WEBSITES • EMAIL MARKETING • SEO • SOCIAL MEDIA

The Content Connection

10 Writing Tips Your Content Marketing Needs Today

A major struggle all content marketers face is producing enough content. Thankfully, we professional writers have come up with some tried-and-true ways to keep the content coming and make it read well, too. Check out these ten writing tips for producing consistently great content that your audience will want to read—and share.

1. Read more.

The more you read, the better your writing will be. As you read, take stock of each article and how it’s constructed. How do authors successfully grab—and hold—your attention? Where do they lose you? Stay in research mode, whether you’re looking for how an article is crafted or for topics to feed your own content.

2. Write every day.

Practicing writing is another key way to not only improve your writing, but also make it easier to get into the flow of producing content. Commit to writing something every day, whether it’s a blog post or product description.

3. Write in your own voice.

Every piece of content you produce needs to be stamped with your brand voice. That way, when someone reads your content, they’ll know it’s coming from you. It will feel authentic and, as a result, trustworthy. If you’re not sure what kind of style you want apply for your brand, take a look at writing you like, and pick and choose the parts that fit your brand and the vibe you want to portray.

4. Keep it concise and focused.

The best writing is clear and easy to read. Ask yourself: Did I stick to the most important parts of my topic? Are there any words I can omit?

5. Make your content useful.

Useful content will automatically be engaging for the audience you’re trying to reach. Ask yourself: does this article answer a question my customers actually are struggling with? Does it offer actionable steps to solve a problem my customers deal with on a regular basis?

6. Be original.

Your company has something unique to offer, right? Put that one-of-a-kind perspective in everything you write, whether it’s the innovative solutions you’ve come up with for the issues that your target audience faces or refreshing takes on hot topics in your industry.

7. Rewrite.

Writing is a process. In your first draft, you’re just getting your ideas down quickly without worrying about the finished product. The majority of your writing time will take place in the later stages of rewriting and refining through multiple rounds of edits.

8. Get feedback from an editor.

In the process of rewriting, it is super helpful to have an editor read the article and offer feedback on style, grammar, voice, and the overall content. If you don’t have an editor on your staff, ask a coworker with a great grasp of 1) your brand voice, 2) your target audience, and 3) the language in which you’re writing.

9. Take time to write a great headline.

Titles are very important. They’re what get readers to pay attention to your content. In fact, according to Copyblogger, 80% of people will read your headline, but only 20% of those people will read the rest of your content. What makes a title great? It not only sparks readers’ interest, but also provides information about what reader can learn by reading your article.

10. Be accurate.

When the ideas you’re writing about come from somewhere else, be sure to cite your source accurately. If you include a statistic, let your readers know where it came from. Better yet, include a link to the report, so your readers can review the information themselves. Just know that you want to double-check that your source is reliable. Everything you cite—or fail to cite—reflects back onto you.

 

There you have it, ten tips to help you create relevant, compelling, and easy-to-read content. Great writing takes time, but if you follow these writing tips consistently, you’ll be well on your way to engaging your audience and building a following.

Need help writing content for your brand? Get in touch with the content experts at Filament. Great content is what we do best!

How to Create a Social Automation Strategy

The benefits of creating a social automation strategy are far-reaching. Consistency of content and greater time efficiencies are two huge advantages of marketing automation that will help to drive your social media plan further with minimal effort.

The greatest benefit of an automated social media strategy is that it removes the tedious nature of posting, allowing for more time to spend engaging with your customers.

How can your business create a social automation strategy optimized for success? By finding the right tools to automate and then creating a strategy that aligns with keeping your brand authentic and customers captivated across all of your social channels.

Find the right tools for you

There are hundreds of wonderful tools to automate your social media content. Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social are three popular examples of tried and true social automation tools. It is up to you to define what you need in a tool beyond the basics of scheduling posts in advance across a variety of channels and monitoring those social channels for mentions and questions from your customers.

Create an editorial calendar with diverse content

While it’s tempting to schedule the same post across multiple channels each day—don’t. Repetition on social equals boredom and it’s guaranteed that more than a few of your customers might follow you on multiple social platforms and will benefit from seeing different creative and copy on each.

Instead use the extra time you’ll save by scheduling your posts in advance to create thoughtful and fresh content across all of your social networks. Make sure your content aligns with your brand voice but doesn’t feel repetitive to your audience.

Schedule time to engage with your customers

Don’t forget the human behind social. Although social automation can raise the bar on productivity levels, it’s important to add a personal touch and set aside time each day to interact with customers, answer questions and truly manage your social community.

Alway monitor your posts

A key “don’t” is to set it and forget it. When scheduling posts for weeks at a time be sure to be aware of the day and time of each post to ensure that you are monitoring it for customer responses. This is beneficial for a variety of reasons. First, if your post garners a number of questions and comments from your audience you are quick to response. Second, mistakes happen. If a post receives a negative reaction you are able to quickly remedy the situation and make a correction.

 

Automation is a great tool to add to your social media strategy. The key is to utilize its benefits in moderation while still staying actively engaged and available to your customers. Need help creating a cohesive automated social media plan? Contact us today to get started.

Strategies for Successful Automated Email Campaigns

Marketing automation is a must for email marketing. It leads to better targeting, more engagement and quicker conversions, and can save your company valuable time and money. Knowing this, who wouldn’t want to jump in with both feet? Before you do, make sure to have defined goals and a well-considered strategy in place in order to get the most bang for your automation buck. Here are a few top strategies to consider before you move forward with email marketing automation.

 

Lead Nurturing

First, you’ll want to put together a diagram that identifies your buyers’ journey, triggers along said journey, content gaps along the way, and sales and marketing responsibilities to nurture leads. Create and review this diagram with both your sales and marketing teams.

 

Drip Campaigns

A drip campaign consists of targeted emails sent at regular intervals or triggered by specific user actions in order to welcome prospects and nurture leads. It can help you stay in regular contact with prospective clients while delivering targeted content. However, triggering the delivery of relevant emails relies on the right rules for automatically sending content related to leads’ specific activities. Be sure to track lead activity and create respective lead nurturing campaigns that respond accurately to lead behavior and demographics. In addition, you’ll want to measure engagement with your campaign so that you’ll know when a lead has moved down the buyer’s journey far enough to approach directly.

 

Dynamic Content

Use dynamic content as part of your drip campaigns to be sure you’re sending relevant content to leads at the right time. You can create a personalized experience for your subscribers by delivering customized content that reflects their behavior and history with your company. For example, you might want to vary your call to action based on the subscriber’s title. Or perhaps you include special offers based on geographical location or past purchases.

 

Segmentation

Many marketing automation tools offer smart segmentation to help you deliver highly targeted messaging. You’ll create segmentation rules that automatically build lists based on the criteria you choose. Don’t forget to use these tools with existing customers as well as prospects to keep nurturing customers beyond conversion.

 

Monitor Performance

Use your tool’s automated reports to track how your email campaigns are performing. This tactic will be important as you optimize future campaigns and as you illustrate how automated email is directly contributing to achieving your business goals.

 

Remember, the strategies you choose ought to depend on your goals and your industry. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for another. Hone these strategies to your business to make them work for you.

 

Ready to craft compelling emails for your prospects? Get in touch with Filament for help creating relevant content tailored to your target audience.

Strategies for SEO Automation

SEO is designed to pull in organic visitors, but a well thought out search engine optimization plan does more than draw organic eyes to your website. It’s responsive to your market’s needs and wants as well as shifts in your industry. It’s also heavily reliant upon analytics. This is where SEO and marketing automation come together.

 

In the very beginning, on a single-cell level, SEO was about keywords. Optimization has grown from those simple and sometimes shady beginnings to what it is today, which is still in great flux. The user experience has become a key part of a good search engine optimization strategy. Google really wants to reward websites that deliver what searchers want, not sites the falsely lure people in. This is why the user experience is an intricate part of modern SEO. It’s also why SEO and marketing automation are now finding wonderful synergies.

 

The question now is, how do you create an SEO automation plan that uses assets from both SEO and analytics to complement each other.

 

Analytics

Whether you use one of the free analytics programs (Google Analytics is, of course, a favorite) or a different platform, you’re getting regular data about your audience based on the SEO plan you have in place and their reaction to it. This is valuable information that can then be put into action in your marketing automation approach.

 

Web Tracking

Your marketing automation campaign should be integrated with your SEO strategies so it can track the results and help you determine which campaigns are working and what to tweak. This data can be just as useful for SEO as an analytics platform, just in a different way.

 

Engagement

The real goal of both SEO and marketing (of any sort) is to get people engaged. Automation is just an easier way of inciting engagement in a variety of areas by pulling site visitors through the funnel more efficiently. SEO is a basic way of reaching an audience who is ready to be engaged. Using SEO to develop effective content and then using that content in your marketing automation plan is the golden ticket of SEO automation.

 

Dynamic Customization

Different marketing efforts can easily be created for different target audiences through automation. This is where it gets complex and, frankly, very impressive. Let’s assume you have an Adwords campaign selling pet food and Sue Smith randomly clicks on a keyword. She will get the average experience on your webpage; very generic. But let’s say our marketing automation recognizes Susie Smythe clicked on a keyword and she runs a cat shelter. Susie will automatically have her experience tailored for cats with different images, slightly different content, cat-centric products, testimonials from cat owners, etc. This clearly is more appealing to her. It answers her needs immediately and will most likely prompt her to engage and become a brand advocate.

 

The ultimate goal of pulling SEO and marketing automation is Dynamic Customization that uses data from both ends to get engagement based on a tailored experience. The downside is that you will need to have content for all of your “buckets” of customers. If we stick with the example above, you’ll need a cat food experience, a dog food experience, bird food etc. The upside is that Filament is here to help you customize content. Get in touch with Filament for help creating customized content for your target audience.

4 Key Strategies for Content Marketing Automation

Content marketing automation has the potential to generate better quality leads, nurture said leads more easily, and convert more of them while in the process improving your bottom line, gathering great data, and leaving you more time to focus on strategy. Sounds great, right?

Before we can reap the valuable benefits of marketing automation, we need to figure out how to best use this technology for our business. There are numerous marketing automation strategies a business could employ. Here we delve into just a few to help you get started.

Define Your Goals

Why are you using marketing automation in the first place? Make sure you have a thorough understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish before you begin. Let your goals drive the tools you choose and how you build and optimize your campaigns.

Buyer Personas

Take the time to create well thought-out buyer personas. Build out their stories and add context. Identify what makes your customers who they are, the communities they’re part of both online and offline, their behaviors online and offline, and what content is most valuable to them. Let these buyer personas direct the path of what and how you’re automating content.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is key for making it easy for sales to focus on the right leads. Start by defining what a quality lead looks like and how they behave. Makes sure your sales and marketing teams work together to identify the elements of a quality lead.

Don’t rely solely on information provided by your prospects. Instead, use what you’ve observed. For example, test which actions correlate with buying. Prospects who visit a detailed pricing page may be further down the sales funnel than those who attend a webinar. Know what actions are closest to conversion and then use that information to score leads as they enter and move through your funnel.

Relevant Content

When it comes to nurturing leads, relevance is the most important aspect of content. You have many options for ensuring your content is as relevant as possible to your buyer’s needs and wants.

For starters, you can map your content to the buyer’s journey. This strategy will allow you to deliver interesting, useful content to your leads that will help guide them down the funnel.

Consider which content types your audience is hungry for at different points in the journey. Most marketing automation software offers options for targeting and personalization that will help you deliver your content to the right prospects. You can also find out directly from your prospects what makes content relevant based on how they engage with it.

 

Marketing automation offers tons of great benefits for your content marketing efforts. However, before you get started, make sure you have solid strategies like the ones above in place to meet your goals.

Get in touch with Filament for help creating relevant content that will help nurture your leads down the sales funnel.

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Automation

The benefits of automation are well known in the financial world with tools like bill pay and the ability to automate everything from your savings to 401Ks. Now with the ease of marketing automation you are able to transfer those same valuable strategies to your social efforts.

Having a well-planned editorial calendar is key. When paired with social media automation you are able to schedule posts well in advance. This allows your team to develop a cohesive content strategy across all of your social channels.

Social media automation also helps to improve the reach and engagement of the content you post. Many marketing automation platforms not only allow you to schedule out posts weeks in advance but through algorithms also take into account the best times to post your content ensuring they go live to your audience at peak times.

But the greatest benefit of automation is being able to plan ahead, allowing a few great tools to do the work for you so that you and your team are able to concentrate on growing other areas of your business.

Here are a few do’s and don’ts to ensure success with your social media automation strategy.

Do: Be Consistent

Marketing automation helps to create consistency in a posting schedule. This is valuable not only for your team but also for your audience. Consistency allows your customer to know what to expect from you and when.

Consistency also helps your team to plan out content weeks in advance. Unexpected vacation or sick days don’t have to stall your content. And having your posts scheduled ahead of time removes the last-minute stress of composing the perfect tweet on a daily basis, in turn avoiding embarrassing mistakes or grammatical errors.

Don’t: Set It and Forget It

Although it’s tempting, no brand should automate 100% of the time. The best part of building a brand is the opportunity to engage with your customers directly on social media.

Be smart about automating to save you time but be careful not to lessen the engagement with your audience. Find the right tools, set the right schedule while still staying in the conversation, commenting and answering questions on a daily basis. Remember customers appreciate authenticity. They are engaging with your brand because of the people behind it.

Do: Focus on Overall Social Strategy

Automation frees up valuable time to be productive, creative and thoughtful when mapping out the content strategy for your brand. Set aside time early in the week or month to brainstorm and create well-planned content. This will help raise the level of content created and ensure that it is inline with your overall social media strategy.

Don’t: Schedule Posts Too Far In Advance

It’s important to keep in mind breaking news and current events. When social posts are scheduled ahead of time and not adapted to breaking news a brand can come off as appearing insensitive. Be sure to be aware of the posting days and times in order to modify the schedule due to unforeseen circumstances.

 

Overall, scheduling posts ahead of time allows your team to be more productive throughout the day. Gone are the mornings of “What should we post today?” With social media automation the posts are in the queue and ready to go, so that your team can concentrate efforts on creativity, strategy, analytics, testing and providing exceptional customer service.

Need help automating your brand’s social presence? Set up a time to meet with Filament today to create a cohesive editorial calendar that sets your social media apart from the rest.

 

Marketing Automation & SEO

Whether you have already jumped on the marketing automation bandwagon, are thinking about it, or are just looking for more information, it’s vital that we make one thing clear — marketing automation does not do your search engine optimization (SEO) for you. You may, however, find that incorporating marketing automation into your website helps you get the SEO ball rolling.

If you’re looking to lighten the load of your marketing team or create a system with simplicity and synergies, an automated marketing platform can do the job for you. With these systems in place you can easily create personalized messages to your customers/client base, generate leads and even convert customers. Automating and replacing repetitive tasks is a clear benefit, freeing up resources and/or valuable employee time for other efforts.

While we’re stressing that marketing automation and SEO are not the same thing, we also need to press the point that they not only can play together, they actually belong in the same sandbox. The analytical data gleaned from all marketing efforts gives you a wonderful starting point to hone your SEO plans or to create a new one from the ground up. You learn where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they used to bring them there and how they then interacted with your webpage. Pairing that knowledge with your marketing plan gives you the information necessary to constantly stay in line with your audience and give them what they’re asking for. This can lead to a greater ROI (return on investment) and improved execution of your SEO plan.

So let’s jump to the chase here, marketing automation and SEO are not the same thing but they work together quite well. The following are ways you should be pairing the two disciplines to get the most value from their synergies.

 

Content  

Your SEO rich content will drive your marketing and will then help you to engage with customers/fans.  Great content with seamless SEO integration helps you reach and connect with your target audience.

 

Analytics

As we mentioned above, marketing automation gives you a wealth of analytical data which can then be woven into your SEO plan. Learn what keywords are really driving your ROI and make them your top priority. Be prepared to add flexibility to a stagnant SEO plan for the best results.

 

Cross Promotions and Link Building

Marketing automation can give you more specific information on referral sources, which is a fantastic opportunity for partnerships. Remember that complementary working partnerships are great link building opportunities. This is one of the building blocks of SEO.

 

The important take away is that whether a marketing automation plan is in your website game plan or not, a solid SEO plan is essential in all cases. Contact Filament to learn more about how SEO can help your website thrive and to add an SEO-driven content plan to your efforts.

Why Email Automation is a Must

From welcome emails to renewal notices, email automation make marketers lives easier in a variety of ways. With an automated email campaign, you set up the email once, and then it’s automatically sent to a subscriber whenever that person meets a specific trigger. Marketing automation has been a top marketing trend over the past few years. If you haven’t yet adopted it, it’s time to consider the top benefits of this technology.

1. Better lead management & nurturing

Marketing automation tracks your leads for you and delivers key messages at specific touch-points in the customer journey. Because your email messages are delivered at the right time to a more targeted lead list, the leads you generate are not only higher quality, but also more likely to convert.

2. Better segmentation & personalization

Using behavioral triggers, email automation offers unique individual targeting by creating “segments of one,” i.e. micro-segments that target each customer uniquely. This allows you to convert prospects into long-term, high-value customers.

3. Better engagement

Email automation makes it possible to send timely, personalized, and hyper-relevant emails to your subscribers on a consistent basis. Not surprisingly, those emails get more opens and more clicks, driving more visits to your site and greater revenue for your business. Automated emails not only make it easier to nurture prospects, but also to encourage greater product adoption, upselling, brand evangelism, and additional purchases.

4. Better data

Marketing automation has the added benefit of providing detailed reports that tell you what’s working and what’s not. Its granular insights can teach you how to engage with both prospects and customers.

5. Better value

Because marketing automation takes care of tasks that were once time-consuming, it can save your company valuable time and money. Instead of manually sending email-signup thank-yous and personalizing emails, marketers can now focus on high-level tasks like email marketing strategy and nurturing leads at the end of the sales funnel.

With marketing automation, the automated emails you can send are limited only by your creativity. Check back with us in a couple of weeks for top email automation strategies to make the most of this technology.

What benefits (or pitfalls) have you seen for your business as a result of using automated email campaigns? Share your experience in the comments section below.

 

Ready to start sending automated emails? Contact Filament for help crafting the perfect emails for your target audience.

Top 6 Benefits of Content Marketing Automation

Marketing automation offers substantial benefits for marketers, from lead generation to streamlining segmentation to customer retention, and a lot more. In today’s post, we’ll examine the top six benefits of this important marketing tool.

First, let’s get clear on what marketing automation is. HubSpot defines marketing automation as “the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions.” Marketing automation automates repetitive tasks, such as emails, social media and other website actions, with the goal of making these tasks easier. It can be used for all types of businesses, whether they’re B2C or B2B.

Now, on to the benefits of marketing automation:

1. Generate Better Quality Leads

The Annuitas Group recently reported that businesses using marketing automation to nurture prospects saw as much as a 451% increase in qualified leads. Marketing automation software increases your ability to generate more and better quality leads. How? It helps identify people with an interest in your products and services based on online action they’ve taken, such as by signing up for your email newsletter, browsing your site for long enough or downloading an eBook, and then sends targeted digital messages based on the action taken at the exact right time in the sales funnel. Because your messages are delivered at the right point in the funnel to a more targeted lead list, the leads you generate are higher quality and more likely to convert.

2. Nurture Potential Customers More Easily

Nurtured leads make larger purchases than leads that aren’t nurtured. However, nurturing leads can be very time-consuming, especially if your list is large. Luckily, marketing automation makes it easier with tools like drip email campaigns and email personalization technology. And because marketing automation helps you deliver targeted messages to potential customers at different points in the sales funnel, it makes it easier keep potential customers engaged, leading them to the point at which they’re ready to convert.

3. Convert Customers Faster

When you deliver compelling content at the right time, your leads are less likely to get distracted before they convert, leaving you with abandoned shopping carts and suspended product searches. Instead, your automated content has moved them down the sales funnel with the content they’ve needed and compelling calls to action to help them move to the next step and finally make a purchase or sign up for your service.

4. Improve Your Company’s Bottom Line

Marketing automation saves you time and money since it frees up valuable time that used to be spent manually sending out emails and social media posts. That paired with better leads and faster conversion, which help increase revenue, offers a great return on your investment. Plus, according to a recent report by Nucleus Research, marketing automation has been shown to drive a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.

5. Gather Great Data for Optimizing Campaigns

Most marketing automation software can now integrate with your CRM platform to show you which of your marketing automation strategies are working and which aren’t. It will also track and score lead behavior so that you can learn how prospects react to different messages and websites. This information is key toward creating effective content experiences for your audience.

6. Focus on Strategy

With content marketing automation, tasks that used to take a long time to complete can now be automated, leaving more time for content marketers to focus on strategy, nurturing leads at the end of the funnel, optimizing campaigns and other important tasks.

Marketing automation has many benefits for today’s marketers. However, it’s not without its drawbacks, minor as they are. It does require research around which software is right for your business. Marketing automation also requires that you have a strategy in place that aligns with your business goals and your industry. Check back with us later this month as we explore effective marketing strategies for marketing automation.

 

Do you have experience working with content marketing automation? Please share the top benefits and pitfalls you’ve experienced in the comments section below.

Marketing automation is only a small piece of the content marketing mix. Compelling content is key, and Filament can help you get there. Get in touch with Filament today for help crafting the right content for your target audience.

Social Media + Big Data = Social Intelligence

Never before have businesses had the opportunity to get to know their customers on the intimate level that social media has been able to provide. The immediate power of real-time customer feedbac paired with data collection provides a dynamic one-two punch, creating invaluable social marketing intelligence that wields the potential to drive your business forward.

Social marketing intelligence goes beyond the reporting found on dashboard analytics. Instead it digs deeper into understanding your customer, their feelings towards your brand and their buying process.

Should you be using this convergence of social media and big data to inform business decisions? Keep reading for our top reasons to incorporate social marketing intelligence into your overall strategy.

 

Know Your Customer Better

Capturing intelligence through social listening and big data helps you get to know your customer beyond their initial sentiments towards your brand. Utilize this key social intelligence to learn about customers’ hobbies and interests that you can then leverage in future content marketing strategies. By knowing what excites and delights your customer along the decision-making process you are able to provide a better product and in turn gain their loyalty for a lifetime.

Pinpoint the Path to Purchase

With a greater understanding of your customer you will be able to better utilize the data to determine their exact path to purchase. Identify not only the motivations that informed their decision but also the specific steps they took to make the purchase. Once the path to purchase is discovered, use this information to inform your marketing strategy on how to reach current and potential customers at each point of their buying decision.

Identify Opportunities in the Market

Use social marketing intelligence to not only see what your customers are saying about your product but also to collect feedback on what they like and don’t like. Find ways to improve your business by listening to feedback in regards to a specific product, customer service or their overall experience with your brand. Along the way you might discover other needs in the market not currently being fulfilled by you or your competitors. This could potentially spark new ideas for product development driven straight from your customers wants and needs.

Real-Time Competitor Analysis

Conduct a real-time competitor analysis by seeing what your customers and your competitors’ customers are saying on social, about what’s lacking and can be improved or what is great and they want more of. Use this invaluable data to craft a strategy that keeps you one step ahead of your competition across all channels.

 

Employ these learnings to find out how social marketing intelligence impacts your brand and how to build a successful strategy that can move your entire business forward. Need help on where to begin? Contact the Filament team to help define your strategy today.

Creative content from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Get in touch with us!

Verified by ExactMetrics