10 Use Cases To Automate Presentations and Content at Scale

Getting more done in less time. That’s what automation is for. It’s about reducing the time and investment necessary to create better outcomes. You might be wondering what use cases are for automation in presentations, how you can create personalized content in less time and how you can maximize your productivity.

You came to the right address. 2024 is all about doing less with more, working smarter not harder. With employees spending more than 8 hours per week on creating content, you need to look into automation of content creation.

Think about it – 8 hours are wasted on invitations, case studies, sales pitch decks, marketing material and other content related use cases. That’s a full working day that could be reinvested in talking to clients, closing more deals and other meaningful work.

This guide will inspire you, founders, entrepreneurs and leaders to find practical use cases to automate the creation of content. It will inspire you to do more with less and increase the outcomes of your business or team.

Megan Foster is a sales leader and revenue operations manager with 5+ years of experience in high tech SaaS. She has experience in both regional and global sales and marketing teams. She is the co-founder of SlideFill.

Presentation automation use cases are all about increasing productivity and improving business outcomes. Whether you’re a one-person business or a large corporation, you always will be resource constrained. To increase the output of your input, you need to rely on automation to scale beyond what’s humanly possible.

Creating content is one of the most time consuming tasks of any business. The average takes more than 8 hours to create a presentation and worldwide more than $250 million dollars are wasted daily on time invested in creating content. That’s insane.

Leveraging automation can significantly reduce the time necessary to create content while improving the quality of the material itself. There are hundreds of use cases one can think of to automate and in this guide you will find 10 of them outlined for various business sizes.

1. 10 Use cases for Presentation and Content Automation © SlideFill 2024

The first major reason to consider presentation automation use cases is productivity. Improving productivity is all about increasing output and decreasing the time you need to make the material. Think of the last time you spent hours on creating a presentation or adjusting content to be relevant for different audiences. Frustrating, right?

I remember a time when I helped a friend adjust 150 wedding invitations and personalized every single one of them by changing the name of the invitee. It took me multiple hours. A task that seemed so simple. What made it worse was that I know most people would only spend a couple of seconds reading the invitation.
Automation could have easily done this job for me. All I needed was to create an invitation template, add a placeholder and run automation to get 150 unique wedding invitations.

I am pretty sure thousands of wedding planners across the world have this use case and they are all manually updating the invitations. RIP. It’s just one use case of content automation that would increase productivity. In a couple of clicks, hours could be saved.

Productivity gains go hand in hand with competitive benefits. If you are able to do something in less time than one of your competitors, you have more time available to drive what’s really important to your business. The savings with productivity gains can be reinvested into strategizing, talking to clients, running impactful marketing campaigns or improving your product.

But it’s not only about quantity. There is also something to tell about quality. Imagine I wouldn’t have invested hours in personalizing the wedding invitations and had no automation available. My friend would have been forced to send generic invitations. No personal touch or directly addressing the audience. It would be a rather sucky invitation, don’t you think?

The same is happening in the business world every day. Companies have adopted automation to bulk email their clients every week, but they forgot the most important element of doing business: building personal connections.

Leveraging content automation for personalization use cases can help you to make automated messaging seemingly personalized. This will unlock more revenue.

Automation use cases for content is a winning strategy? Yes, it is. At least when it’s done right.

There are plenty of opportunities for automation use cases but things can turn sour very fast. The main challenge with automation is data quality. Automation relies on a trigger that’s based on a data point changing. It then takes an action, often using another data point.

Wrong personalization will be perceived worse than no personalization. You can imagine a female client wouldn’t appreciate it when you address her with ‘Hi man’. It would showcase you’re either using rubbish automation or you’re completely ignorant. It’s a big no go. To successfully implement automation use cases for presentations or content, you need data hygiene.

So, where should you apply the magic of automation? What are use cases you can consider in B2C and B2B? Help is on its way. This guide will provide you 10 use cases for content and presentation automation you can literally implement today. You will get inspiration to decide for yourself what’s the most impactful to automate in your business.

Today’s online users are used to getting tons of invitations. Personalization can help tremendously in order to make sure your clients or leads consider attending your upcoming event. Invitations are usually dull as companies invite hundreds of clients in one go using a generic invitation, “You’re invited!”.

If a stranger (yes, as a business, you’re a stranger) would invite you to an event, you usually pay less attention. But what if they address you directly? You instantly get the feeling the invitation is personal and the event will be adjusted to your needs. They took the time to handpick you and invite you to their upcoming webinar.

Personalizing invitations can have a positive impact on the participation of clients. And it can be used for more than simply webinars. Think about other use cases in the business such as surveys, in-person events or client meetings.

There is also a good use case for self-employed or entrepreneurs. Remember the wedding invitation example? You can use this type of automation to create birthday invitations, wedding invitations, send a personal thank you note or wish someone Happy Holidays. Designs can be made online and to elevate the personal touch, you can print and send a card to your clients.

There is nothing more effective than someone else talking about the success they found using your service or product. According to McKinsey 20-50% of purchase decisions are driven by word of mouth. As a business owner, you need to scale word of mouth. One of the best ways to do so is by leveraging case studies that are co-created with your clients.

Business success stories or case studies can convince new clients to buy your product. They are highly trustworthy as the client agreed to spend time and effort to help your business. Success stories are also key to showcase the success others had by leveraging your solution.

To maximize the impact of business success stories, you need to ensure the case study is related to a client that’s similar to the one you’re pitching to. Same industry and similar size. Presenting a business success story related to Coca-Cola to a local craft beer producer will not do the trick.

Automation can be leveraged to facilitate the process of making such success stories. You ask clients to fill in a form and link their answers to placeholders on a slide. Once they submit, the one-slide success story is directly generated. The only thing left for your business is to review and publish the success story!

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Imagine going to a product or service website, signing up and instantly receiving an email with a presentation attached completely tailored to your needs. Sounds like heaven? You can offer your clients this experience with content automation and it won’t take you too long.

All you need is a lead form that collects information from the prospect related to them and their business. In the back-end you have different presentation templates, for example based on the industry a lead can select. Once the form is submitted, you push the lead’s data to the respective content deck related to their industry. You now automatically send the deck to the lead.

It’s an instant positive dopamine hit for your B2B lead signing up on your website. They receive valuable information, have a positive experience with your business and get subconsciously pushed through your conversion funnel.

Using content automation towards leads is also interesting for you. It will decrease your lead to opportunity cycle as leads can receive information before a discovery call or demo. The tailored experience will prepare the lead for their next interaction with a member of your sales team. Everyone is winning!

Just like sending a webinar invitations, content automation can be extremely useful to drive actions after an event. Organizations invest time and resources in organizing events, but they often make the mistake of not having adequate follow-ups. Ideally, you want clients to take an action based on the webinar.

To do so, you need to ensure you send next steps to your clients or leads. Good next steps are specific and tailored. Doing this manually can be a tedious task. It’s one of the reasons most businesses fail to follow-up and subsequently drive impact.

It’s by leveraging data points of your customers in combination with automation, you can drive impact on revenue. Marketing and sales teams should outline a set of desired actions clients must take after a webinar. They then create a follow-up template with placeholders. Based on the data of customers, they let automation decide which three actions items are the most desirable. The placeholders are replaced with the action items and clients receive personalized next steps.

Is your organization spending more time on reporting than gathering insights? Most organizations do. They are too lost in downloading data and formatting reporting slides, losing track of what’s really important: getting intel to make strategic decisions.

Setting up a Weekly Business Review shouldn’t require a full reporting team or hours from your management to prepare slides. It should be a streamlined process where reliable data is available and stakeholders think about reasons behind the data. This is the only way they can come up with corrections or continue what’s working well.

Given all your data is most likely available in a CRM, Weekly or Quarterly Business Reviews would require only to set up the right automation. You select the data points you want to report on, format a business review deck and set up a weekly push to update your presentation. Your team can now focus on commentary so you know what is moving the needle.

Sellers creating decks, instead of pitching to clients. One of the worst inefficiencies within any sales organization. Sellers should focus on talking to clients. They are often too occupied with creating tailored presentations, reducing the time available to do their most important job.

Automation can play a key role in creating personalized sales pitch deck from data available in your CRM. Your sellers can pull a report from Salesforce or HubSpot and easily use the data points in their upcoming pitch. Want to tailor your deck based on client’s demographics, industry, feature adoption or spend? You can.

The personalization of sales pitch decks is one the main reasons tools like SlideFill exist. Through customization sellers can create a better narrative, resonate more with their audience and utilize personal data from the client in order to convince them to expand or adopt a new solution.

When you’re a customer success manager you definitely recognize the following question: “Can we please have a report of our last month’s usage of your product?”. You also instantly know you will lose a couple of hours in order to pull the report. While usage data is available, it’s often in an internal tool and not something you can simply share with clients.

It’s time consuming and annoying! To make things easier, CSMs can allow their customers to pull reports themselves or generate reports in a couple of clicks. The only thing they need to do is set up a report template, select the right client, push the data to the report and download it.

It’s a simple automation organizations can set up but often do not invest time or resources in. If your team is spending time on doing this manually, try to imagine how many hours you could save. A team of 50 people, spending an hour per week will spend 2,600 hours per year on generating these reports. That’s 1.5 employee you can save or reinvest in actually helping clients to expand their success with your business.

The power of automation can also be used outside of sales and marketing. Let’s have a look at a different use case: using content automation in HR for interview feedback or onboarding. Providing candidates with interview feedback can take a lot of time, while most of the feedback is already written in your HR software.

Utilizing AI you can summarize feedback and summarize feedback into one template showcasing to the candidate what they have done well and what they could improve next time.

The same automation can be leveraged to provide a personalized onboarding experience for new people joining your team(s) or to celebrate their anniversary at the company. Providing this personal touch will increase their morale when joining your company. It’s all in the details, but it will help you to retain amazing talent.

The creation of sales motions is often a centralized process. One team is responsible for creating the sales collateral and sellers across the globe use it to drive sales and actions. The problem is that these kinds of sales motions are often not tailored to different markets. This has a negative impact on conversion rates.

One way to solve this is to make a generic template with placeholders, allowing for local customization. You can allow sellers to fill in blanks at scale using automation such as specific insights, demographics or market-specific content. By doing so, the motion is still centrally controlled but adapted to local needs.

You can also do this process centralized in order to keep more control. Local sales enablement teams can provide which data points to use and your central team can use automation to generate unique go-to-market decks.

What about our marketing teams? You’re not forgotten! There are plenty of use cases for marketeers and digital marketing leads. The top of mind use case is the simplification of creating tailored social media creatives at scale.

Whether you are creating visuals for Instagram, LinkedIn or a newsletter; you can leverage automation to ensure every visual is tailored for the audience you’re targeting without having to create thousands of visuals manually. Plenty of marketing agencies use SlideFill to generate creatives in a few clicks.

Implementing content automation shouldn’t be difficult. In fact, you can start implementing personalization at scale today. That’s correct. You don’t need engineering or software developers to write any code. There are plenty of out-of-the-box solutions on the market.

The only thing you need to get started with any of these use cases is a source of data (a simple Google Sheet is sufficient), a presentation template and a tool such as SlideFill to help you out.

Before you start automating, you want to ensure all your data is correct. Automation takes away the manual need to update your content, but it can also lead to mistakes being made at scale. You want to prevent this from happening. The best prevention is ensuring your data is correct.

Next to that, it’s recommended to do manual reviews with your first iterations. You want to see if nothing is broken, data is populated as desired and mappings are set up correctly. Don’t be afraid to test and keep in mind, machines often make fewer mistakes than humans.

If you are struggling with data quality, you need to look into ways to improve your CRM data. There are multiple ways to improve the data you have available in your CRM before using it for content automation:

1. Emphasize consistency across data entry practices
2. Regularly schedule CRM data cleaning to maintain quality
3. Leverage automation tools for efficient data management
4. Evaluate data field conditions in your CRM
5. Utilize CRM integrations for enhanced data management

Rome wasn’t built in one day and your content automation shouldn’t be either. It’s recommended to start simple. SlideFill allows you to push data from Excel or Google Sheets to Google Presentations. You can start your automation simple.

Download customer data from your CRM, create a simple presentation template and connect the two through our software. It’s recommended to get going with content that can’t hurt your business, such as an invitation or thank you card you want to send to a couple of your customers. Expand gradually once you feel more confident.

Personalization will become more important over time. Generative AI is good for generating generic content, but over time customers will even get more tired of receiving the same email over and over. Providing a personalized experience to your customers will be insanely important to stand out amongst competitors.

The future of presentation automation is hyper-personalization. The same goes for eCommerce. Organizations need to prepare today on how they can enforce personalization in all their communications.

While AI is leading to content saturation, it’s also helpful to still generate certain parts of a presentation. Want to summarize feedback into a one-slider? Generate visually appealing images to support your content? AI will be able to help you and save time to even further customize your presentations at scale.

When you use Generative AI, make sure to evaluate what was generated. It’s still quite experimental software and some content that gets generated can be wrong or offensive to your customers.

Now you’ve implemented multiple content automation use cases, what’s next for you? You want to be able to measure the impact of course! The impact can be measured both in terms of savings and gains.

For savings, you will be mainly interested in how much time you and your employees have saved generating content at scale. This can be expressed in time and cost-savings (as employees need to get paid). The time and money can be reinvested in more revenue generating activities.

Lastly, you want to look at gains. Gains can come from quantity (additional material) or quality. By doing an A/B-test between non-personalized and personalized client facing material you can gain an understanding of the impact of personalization and the impact on key metrics such as the average conversion rate or revenue.

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Views are personal and not affiliated to employers.
No generative AI was used to write the article.
All examples are illustrative and fictional.