3 Ways Content Automation Can Help Multi-Location Marketers

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Among multi-location marketing’s most difficult challenges is creating localized content at scale. Reaching, say, local restaurant goers across 1,000 locations requires not only training local marketers to create brand-safe, well-written content but also monitoring performance via HQ to optimize and ensure marketing investments are driving results.

Enter content automation. Street Fight spoke with Andrew Melchiorri, co-founder of AI-powered content enrichment platform Automata, about how multi-location marketers can use AI to create, manage, and win with content at scale.

Understand the content competitors are producing

When it comes to content, many local marketers will struggle with where to start. Local marketers are often operators who spend the bulk of their time trying to run a profitable business. They do not have a lot of time to muse about marketing ideas.

Content software can help by providing competitive intelligence. Automata, for example, helps businesses understand the other companies with which their social followers are engaging. It also helps them easily review competitor content in one place, giving marketers back the time they would otherwise need to spend scouring the web for rivals’ content.

Like search marketing software, Automata also helps marketers identify the top keywords for their business and their competitors’ businesses. This, too, can spark inspiration, pointing marketers to the type of content and topics that will resonate with the shoppers they need to reach.

Maximize the value of content by repurposing it

Coming up with ideas and writing, say, a blog post that can help an individual location show up in local search is only the first step in crafting a localized content strategy. Next comes repurposing content so that a blog post also becomes an email subject line, ad copy, or a Facebook post.

Here, too, content automation can make a difference. With Automata, users can upload a blog, social post, or white paper and receive a flurry of suggestions — like email subject lines or social posts — on how to repurpose original content across channels. In this way, content automation is not just a repurposing engine but an engine of inspiration that expands the local marketer’s strategic thinking on how and where to reach customers.

Repurposing text across formats is where Automata’s AI comes in. The company initially set out to create an AI writing tool, but that category is quickly becoming commoditized. As a result, Automata has shifted to repurposing, which is where AI truly excels — not creating sophisticated writing from scratch but maximizing the value of that writing, and the marketing dollars behind it, by repurposing it efficiently across formats.

Monitor content production and performance at scale

The third tenet of a multi-location content marketing strategy is analytics. It’s one thing for the head of marketing at corporate to help hundreds of local marketers produce content, quite another for that person to monitor success in hundreds or thousands of locations.

As has happened in every other marketing discipline, software is developing to help multi-location marketers crack the content analytics equation. Automata is helping marketers evaluate content performance, audience composition, and technical SEO. It’s also assisting them in benchmarking their performance against that of competitors.

When it comes to replacing sophisticated writers, AI is not quite ready for primetime. But it certainly can help marketing teams scale and measure the impact of already-competent copy. There’s no need to look toward the future to evaluate whether AI is capable of accomplishing that.

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]