3 Brilliant Marketing Automation Hacks for Content Marketers

For the last few years, automation has been a buzzword in content marketing circles.

If you’ve been under the impression that it’s just another fad that’ll fizzle out eventually, this recent report from Markets and Markets will probably lead you to think otherwise.

According to the findings of the report, the global marketing automation sector is set to grow from $3.65 billion in 2014 to $5.5 billion in 2019.

The reason why businesses are increasingly adopting marketing automation software is because it reduces manual effort while simultaneously improving effectiveness.

It also enables sound decision-making, allowing marketers to make better use of the limited resources at their disposal. Through automation, marketers are able to achieve greater levels of customization, thereby enhancing customer experiences.

Here’s how you can use marketing automation at different stages of your social media and content marketing campaigns to drive engagement and improve ROI.

1. Automation in content creation

It’s true. You can have all your content written entirely by a computer program. While the technology itself is rather sophisticated, automated content often lacks depth and insight.

“Set-it-and-forget-it” applications definitely make content generation a whole lot easier, but they do little to establish your thought-leadership in the industry. Automating content generation entirely may not be the best idea, but there are several parts of the content creation process you could automate for better results.

The most critical and challenging aspect of content creation is ideation.

The content you create should not only be relevant to your business or industry, but should also interest your audience. However, you may often find yourself hitting a dead end when you’re looking for topics or themes to address through your content.

Content explorers help simplify the brainstorming process by recommending topics and ideas for your content. You can also use these tools to look for posts on similar topics and take inspiration from them.

For example, BuzzSumo lets you identify blog topics that have received the highest engagement based on specific keyword searches. As a result it helps you align your blogs with trending topics, increasing their appeal to your audience.

Other tools like Headline Analyzer score your headlines to tell you how effective they are in attracting readers’ attention.

Not only does it give your headline a score and a grade, but it also gives you a break up of the types of words you’ve used. Based on the word usage pattern it suggests a tip to help improve your score too.

In this example you’ll see that I’ve used 0% Emotional words, and trying to use some could better my score.

It also classifies your headline by type – generic, list post, how-to, and question headlines. Another important factor based on which it scores headlines is their length. The ideal headline length recommended by the tool is 6 words (56 characters).

Automating lead management processes could have a significant impact on your sales numbers. Although these processes may not always involve content creation, in some cases they do.

Lets assume you own an eCommerce website. Several prospects may have visited your virtual store and left without making a purchase. Using marketing automation tools will help you generate custom messages and ads for every person that visits your e-store.

These tools typically take into account the visitor’s purchase history and current location, and tailor a message that will nudge the prospect to make a purchase. You can also use automation in your email marketing campaigns to send more targeted messages to your prospects.

In a less direct manner, it is also useful in content creation since it lets you customize your message based on the buying stage that the prospect is in. Here’s an example:

2. Automation in content curation

If you’re looking to build a strong social media presence for your business, content curation is a must.

Social media has caused an unprecedented rise in content consumption and relying solely on content creation to meet the growing demand will simply not suffice. Content curation helps you stay visible and relevant in the transient social world.

However, curating content manually is a dreadfully time-consuming process, particularly if you maintain multiple social accounts.

Automating content curation will help you save a significant amount of time and effort, while also achieving consistency in your social media activities.

In most cases, content discovery engines recommend content based on a keyword search. The argument against such tools is that they affect the quality of content being shared. But that argument holds water only if you’ve set your tool on auto-pilot and are running posts without reviewing them.

In such a situation, you stand the risk of sharing content that may not reflect your business’ values, or worse – may promote your competitors.

It’s important to note that automating content curation is meant to reduce your effort, and not eliminate it entirely.

As long as you review all posts before you schedule them out, automating content curation will only work to the benefit of your business. In fact, more and more businesses are now using tools to automate content curation given their value proposition.

Content discovery and scheduling tools like DrumUp help you streamline your social media activities and significantly reduce the time and effort you invest in social media management. All you have to do is go through the recommended content for each account you add to the tool and pick the ones that you’d like to share.

You can also edit the post, schedule the same post to all/multiple accounts, add recommended hashtags, add images, choose a custom time of publishing and set posts on repeat schedules.

3. Automation in content distribution

Content distribution is an important aspect of your content marketing strategy. Ensuring that your content reaches the right people, at the right times is more important than simply creating content.

Without a holistic content distribution plan even the most exquisite piece of content could be left undiscovered.

You may have very well optimized your content for search engines, but with the amount of content being published online and the ease of access to all of it, your content distribution strategy needs to step up and move beyond those plain, old SEO tactics.

When you’re devising a content distribution plan, you should consider paid media, owned media as well as earned media.

Ads, newsletters, email subscriptions, and social media all hold tremendous potential in amplifying your content. And if you’d like to reach out to thousands of people through content distribution, automation is imperative.

Tools like MailChimp help ensure that your content reaches all the right eyes and ears, all at once.

Ask Katie Cross, and she’ll tell you just how good the little monkey postman in the blue hat is. The independent writer recommends the tool highly, particularly for its awesome analytics. Who wouldn’t like to know how many people are actually opening those emails?

Given the challenges of a highly competitive market, the question really isn’t whether you should use automation in content marketing; it’s how well you use it that makes all the difference.

So, what tools will you be using today?

Author Bio: Vasudha is a blogger at Godot Media, a leading blog writing services firm. She writes extensively about social media marketing and content marketing. Her other areas of interest include travel and business.

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3 Powerful Social Media Marketing Lessons From Game of Thrones

It’s that time of the year again.

A release of a compelling series designed for jaded audiences. And its captured a global audience of tens of millions. It can’t be viewed on traditional channels but pay per view.

TV addicts that were fed a diet of mass media television are leaving free to air television and are discovering something new. On demand video that doesn’t have advertising.

It’s the “Game of Thrones Premiere Day” (which I’m sure is a public holiday somewhere). It is upon us, and what does that mean?

Thrones. Themed. Everything.

It is unavoidable, so much so that it feels like the machine that is Game of Thrones (GoT) has become a living, breathing social beast.

But this level of cultural saturation comes with its own set of rules, and there are some great lessons we can take from those rules in social media marketing and communications. It’s not quite Valar morghulis (“all men must die”), but helpful all the same…

So before we look at the lessons, let’s look at the social and digital trends this phenomenon illustrates for us:

Borderless communication

We are now well and truly a global society – and this comes with an equal number of risks as it does advantages.

When GoT first hit our screens as a little known HBO book-to-TV series about kings and dragons, no one paid it much mind, and there was little scrutiny over the timing of the premiere. Fast forward 5 years, 26 Emmy awards and a global cult following, and something as simple as setting the time of the premiere becomes a very serious issue.

Nobody cares that HBO is an American cable channel producing content for predominantly American paying viewers – they want Thrones now. So much so, last year a petition kicked off in the UK trying to force Sky Atlantic to air the GoT premiere at the same time (or at least, directly after) it did in the US. The petition was successful, and the mandatory GoT simulcast was born. Global audiences have completely disregarded traditional borders in favour of consuming content…NOW.

Borderless, but not timeless

Of course, one of the biggest drivers behind the simulcast is to avoid spoilers – because the other side of the coin to being able to communicate with anyone in the world, is that you can do so at any time. And really, who needs sleep when you could be watching GoT live and arguing with someone from London on Twitter at 3am. #Whatatimetobealive

The “Fear of missing out” (or FOMO for lovers of acronyms) is real – and now companies are getting on board, with the UK creative technology firm +rehabstudios actually giving their employees the morning off on GoT Premiere day… Seriously, it’s in their employment contracts:

Source: REHABSTUDIO/MASHABLE COMPOSITE

However, there is still a certain level of etiquette that comes with potentially “spoiler” content. Any related trend related should carry a #SpoilerAlert warning. That’s if you don’t want to lose followers over a pop culture reference.

The common courtesy is to use a warning on content within the first 24 hours. After that it’s a judgement call on how big the spoiler is. Then it’s how adversely your target market would react to the reveal if they’re not up to speed.

We are not Lannisters

That is to say, very few of us are willing to pay our debts. The GoT Season 5 premiere episode holds the title for the second most concurrent downloads for users sharing a single file, and the second fastest TV episode to be illegally pirated more than 10 million times.

The outright winner? The Season 5 Finale of course.

Unfortunately for many media or content companies, the moral to this story is that it’s very difficult convincing people they should be paying for content, no matter how “premium” that content may be.

Can you blame audiences?

Even the journalists don’t want to wait around or have to pay for the good stuff?

In the US last week, a journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a DVD screener (something GoT refused to distribute this year after last years’ press screener leaked), after showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss confirmed that President Obama will receive the advance copies, because, hey, if it’s good enough for Obama…(At the time of writing this, the request has actually progressed.)

This is obviously a serious issue, but the conundrum is the same – how do we convince audiences, consumers and clients alike that our content is worth something, whilst still competing with the myriad of free sources providing similar material?

The simple answer.

It is a balance of trust, quality and relevance. But finding and maintaining that balance is harder than surviving a wedding in Westeros…

3 lessons on social media marketing

Ok, I swear I have a point to all of this… So what can we learn from Game of Thrones?

1. Keep abreast of current trends

Use these to your advantage, but you MUST do your research – there’s no point jumping onto a trend that is so irrelevant you look foolish, or so serious you come across as insensitive and uninformed. I could list a number of social media faux pas made by companies that didn’t double check what they were talking about when they chimed in on a trending topic, but we’ve all seen it happen. It takes as much time to check the origin and tone of the trend as it does to draft the apology post – if you have to choose to do one, go with the former.

2. Timing isn’t everything

But it’s probably the most impactful tool you have in social. Because in social, it’s the quick and the dead. Social media is constantly moving, and often – depending on your platform of choice – an algorithm will quickly decide whether or not you’ve hit the mark with your audience, and if you haven’t, you fade into irrelevance.

Before you hit publish, ask yourself three simple questions:

• Is my target audience likely to be using this platform right now?
• Is this content relevant to what my target audience would be looking for or willing to read at the moment?
• Is this content evergreen, or do I have one shot to get this right?

3. You can’t own the best social media conversations

No one can control them and you cannot buy them – so don’t expect your audiences to pay. Not today.

That being said, by being part of the conversation authentically, you build trust and you remain relevant – what you do with that relationship is then up to your product or service!

Valar dohaeris

Author: Kate Prince – Based in Sydney, Australia, Kate is a Communications Adviser and TV addict. Start a conversation with her on Twitter, @kate_prince

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The Hard Truth About Social Media And What You Need to Do About It

It had been done.

The application form had been filled in. The schools attended, the relationships and the interest fields had been mulled over. The final submit button was pushed.  I was live.

Then something happened.

People I hadn’t seen in 30 years started popping up on my screen. A bit older, greyer and more seasoned than I remembered. This was global and virtual connections at scale.

That was 8 years ago and I was hooked.

Connecting with friends, college pals and past colleagues was now tech enabled. Sharing life’s moments and experiences was instant and also visual.

It was one to many.

Promise revealed

The web was starting to reveal its promise. It was coming to life. It felt human.

The hardware, software and communication networks were becoming an extension of our creative and tribal humanity enabled by bits and bytes. The neurons were not alone but now had an amplifier.

Twitter was also part of this puzzle and offered a different experience. Instant, simple and a tad confounding.

The new social networks also provided public validation of our creations. That simple tweet, like or share showed acceptance and popularity.

The other thing to love about these shiny new social toys was that they were free and devoid of ads. So we all played. It was like the Wild West. Land claims, some unsavoury characters and a sense of adventure were all part of the landscape.

But then it dawned.

These platforms were more than friend networks….it was much, much more. We were all about to discover what this was.

The pivot

Marketers, publishers and bloggers started to discover the power of a tweet and a Facebook update. The broad global adoption of these online communities reached critical mass. Hundreds of millions started to pile on.

Then it was billions.

This mass community made content move, drove traffic and brand awareness. It gave the invisible attention. Made videos go viral. No permission was needed to publish except the access to a computer and the Internet.

Small creative endeavours were discovered and businesses started to flourish online. The social networks didn’t make us creative they just allowed us all to be noticed. You just had to learn how to use it.

Then Facebook decided to pivot.

The Facebook profile had a new sibling. The Facebook page. The gold rush of the Wild West started in earnest. Social media was now touted as the marketing nirvana for business and brands. Message to the CEO from the marketing department and external social media consultants. “Don’t worry about the ROI…. that will happen“.

Advertising banners appeared and the masses got a bit annoyed but the marketers were chuffed. Google Adwords had a serious competitor.

But then something happened.

The hard truth

A clever data scientist (with way too many IQ points) was having a cocktail at a smart bar in Silicon Valley. An idea was born. Let’s jumble the newsfeed on Facebook. We will tell you what is important to view and……we will serve up ads on your timeline.

They have retired to the Bahamas and are now sipping Pina Coladas on the bonuses from that one idea!

Reaching your fans and friends was now dictated by the network’s computer algorithm. Organic traffic from fans almost disappeared overnight.

But the advertising revenue soared. It had to. It was past time to make payroll and keep the lights on without begging for more money from the venture capitalists.

With old social you had built a tribe, they had found your visible content and shared it with passion. Now it was buried and often never to be seen again.

Twitter has followed and Instagram is on the verge.

So the social media I knew had died. It is now just becoming another media channel that is pay to play. The financial reality is turning social into a freemium business model.

The hard truth is that the free and organic social media marketing doesn’t work like it used to. And that’s a bit annoying.

What to do

The good news. All’s not lost.  Things change and marketers and businesses will need to evolve. So what can we do?

First you need to  be aware of the changes and trends. Then you need to get cracking on the following:

• Concentrate more on owning your traffic. Convert social and search traffic into a loyal email subscribers. Guess what happens when a millennial joins the workforce. They get an email address. Email marketing is not going away anytime soon. Use this to reach your audience when you want without a Facebook algorithm getting in the way
• Invest in a digital marketing automation platform to do more with less. Scaling your marketing in a splintered media world needs proper grown up tools.
• Re-purpose content onto other networks. Take your best posts and publish on Linkedin, Medium, Flipboard and even Slideshare.
• Measure more and concentrate on what works best. The Pareto principle is a truism. Concentrate your efforts on 20% of the effort that produces 80% of the results. So start looking for a data scientist to add to your team.
• Pay for social media traffic. But don’t do this unless you can measure the cost of leads and sales.
• Don’t aim for the quick fix. The digital marketing game is not a sprint…..it is a marathon. Create pillar content around your key phrases you want to be found for on a Google search. Digital marketing is an asset build.
• Work with influencers and collaborate with joint venture partners. The old art of networking is alive and kicking. But it is now global, web based and niche focused.

Digital marketing is a multi-discipline ecosystem that requires an understanding of how it all fits together. Search, social, email, content and automation technology all need to be in the mix.

The old social media we all knew was exciting. But it has evolved. It had to.

You just need to adapt.

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How to Increase Your Authority with Evergreen Content

A great majority of the blog content you read, you never read again.

When was the last time you went back and soaked in the glory of this article about Craft-Toberfest? What is “Craft-Toberfest” anyhow? Does anyone care?

Ok I confess, the Craft-Toberfest piece is mine. It might not be the best example of a disposable post. Someone could come back to it next October. But by then there will be newer articles about Oktoberfest.

How about this – by the end of this article I’ll come back to it and we’ll see if it meets any evergreen qualifications.

Why evergreen content?

There’s good reason why sites want to post new content all the time. It’s called SEO. According to Appnovation, new content with 2-3% keyword density will get the highest rating in Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

But what about authoritative posts? If an article isn’t authoritative, if it doesn’t have relevant information, the advice is for sites to take it down during redesign.

The old stuff is called ‘legacy content’. When a third party is linking to an article with “outdated information”, it’s a shoddy legacy for a host site. The host has incentive to take it down and make room for currently relevant content.

That’s why you should write evergreen posts. So your work stays up, so it stays useful to an audience and therefore, a website. Evergreen content maintains authority over time because it continues to be relevant.

But how do you go about writing evergreen posts?

Consider overall relevance

Whatever niche you’re working in, there are underlying topics of relevance. Let’s stay right here at home and consider the SEO niche.

Here’s an example of a piece that’s not evergreen – it’s an SEO trends piece that will only apply to 2016:

Yes, Google cares about quality. And this piece will be highly useful to look back to in the future as a reference point. We’ll be able to ask, ‘how have the SEO trends changed since this was published?’

But we won’t be able to say, ‘this is a stand-alone piece I look to for SEO info no matter what year it is’. It’s not meant to be.

This piece, on the other hand, deals with the underlying concept of SEO as we know it:

Note that the piece is keyed on content marketing – highly relevant for Jeff Bullas’ niche. It’s looking at the underlying topic of using your content to optimize for search engines.

It’s a tricky niche for evergreen content. Google is always changing. But the post gets at the underlying factors at hand:

• We create content as a marketing tool
• We can optimize that content for Google’s search engine
• We have to adapt our strategy to Google’s changes
• There are tools we can use to do this

From this, we learn:

• Evergreen content doesn’t limit itself to current trends

• Evergreen content keys in on a topic highly relevant to a site’s niche

• Evergreen content is addressed more to beginners than experts

Create staying power

Author Taylor Tomita posted the example above about six months ago. If the post is evergreen, it will continue garnering views, comments, likes, shares, and backlinks.

The post has the hallmarks of being evergreen, but is it evergreen? Six months isn’t long enough to tell. Let’s look at a certifiably evergreen post and analyze what gives it staying power.

One way to tell if content is evergreen is by looking at its backlinks. In terms of search engine rankings, backlinks are the third most important factor.

If I Google “content marketing” this article comes up first:

It’s no wonder this is first. If I go to Moz and enter the URL for this post in Open Site Explorer, I see it has 11,524 total backlinks, which earns the article a higher Page Authority than the domain it’s on:

This includes 386 links discovered in the last 60 days. So the article continues to maintain credibility. Why?

You might say, ‘it’s number one in Google for “content marketing” because the name of the site is contentmarketinginstitute.com.’ Duh. But the article wouldn’t still keep getting links purely because of the domain it’s on.

The article keeps getting links because:

• It offers definitive insights – gives us an authoritative definition

• It’s well-written – not many people want to link to a post with sloppy grammar, inaccessible language, or tons of typos
• It has been promoted on social channels, and it’s been shared more than four-thousand times – this increases visibility and increases likelihood of getting links
• It tackles a topic head-on – it poses a question and provides an answer
• It provides links to other helpful articles on the site

Truthfully, the clincher for the article is its clear and prominent definition of content marketing. A ton of the articles linking to it quote this definition.

Prioritize value

What is value? Value is service. Value means a reader can return to the post again for information. Or, the reader returns because it’s just a gem of a post and they want to share it.

There are specific kinds of posts more equipped to provide value than others.

The How-To Post

Not all of these apply. If it’s a how-to about tech that will soon be outdated, or a ‘how to win at SEO this year’, it’s not evergreen. The how-to makes for great evergreen material because plenty of people Google ‘how to_______’.

Here’s an evergreen how-to:

Simple. The post has about twelve hundred words. It contains a good deal of information, detailing different options on how to pay for business school, with appropriate links. The subject matter is not likely to get old in the foreseeable future. Done and done.

The Tips-and-Tricks Post

Similar to the how-to, the ‘tips’ post aims to inform. It’s more suggestive and less comprehensive, which opens it up to a serial format. But the individual tips article stands on its own:

This offers the chance for visually-rich content.

Each tip should be unique.

Tips in the above post are highly focused on the subject matter, meant for beginners, and include tools.

Including suggestions on tools is a great way to add value.

The History Post

Posts about the history of something are a challenge. For one, you’re competing with a lot of definitive educational content (and Wikipedia). Two, you need to be comprehensive – to an extent.

If your focus is tight enough in your niche you can avoid a lot of lengthy exposition on a broad topic. Instead of a history of marketing, a history of content marketing. Both of these articles show up ahead of Wikipedia in the SERP:

Courtesy of Uberflip

Courtesy of TodayMade

Note both of these titles do two things:

• Include “history of” in the title – the Wiki page does not do this
• Make a claim towards uniqueness – the history is ‘not what you think’, or it is the ‘real’ history

The content in both the articles is easier to read than the Wiki, with more visuals.

The List Post

We’ve all seen these. To be evergreen, they need to offer a definitive list of resources:

Courtesy of Simplilearn

115 is so many, it’s tough to imagine more. Provide links to each resource. It doesn’t hurt to have a catchy title. The thing about lists, though, is that the links may expire, so make sure to go back and check them periodically.

In the example above, the author offers links to key articles on inbound marketing. Articles offering insights are great resources to link to, because site managers rarely remove them. Especially if they’re evergreen.

The FAQ Post

Frequently Asked Questions get at the root of your niche and directly reflect what people want to know.

Here’s an example from Problogger:

The formula is simple:

• Pay attention to the most frequently asked questions on your site
• Weed out the questions that are dated or part of a current trend in your niche
• Take the remaining top questions and turn them into blog posts

FAQ posts get at the heart of evergreen content as a beginner’s jumping-off point. They address what’s really important to your audience.

The Definition Post

The “What is Content Marketing” post I analyzed earlier is a good example of a definition post. Another option is to define an acronym in your niche, then analyze it.

A post defining ‘SERP’opens itself up to a discussion on the evolution of search engines, and how engines such as Google use algorithms.

A post defining CMS opens itself up to how sites use Content Management Systems, the benefits of open source, etc.

In any case, the difficult thing about definition posts is there are a ton out there already. When I put “Content Management System” into Google I get nearly 300 hundred million results. They aren’t all definition posts, but I’m contending with Wikipedia in the top three spots.

That’s why I go back to Taylor Tomita’s article on “How to Maximize Your Content Marketing Strategy with Search Engines”. Since it’s an evergreen article, I can look to it for lasting advice. I want to know how to make my hypothetical ‘What is CMS’ post rank in Google. Getting it to rank will drive brand awareness. An evergreen post on content marketing will definitely serve my purposes.

Here are some other ideas for evergreen posts:

• Personal Posts: it’s a risk because people might not care; but if you master your niche posts about you and your experience scream authority
• Biographies: a lively and detailed biography of an industry leader (especially one who’s passed away) is of use to everyone
• Interviews: like bios, interviews of industry leaders or up-and-comers (or Jane Doe if she’s interesting) help grant authority to your content
• Case studies: this is the bio of a brand’s success (or failure); people will refer back to these later on when they’re doing research
• Motivational: motivation, and the lack thereof, is timeless; make sure it relates to your niche
• Myth–buster: if you’re lucky enough to discover a myth in your industry, tear it down and your post will stand forever
• Humorous: good evergreen humor tells the truth and pokes fun at industry foibles
• Strategic: this is like a how-to or tips post, but more cerebral and philosophical; make sure to stay grounded

Do you have other ideas for evergreen posts? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Evergreen sticks

Did the Craft-toberfest post at the beginning pass the evergreen test? Well, it does detail the history of Oktoberfest. But it’s not offering insights to beginners and it’s not necessarily at the core of the niche (craft brewing). An evergreen example would be ‘Best Ways to Celebrate Oktoberfest around the World’ or something like that.

Evergreen is what sticks. With that, the ultimate test is time. Develop a core of evergreen articles that nail the core of your niche. Then, your more timely articles can refer back to the evergreen daddies again and again.

Guest Author: Daniel Matthews is a writer, part-time social worker, and musician who loves to explore topics ranging from technology to business culture and psychology. He has written for Social Media Today, Triple Pundit, Smart Data Collective, and YFS Magazine, among others. You can find him on Twitter @danielmatthews0

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