Automation is changing the online marketing landscape. Brands are reducing dependence on manpower and minimizing the number of errors.
Bloggers are not left out. Automation has a lot to offer them. Automation is modernizing blogging platforms. Social media integration, avoiding common blogging mistakes and content curation are now easy for bloggers, thanks to automation.
To get the best out of automation, bloggers need to follow a few tips.
Audience identification
Using automation for the right purpose will give you the most optimized result. For bloggers, the most important thing is acceptability. Writing for the right audience can make them more acceptable.
Automation can help them spot the right audience. Automated blogging platforms have built-in analytics that goes for a headhunt and identifies the audience from social media, consumer referral sites and email lists.
Here’s an example:
You blog on automobile. Your audience are automobile enthusiasts, automobile buyers and ordinary people with interest in automobile. Blogging automation tools can skim through social networks, online forums and other places to find potential audience for your blog.
The more advanced a platform, the better it works. Cutting-edge automation platforms can inform bloggers about what kind of content audience wants to see, thereby increasing the odds of carving a niche reader-base out of them.
Customize the subscription message
Automation arms you with audience details. Taking advantage of those details, however, depends totally on you. The best way to harness the power of audience demographic and behavioral info is drafting customized messages for newsletter subscription. As new visitors sign up for newsletters, the readership increases. But convincing visitors to subscribe is one hell of a task.
Neil Patel suggested some guidelines in his blog. Common guidelines are leveraging QR code for mobile, keeping unsubscribe option open, using catchy texts, etc. While automation takes care of all these, it helps the blogger customize the message as well.
For example, a French reader may want to see “Bonjour” in the beginning of the subscription message. Often, automation tools come with newsletter templates. Such templates show a list of personalized messages to choose from, making the work easy for the blogger.
Social Media and Email Automation
The beauty of blogging automation tools is they unify social media marketing. Instead of marketing individually on each network, the automation platform/s allow bloggers to optimize their presence on different networks from a unique dashboard.
One mistake that many bloggers make is they subscribe to the free version of the automation tool. Tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, GetResponse and Hubspot offer cool features, but to avail them, one needs to subscribes to the premium version.
- Hootsuite offers a 360° social media marketing solution. You can add 35 social media accounts to your Hootsuite dashboard and administer all the activities from a unique and consolidated platform.
- Buffer app gives you almost all the benefits that Hootsuite offers. In addition, it has a feature called Power Scheduler. The feature lets one schedule the interval during which social media and blog posts will appear through weeks or months. Buffer’s built-in analytics is great and has apps and extensions.
The following two options are perfect for implementing automation into your business.
- Getresponse supercharges your email marketing efforts. The tool has a visual workflow editor with drag-and-drop feature enabled. Its cutting edge open and response rate tracking along with affordable pricing attract customers.
- Hubspot requires no introduction. Marketers are familiar with it and its variegated functionality. CTA design, landing page design, analytics and lead management are the strong areas of Hubspot.
Some key benefits of social media automation for blogging are
- Identifying the right time to post
- Targeting different users on different networks
- Tags and filters
Because automation tools come with state of the art built-in analytics, these tools can identify the most optimized time to post. Not all users are equally active on all networks. Some are more active on Facebook while others prefer to be active on Twitter. Automation can identify those users and reach them when they are on the network of their preference.
Email drip campaign
It’s like newsletter subscription automation, with a few extra complexities. Since bloggers don’t sell anything (they do, but the purpose on the surface is to grow their reader-base), they have an easy time communicating with the email list subscribers.
A drip campaign automates the whole email marketing process. To take its full advantage, a blogger needs to:
- Write clickbait headline. He’d get suggestions from the automation platform itself.
- Select the best posts on his blog. This selection cannot be made in automated ways. It should be done manually.
- Put links of those posts into the email body. It’s like advertising. In other words, giving people a convincing reason to visit the blog.
A drip campaign is especially useful for product-based sites that have a blogging page. The blogging page remains instrumental in list building and automation turns the prospects in that list into customers.
Curation screening
In one of my earlier posts, I discussed the benefits and challenges of content curation. Automation makes it easy to overcome the challenges.
Curation through sophisticated tools is more effective, less time-consuming and 100% goal-driven. Automation tools simplify the curation process. The benefits of curation screening are:
- The blogger is suggested the most suitable content for curation by the software.
- The tool helps the blogger speculate the possible reaction from audience to the curated content.
- The tools make it easy for bloggers to add commentaries, either in support of the view in the original content or opposing it.
The reason automation tools work so well is simple – curated content is found mostly on social media and we’ve already discussed social traffic is monitored and analyzed by those tools.
Hence, blogging automation ensures a blogger gets access to the best content for curation.
Lead scoring
This is a vital part of blogging automation. We know there are several benefits of using marketing automation. The benefits include gauging a person’s likelihood of becoming a loyal customer or at least a subscriber. Both personal and corporate blogs can harness it.
Based on onsite interaction, social media interaction, peer-to-peer interaction and email replies, the automation tool assigns a score to a lead. The lead score is a reliable indicator of the campaign’s progress.
A blogger needs to keep pace with the automated system. If someone is assigned a high lead score, then he needs to pursue that prospect quickly. The campaign’s virality and engagement score normally stay in sync with the lead score. When engagement and virality score increase, so does the lead score, indicating the campaign is on the right track.
It is then when the blogger needs to engage himself in drip campaign and other methods of converting the lead to a loyal customer or a dedicated reader, who’ll keep visiting the site and recommend it to others.
