
Most of the time, SMM is a trend-based marketplace. Today’s trend may be long-forgotten tomorrow. Brands that can’t keep up with these social media fluctuations find it challenging to establish a consistent online following.
The role of content automation in this fast-paced market is to produce social media snippets in bulk.
Constant presence is essential in social media. If consumers see your brand regularly across different platforms, they are more likely to recognize your brand and develop an interest in what you have to offer.
This type of recognition is significant for small businesses because you want consumers to look you up on any platform available. In this manner, if they see that your brand is available on their favourite social media site, they can correctly assume that your brand is easy to connect with.
3.  Increase Customer Retention
It may seem far-fetched, but content automation directly links with customer retention.
The effects of content automation on customers are similar to the effect of customers preferring products with many reviews. Trust is developed at the beginning because many others have expressed a similar experience.
In the same way, a small business’s website with a lot of content is a green flag sign for consumers. It’s an indirect way of telling your consumers that you have put in a lot of effort for building your brand, even though you are just starting out.
And when they begin to browse your content and see that most speak about the uses and effectiveness of your products, they’d also like to try them out. Even better is when they’re motivated to leave comments and positive reviews on the articles themselves.
Content automation platforms take on the role of producing these types of content to provide valuable resources for your current customers and prospective clients.
Will CMS Take Over Everything?
When new technological development begins, this is always the question – will all pre existing methods be replaced? And the answer is no.
Content automation does not go beyond the bounds of the imagination. Creative freedom is something that computers and artificial intelligence can never replicate. It is something unique to humans and is built upon personal experiences and worldviews that vary from one person to another, either way, this skill is irreplaceable.
Relying on CMS alone won’t provide a personal voice to your brand. As much as you want to keep on producing content to raise brand awareness and recognition, creating a unique voice for your brand is essential.
Small businesses, in particular, need to come up with that recognizable voice to relate better with consumers. So, yes while reliance on CMS will increase there is still a level of human touch that is essential to prosper.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing is essential for today’s businesses, especially with the industry’s increasing reliance on online platforms. Content automation platforms are one of the countless technologies that reduce the burden of digital marketers.
With this technology, small businesses save money. Instead of hiring more people to create content with monthly salaries, investing in CMS platforms is a one-time payment that has a fast ROI cycle. It’s up to you to decide which is the smarter investment.