Frederik Vincx, co-founder of Prezly, explores the ways technology can increase your marketing efficiency
It’s clear to see how vividly technology is impacting the marketing industry, from the rise of context-driven personalisation to the increasing impact of micro-targeted social campaigns. So why are things changing so slowly?
The challenge is one I think we all sympathise with: even when you know there are better ways to be operating, the options open to you seem so varied and, in some cases, so starkly different to how you’ve been working, that it’s hard to know where to prioritise. It’s also hard to know which claims are marketing hype and which products will deliver real tangible benefits.
So, it’s time to make a stand. Below, we’ve cut through the noise to offer you six places to start that will help supercharge your marketing efforts today.
1. Make the web work for you
If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to every marketer, it would be to stop working so hard and instead, focus on working smarter. The easiest way to do this is automating admin so you can focus on the bigger picture. There are so many separate services out there but as it stands they don’t share information with each other. Now there’s a way they can.
To get maximum bang for your buck, make a list of the most mindless, time consuming tasks you do day-to-day. Services like IFTTT or Zapier let you join the dots between over 500 online services and allow them to communicate with each other without interrupting your work.
A few of our favourites include:
• Tracking mentions across social media in one centralised spreadsheet.
• Receiving notifications every time a marketing lead converts.
• Getting important documents emailed to you before big meetings.
• Automatically alerting your team when you leave the office or go into a meeting.
2. Schedule social smartly
We all know the importance of maintaining a strong social presence for your brand but it comes with a number of challenges. How do you work as a team and avoid duplicate posts? How do you manage your social in a time efficient manner?
Using tools like Buffer it’s possible to schedule posts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ simultaneously. It’s important to plan your time on social, avoid being connected all day with distractions galore and instead strategically schedule posts in advance. As for interactions, create a tight-knit list of key people you want to interact with and keep it as a live column on Tweetdeck. Do all this and you can sit back knowing that every channel will be updated without interrupting your day.
3. Information is power
There are any number of ways to keep your team in touch across continents, devices and workflows. But what if you could include the insights of the industry alongside your messages, making sure everyone saw the latest intelligence from Twitter, important news sites and more? A new wave of tools combining real-time intelligence and team communication let you do just that.
Slack is just such a service. I recommend creating a channel for your brand that brings together industry insight, Twitter mentions and web traffic. You can even receive
sales alerts from Stripe or Salesforce straight into Slack.
Tear down the separate silos of information in your organisation and bring them together in one place to increase efficiency and help your entire team work smarter.
4. Identify your influencers
As well as reaching audiences directly, marketers are increasingly identifying social conduits who will share a message for them. This can be time consuming and full of pitfalls. How do you know if an influencer is active on a particular network? What if their 5000 followers are fakes? The answer: add intelligence to your influencer analysis.
Enter SocialBro and Traackr, services designed to quickly create lists of relevant influencers for your industry and track them across the web. You can then use this intelligence to identify leads, create more relevant content, enhance the focus of your paid social campaigns and even get ahead of your PR team in identifying who they should be speaking to
5. Make it multimedia
One trick in marketing I’ve picked up over the years is that it’s important to give most of your attention to the areas where people are looking. Make sure if anyone is searching for your brand they come face-to-face with engaging high-quality multimedia content.
You could be creating an interactive quiz for potential leads, a video that shows your product in action, even a Storify of social testimonies taken straight from Twitter. Get geeky: microsites, multimedia newsrooms, videos and even games should all play a part in the marketing mix.
6. Keep focused
Okay, I know we said we’d keep it simple. And there’s some pretty advanced stuff here. But here’s the trick. Start small. Try one or two of these, and if they free up a little time for you, that could give you the edge to try the next one. Before you know it, you’re using tech to your advantage and you can concentrate your time on what really matters.