  BIO: Stephanie Trovato fills her days with content creation and marketing strategy for publications like Business Insider, Investopedia, Huffington Post, and more. She also works marketing strategy as a freelancer with Optimist, while balancing duties as a DotDash editor. She is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and is based in New York. Check out more of her work at BigHContent.com. There’s no doubt that marketing today is the epitome of multitasking. It's all about big data, and functions that advertisers used to do manually are now inextricably linked with automation. Marketing automation is a system that streamlines and automates marketing procedures to make marketing practices easier. Marketing technology offers a lot: more leads, transactions, and sales, and all with less effort. In fact, according to CMO, businesses that employ automation have seen a rise in leads and revenue, resulting in a 14% increase in sales efficiency and a 12% decrease in marketing overheads. Automation represents an incredible prospect for increased productivity, cost savings, and a better consumer experience for marketing practitioners. It can seem daunting to embark on an automation journey for your company, but with the right guidance, it is simpler than you expect! Benefits of Marketing Automation Marketing automation tech allows you to do so more than just place orders for your various promotions. It has real advantages for a marketing firm, not just for you and your marketing campaigns, but also for your customers. Here are the top three primary benefits of marketing automation tools: 1. Saving Time and Raising Efficiency The term "automation" is self-explanatory. Marketing automation software automates processes that used to take days and completes them in hours or even minutes. For example, social media management systems allow advertisers to plan and publish posts across several social networks simultaneously. This gives advertisers greater freedom in all marketing firms and agencies, allowing them to focus on their creativity rather than waste resources on repetitive activities. A strategy like this boosts production and performance. 2. Less Routine, Happier Marketers Marketing workers should assign the most routine and time-consuming functions to intelligent algorithms, ensuring well-established procedures while unleashing their imagination. As a result, the staff is happy, consumers are delighted, and revenue is high. 3. Multiple Channels to Drive More Leads and Sales Marketing automation software allows you to meet consumers at various stages of the consumer experience across various platforms. Multi-channel targeting gives you options: you could send an email or a social media post, make phone calls, or tweet in a tailored manner. You could utilize a broad range of techniques deftly, like a real sorcerer.  5 Ways Automation To Advance Their Marketing Strategy As per recent data published on the Digital Marketing Institute, 44 percent of marketing leaders think automation will become more relevant as a capability in 2020, which can be considered when reskilling workers and recruiting new employees in 2019. Here are few ideas for incorporating it into your business strategy: 1. Content Marketing Automation The aims of the modern marketer are timeless: build new ways to increase profits while keeping current buyers satisfied and returning for more. And content management is a huge part of that. When you have valid, accurate, informative, and actionable knowledge, you are using a tried-and-true strategy for meeting your clients, not to mention achieving your marketing objectives. Attempting to do it all manually, on the other hand, is a complex challenge that can quickly keep you awake at night. Marketing automation can make it easier to build and monitor content across several platforms. It will provide the appropriate content to each customer, ensuring that your efforts are not lost and that connections are effectively nurtured. An effective marketing automation framework will also report on how the content is doing across all channels and in all situations. Moreover, marketing automation can help you create good quality content that enables you to showcase your personality. As there’s no doubt that content is the king of marketing and will remain so for a long time, there have been commendable advancements in the field of content creation, processing, and planning—for example, a headless CMS. A headless CMS is based on a modular model that separates content development, management, and publication from how it is presented. This allows marketing teams to push fresh content and IT teams to make new technical changes without having to call on each other for assistance or worry about breaking something. Not only does this increase efficiency, but it also speeds up the process and workflow.  2. Email Marketing Solutions Email marketing encompasses so many facets of brand-customer engagement that it is rightly regarded as one of the most common marketing platforms. Furthermore, it remains one of the most successful ways to meet your target demographic. By using this form of marketing, almost every company across multiple industries can automate and personalize communications sent to new and current customers. Most notably, such tools allow large-scale email marketing campaigns with a large number of recipients. Email marketing program dashboards typically have comprehensive campaign information. 3. Social Media Marketing (SMM) Solutions Companies are also using social media to exchange news with consumers, solicit feedback, and even create leads. It's not shocking, given social media's enormous capacity for brand promotion and corporate identity management. Social media marketing software is ideal for organizing posts, engaging new contacts, and assessing the effectiveness of the SMM campaigns. Moreover, by organizing your posts and using automation to understand trends, you’re more likely to create a viral post. 4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions Customer data management is an extremely critical but routine activity that takes a long time and demands complete focus. Another aspect to consider: how you capture and retain consumer data has a significant effect on the customer service the customers ultimately get. The authenticity of the information, prompt responses to customers, contact history, and knowledge about past contacts are all critical for your appearance and credibility and for converting leads into opportunities and prospects into clients. CRM technologies allow sales and marketing departments to simplify these critical elements, ensuring that the business is still seen in the best possible light in the minds of your consumers. 5. Marketing Analytics & Reporting Solutions Marketing automation systems provide a variety of valuable knowledge in and of themselves. However, from this vantage point, one category stands out in particular. There are marketing solutions designed to monitor campaigns and provide detailed metrics. User behavior analysis, dashboards of different types of metrics, illustrative graphs, and reports — marketing monitoring and monitoring systems help companies determine which campaigns are effective and which are not. Analytical marketing techniques can be specialized, such as website traffic analytics solutions, or they can provide advertisers with a comprehensive view of all campaigns. 4 Key Steps Towards Automation It is critical to create a workflow before introducing digital marketing systems. This enables the staff to prepare for future processes while still ensuring that automation produces the best outcomes for your brand. There are four major moves to take:  1. Identify The Right Tasks Look for the team's most popular marketing activities. This is where you'll see the most benefits from automation. As previously said, simple automatic response emails, for instance, will significantly minimize the team's logistical workload. Make a list of all of the latest marketing tasks and choose both time-consuming and automatable ones. 2. Select The Appropriate Automation Software When it refers to automation applications, there are almost limitless options. Sorting out the right ones can be difficult, particularly when you're just starting out. We'll guide you to the cream of the crop later in this post, and it's also important to note that applications customized to your industry can exist. Expand the study to ensure this before making a long-term commitment. Most platforms have a free trial period, allowing you to try the app in your own environment and determine which is the right match. 3. Train Your Team While automation improves marketing efficiency instantly, the implementation of modern technologies and processes necessitates an investment in preparation for relevant workers. Team members must understand how technology blends into their workday and how their job can be refocused. Emphasize the incentives and allow employees to carefully assess new systems while acknowledging any questions they might have. Marketing automation is expected to become one of the most relevant marketing capabilities, and companies are investing accordingly now and in the coming future. 4. Evaluate Automation Effectiveness Putting automation in place is not the end of the story. We suggest doing a regular assessment of what is going well, what could be changed, and the effect of automation on key indicators. This allows you to make the required modifications at the proper time. Conclusion Automation has a lot of potential benefits. Greater performance, cost savings, increased effectiveness, more informative analytic results, and enhanced customer service are all appealing to marketing professionals. Almost every company can incorporate and create a successful marketing automation strategy within their organization by undertaking proper preparation, clear priorities, and advanced training. This can help companies reap the plethora of benefits of marketing automation and take their enterprise to the next level.
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  Last Updated 07/05/2021 Today I have a a technical post for you. Not technical in the sense that you need any technical skills though - queue sighs of relief. I’m going to break down how to fix your broken links & 404 errors without needing any technical skills at all. And I'm also going to explain how to set up a custom weebly 404 page, so, should you have broken links on your website, your users will be directed to a custom 404 instead of a generic page. YAAY. Before I begin, this post applies to Weebly Users. My website is hosted & built through Weebly so I will base the post off this platform. Having said that, the first half of this post will be relevant if you use Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix or any other platform so if you are not sure what a 404 error is it is still worth reading. This post covers: What Are Broken Links & 404 Errors? Why Broken Links & Weebly 404 Errors Important To Fix How To Identify Broken Links & 404 Errors On Your Website How To Fix Broken Links & 404 Errors In Weebly How To Set Up A Custom Weebly 404 Page What Are Broken Links & 404 Errors?Very simply this is any link that a user might follow on your website which takes them to a 404 error page instead of the page they were looking for. This will happen anytime you update or optimise a url. For example, say this post about getting a hobby was live on your website: OLD URL: http://tinybuddha.com/blog/hobby-can-boost-motivation-change-life/ It’s doing really well and you are getting traffic and shares. But, you do some keyword research and notice that the URL could be optimized to improve its ranking position. So, you update the url to: NEW URL: http://tinybuddha.com/blog/boost-motivation-with-hobby/ What you’ve done is created a new url, and the old url now goes to a 404 page (unless you have an automatic redirect set up, some wordpress sites do). Anywhere on your website where you have linked to the old url, and anyone else who linked to your old url, all of those links now go to a 404 error page. (The image below shows the generic Weebly 404 error page which you would get on a weebly website if you follow a broken link.)  To check your 404 error page type your url into your browser and add some random letters at the end of it. For example: http://tinybuddha.com/kkkddd  Top Tip: You can also optimise your 404’s like Tiny Buddha have done here. By simply placing links through to important or popular content you will decrease the number of users who leave your website from a 404 page. There are tons of ways you can optimize the page and I have included some at the bottom of this post where we cover: How To Set Up A Custom Weebly 404 Error Page Why Broken Links & Weebly 404 Errors Are Important To FixThere are a few reasons why fixing your broken links is important. Firstly user experience. It is very annoying, especially if your visitor is on a mobile, to click through to content & find a 404 page. Short attention spans mean you don’t have a margin for error with your visitors. Most will just leave your site and may never come back. That’s a lot of wasted energy which has gone into getting that visitor to your site only to have them leave again. Another reason is for SEO purposes. Say your post had been referenced by several other websites, perhaps it has been shared hundreds, maybe even thousands of times (we can dream). If you don’t fix your broken links then all of this link equity stays with the old url and you’ve lost valuable positive SEO signals pointing to your website. Redirecting your old URL to your new URL means that most of this link juice will flow through to your new page. This is great for your offpage SEO. How To Identify Broken Links & 404 Errors On My Site?Identifying broken links is SUPER EASY thanks to Google and their tool Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t signed up already then get your profile. It’s very easy to install and there is a tutorial here for you to follow. It might take Google a week or so to crawl your website and populate the data. But once it is populated navigate to the section; Crawl Errors  This will let you know where your broken links are! Perfect. How To Fix Broken Links & 404 Errors In WeeblyOnce you have identified your broken links, navigate to your Weebly Website Dashboard. Select “Edit Site”. And now hit “Settings” In The Top Navigation  Click The SEO Tab and scroll down to the redirect section. Here you can enter your old url and select the new page you want visitors to go to.  Top Tip: For deleted pages if there is a closely related page send users there. If there is no closely related page send users to your homepage, or consider re-writing the page! I hope this post has inspired you to fix your broken links on Weebly. It might not be the most fun task in the world, but improving your visitors experience is. So, check in every few months and make sure you aren’t frustrating your readers and losing valuable SEO juice in the process. If you want to go one step further and create a customer weebly 404 page, then check below. How To Set Up A Custom Weebly 404 PageWeebly's 404 error page is very basic, it has to apply to lots of different websites across a huge range of industries and brands so that makes sense. It does include a link through to your homepage to encourage visitors to click through and see if they can find what they are looking for, but it can be improved. A custom 404 page is also one of the indicators for Google that tells them your site is high quality. I'm not saying that by adding a custom 404 page suddenly your site will be prioritized and you'll see your ranks increase. However, putting that little bit of extra effort into your content is a good habit to get in to! It only takes a few minutes and you can have a custom 404 page which elevates the perception of your blog, website and / or business. To create a custom weebly 404 page Go to: Edit Site Click: New Page Name this page: 404 Tick: Hide In Navigation  Now you can create whatever you like! And you can get really creative. Here are some of my favorite examples of 404 error pages for inspiration (note, these were not all created on Weebly).    Ebay 404 Error Page - good for function!
As you can see there are lots of ways you can go with this page. The perfect page is one that stays on brand but still helps the user gets to where they want to go. So make sure you have a link through to your homepage, or even better your site categories to help your visitor easily find what they are looking for. That's it for this post! I hope this is a great reference for you. Good luck on your blogging journey and feel free to comment below or contact me and say hi.  This is a guest post from Jack Kelleher he is a junior copywriter at TopLine Comms, a B2B digital PR and SEO agency based in London. Three months ago, I nervously approached the office door to start my first “real” job, wracked with uncertainty. Was I right for the job? Could I handle the workload? What does a ‘copywriter’ even do? Since then, I’ve settled in – happily, everybody at the company has been incredibly welcoming – and become a fully-fledged member of the content team. And I’ve learned a lot. As a junior copywriter, my day to day work is turning briefs into articles, blogs, white papers, newsletters, video scripts and all sorts of other types of prose. The agency I work at, TopLine Comms, is a B2B digital PR and SEO agency with a range of tech and STEM clients, so there is always something new and exciting to write about. Although I’ve already learned a lot, I’m certainly not under the illusion that I know even a fraction of what there is to know about this line of work. However, I do have some real-world advice for anybody looking to take the same path I did. Whether you’re considering starting out as a copywriter yourself, or work in PR and want to help out new hires, here are five things I wish I had known on my first day. 1: Learn the language Effective writers know the importance of using precise language, and the profession of copywriting is no different. What new hires may not be familiar with, however, are the collection of terms and phrases within the world of PR and copywriting. The industry has its own unique lexicon, and copywriting is no different. Fortunately, most of these terms are simple, and you probably know a few of them already. For instance, the process of writing ‘copy’ – the body of the article, email, or other text that is the majority of the copywriter’s job – begins with a ‘brief’ – a set of information specifying what the copy needs to include, as well as other details such as desired tone and word count. Once you have written up the content, your ‘draft’ will be passed on for someone else to ‘proof’, or ‘proofread’ to spot errors. As a copywriter, you’ll probably be involved in proofing your colleagues’ work. It goes without saying that there’s plenty more to know, but setting out on your journey, I would encourage new copywriters to stay observant and try to learn the words that will eventually define your day. Knowing the names of concepts and processes in the job can help you to learn and communicate issues and help you to get the right start. In short, knowing the language is the first step to mastering the job. 2: Don’t hesitate to ask questions “If you don’t know, ask” is common advice for a reason. Within the world of copywriting, it’s especially important since a question asked early-on can prevent significant problems down the road. If in doubt, it’s better to reach out and ask any questions before you’ve written a 1,000-word article – trust me, I’ve learned this lesson first-hand. Your colleagues know that you are new, and they can all relate to the overwhelming experience of starting a new job.  They will almost certainly be happy to answer any of your questions, or at least point you in the right direction to find the answer yourself. For copywriting-specific questions, it’s worth asking the other copywriters you work with. Writing is a skill, and your copywriting colleagues might be able to share some advice on everything from specific client preferences on the Oxford Comma to the way your agency approaches fact-checking. 3: Not all deadlines are set in stone Sometimes, a copywriter will be assigned more work than they could possibly do in 24 hours – let alone a working day. This deluge of briefs isn’t an intentional attempt to undermine your sanity, but rather a coincidence as new work comes in. Some deadlines are more critical than others and knowing which deadlines are flexible is essential to managing your workload effectively. Communicate with your colleagues and boss to let them know that you are at maximum capacity and find out what can be pushed back. Many deadlines are ‘as soon as possible’, but that doesn’t mean ‘incredibly urgent’, and a day or two of delay is often not catastrophic. Similarly, if you know that something urgent does need to take precedence over other assignments, let your colleagues know so that they can adjust their expectations. Understanding that deadlines are flexible is different to handing in work late, of course, and the sooner you let someone know that your draft will be late, the more likely that they’ll offer you sympathy and flexibility. 4: Follow the brief! The brief is your map when it comes to navigating the world of copywriting: it tells you what you need to cover, how, and by what deadline. Sometimes, it can be tempting to get overly creative and stray from the brief. It’s easy, for instance, to get carried away and start adding your own points or stylistic flourishes, but these will inevitably be met with a request to rewrite the piece according to the brief. If you do think that you can offer a substantive improvement to the brief, speak with the person who assigned it to you. They may be open to your idea or they may not, and in either case, it’s worth knowing before you start typing.  However, even the brief is not infallible. One of the most important lessons that the other copywriters at my agency have taught me is to send back briefs which are ambiguous or lacking in key information. Just like asking questions, clarifying an unclear brief can save you a lot of time and prevent a lot of headaches.
5: Do your homework. Before committing a single word to paper, you should have a robust understanding of the client, the publication, and the subject you’re writing about. You’re not expected to know everything about the client or publication – especially when you’re starting out – but getting a feel for tone and purpose is the ideal way to elevate your writing above generic pablum. Your company likely keeps a collection, probably online, of previous drafts and submissions to clients. This can be an invaluable resource if you have questions about a specific client’s preferred tone or other preferences, so make sure to familiarise yourself with what is available. Starting out as a copywriter Overall, after three months of stumbling and learning on the job, I finally feel confident taking on the work of copywriting. It is equal parts rewarding and challenging, and I still have a lot I want to improve, but I no longer feel intimidated when I see a new brief come through (unless it’s for several thousand words). From research to structuring and, of course, writing, I have found that copywriting is fairly similar to persuasive essay writing at school and university, so if that’s one of your strengths, consider starting your career as a copywriter. If you enjoy the challenge of untangling a complicated sentence, threading the linguistic needle of explaining a complex concept in simple terms, and bringing a fresh approach to a stale topic, copywriting might also be the job for you. The one thing, above all, that I wish I had known on my first day is that everything would be alright. It’s tough starting a new job, but you’ll soon adapt, and, in the meantime, everybody will do their best to be supportive and accommodating. Copywriting is challenging, but it’s not brain surgery, and if you’ve managed to get yourself hired, your employer necessarily thinks that you can probably do the work. So, take it from me, as long as you approach the job with an open mind, are willing to learn, communicate with your colleagues, and follow the brief, everything will be alright. |
AuthorWritten by Cheryl A Clarke Chief Happiness Officer & Content Marketing Freelancer @ Ginger Marketing (unless stated otherwise) Blog CategoriesPopular content marketing postsTotal Social Media Share Count
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“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI