A fresh year presents the perfect opportunity for your brand to recap its 2016 content marketing performance: You may want to examine ways to build upon those past lucrative strategies and reexamine under-performing ones. Did you meet your goals? What new tools are available to enhance your content marketing game plan for 2017?
And exactly how are you going to increase your value in 2017?
One important development in 2016 was the major changes unveiled by Facebook. Content-marketing-centered businesses were deeply affected by Facebook's News Feed algorithm changes, which drastically decreased organic reach. Publishers reported up to a 42 percent decrease in referral traffic from Facebook. These unexpected changes indicate that brands need to be increasingly focused on their own audience reach and retention in 2017.
Now is the time adopt new technology for the new year. To help you get started, here are six tools that will turbocharge your content marketing strategy in 2017.
Buffer
Buffer is a smarter way to post your content to social media. It's like the Swiss Army Knife of social media tools and can really help with streamlining your social media syndication efforts.
Buffer lets you connect all of your social media profiles into one central hub. From there you can schedule content to all of your social media assets with just a few clicks. What sets Buffer apart is its post analytics, which helps you dish out content to your audience at just the right time.
Using Buffer to streamline your social media publishing saves time and eliminates any headaches from juggling multiple social media profiles. This gives you more time to focus on creating quality content, and less time scheduling it.
Almighty.Press
Almighty.Press is a content-discovery tool that goes well beyond measuring basic engagement metrics such as likes, tweets and share counts. The intuitive platform connects you with a real-time filterable news feed of trending content from around the globe.
The virility of the content is measured using its Almighty Force algorithm. This allows brands to track trending content before it becomes saturated. The end result is viral content topics that arrive ahead of your competitors'.
Using Almighty.Press to identify, track, and publish trending topics before they are saturated will give your content the edge to conquer engagement algorithms employed by many social networks.
SumoMe
SumoMe offers an array of solutions to help grow your audience and improve the reach of your content. Most notably, SumoMe provides a list-building tool with an exit intent feature which tracks a user's mouse movement to identify when that user intends to leave your website. This can be used to trigger a pop-up message with related posts, an email opt-in form or a custom special offer.
Brands can improve conversion rates on any page with full-screen calls to action that slide down from the top of the view port after the page content has loaded, encourage email opt-ins and promote the brands' most recent blog post or product.
Additionally, SumoMe provides responsive share-button solutions that complement your website. Handy analytics and A/B testing for your share-button placements are baked into the app. These features work to maximize your on-page social engagement.
Using SumoMe tools can help increase the frequency with which your content gets shared across social media platforms. Having more shares and more email opt-ins is always a good thing.
Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach makes finding influencers easy. Simply enter a keyword to discover thousands of business leads, social media influencers and niche bloggers. Ninja Outreach provides data and contact details for over 25 million contacts.
Ninja Outreach also provides a platform to find, contact and manage influencers. With this data, brands can select a pool of influencers and create outreach email templates directly from their dashboards. This makes it easy to find leaders in any niche. From there it is easy to track email opens, clicks and replies.
Using Ninja Outreach to find influencers will save you a significant amount of time and establish connections with people who can significantly increase your content's reach.
SendGrid
Email is an effective way to build customer relationships. SendGrid's platform allows for integration with almost any website, giving you the power to reach all your subscribers. SendGrid makes it easy to create email funnels that can be A/B tested right down to the last detail, allowing you insights into what is working and what isn't.
Use SendGrid in conjunction with SumoMe to create winning email capture forms that are complemented by well-timed emails for maximum engagement with your audience.
Taking time to set up and test your email campaigns can yield fantastic results for almost any content marketing effort. Once set up, SendGrid will streamline your email outreach, allowing you time to focus on other aspects of your business.
Pushwoosh
Pushwoosh is a handy service for sending notifications to desktop computers, mobile devices and applications.
Any content marketer worth his/her salt will know the pain of ever-increasing punitive action from Facebook’s News Feed algorithm. In today’s fast-moving climate, it's wise to not have all your eggs in a single basket.
Finding new and reliable ways to reach your audience is one of the most important parts of a content marketer's role. Pushwoosh provides an intuitive desktop and in-app notification system that reaches 100 percent of your subscribers by notifying them directly via their phone or web browser.
Need to address only Spanish-speaking users who made a purchase last year? Customers who recently spent more than $1,000? Easy as breathing! Use tags and filters along with other segmentation features to tailor a personal push message that will find its user in the right place, at the right time.
You can link your sites' RSS feed directly to Pushwoosh, and they will automatically send out notifications to your subscribers when you publish new content. Pushwoosh can also be connected to Almighty.Press, giving you the ability to find fresh, relevant content and syndicate it with your audience.
Final thoughts
What's even better about all of these tools? They can be used in combination to increase your brand engagement.
You can identify content with viral potential using Almighty.Press, then automatically queue the content for social media syndication using Buffer. Once users visit your site, you can use SumoMe to increase the chances of a social share or email opt-in.
In addition, use SendGrid and Pushwoosh to keep your audience updated with the latest content. Ninja Outreach can find you those ever-important influencers to help get your content in front of the people that matter most to your business.
Use just some of these tools in 2017 and your content-marketing efforts are almost certain to produce better results than they did in 2016. Better yet, why not use them all in one turbocharged work flow?
Thomas Smale
Thomas Smale co-founded FE International in 2010, growing the business with zero funds from scratch to a seven-figure-a-year business. Specializing in advising and brokering the sale of established websites and online businesses, FE In...
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