The absolute need to deploy a serious content marketing strategy has been obvious for quite some time now – at least amongst businesses with a reasonable online ambition. Content is the lifeblood of SEO, engagement, brand awareness, thought leadership and ultimately lead generation. So, while “Content is King” might not be the latest scoop; it doesn’t necessarily mean that every SMB has deployed an effective content strategy.
And by effective, I mean a strategy that delivers a positive, measurable ROI.
Since 2011, we’ve been providing SMBs with an effective way to curate content as part of their overall content strategy. As our user-base has grown, we have fielded several surveys to assess the value of curation, and to understand what the next, major need would be as far as content marketing is concerned.
As we suspected, SMBs who include curation in their content marketing report a positive ROI. We also understand that concrete return on investment is the overarching objective for SMBs. While content is still king, it also needs to fill the treasury! It’s ROI or RIP.
In order to deliver ROI, content marketing for SMBs needs to be lean.
Lean content marketing consists in a set of tactics that reduce the cost and increase the impact of content: content curation, team publishing, repurposing, smart scheduling, creating a content hub, multi-channel distribution, etc: all of these techniques are presented in our Guide to Lean Content Marketing for SMBs.
SMBs can – and should – turn to software solutions that help them organize their lean content strategy; solutions that provide simple, effective and ROI-focused workflows, that do not require lengthy training, complex setup or time-consuming operations, that don’t cost an arm and a leg.
Today we are proud and excited to announce Scoop.it Content Director.
Scoop.it Content Director’s super simple and integrated workflow guides content marketers through various tasks, along an intuitive path:
- Planning publishing
- Sourcing content
- Publishing content
- Measuring impact and ROI
Plan
Source
Marketers define their content subject (editorial line) with a few keywords. Then, Scoop.it Content Director’s advanced curation technology browses tens of millions of web pages every day, so marketers don’t have to. Marketers can skim through suggested content to find inspiration and curate at will. Or, when a gap is detected in the publishing calendar, the suggestion engine is invoked and immediately offers several fresh and relevant content options to fill that gap.
Marketers can add their unique insights to any suggested content that they choose to publish; they can also create original content, pull content from any site on the fly with the bookmarklet, and even share their publishing power with team members via simple collaboration features.
The suggestion engine drastically reduces the time required to source enough relevant content to fulfill a thorough publishing calendar.
Publish
Once a piece of content is curated (or created and added) to the calendar, it’s automatically scheduled to be published to all required channels (blog, social media, email), at optimal times. Default scheduling rules, based on best practices, are offered to simplify the publishing process (rules are defined per channel; they include ROI-optimizing schedules and they can of course be personalized). Further, marketers can overrule the scheduling should they want an immediate publication or a publication at a precise date and time.
Optimal online publishing requires a home for your content, or a content hub. Generally, the marketers’ content hub tends to be the blog, which of course is supported as a publishing destination by Scoop.it Content Director. What if you don’t have a blog, or you need another content hub for a specific event, a specific product, a specific message? Scoop.it Content Director can automatically generate a mini-site filled with your content, in one click, when you need it. Scoop.it Content Director’s mini-sites are SEO optimized, totally customizable to your brand and can display CTAs with no development necessary.
Measure
Scoop.it Content Director offers comprehensive yet easy-to-read analytics. Key metrics such as number of posts, views, clicks and shares are measured, both in the context of Scoop.it and in terms of all other destinations where content has been published. Important business metrics such as user engagement, opening rates and leads generated are also tracked.
Real time and easy-to-interpret metrics are essential to the success of a lean content marketing strategy: being lean means to be “cost-clever” but also means to try, assess and fine-tune on a regular basis: it requires accurate measurement of the impact of every action. That is how marketers rapidly develop their lean content marketing strategy and meet their publishing goals.
Scoop.it Content Director’s analytics are also exportable to standard file format, so marketers can report and share the results of their work – and proudly demonstrate the ROI of their content strategy.
We developed Scoop.it Content Director not only with SMB marketers in mind, but with an absolute focus on their core stress point: “Do I have enough time and resources to deploy an ROI-generating content strategy?”
Having established this early on, we decided not to overwhelm with bells and whistles. In fact, on the contrary, we focused on stress-killing values: an effective workflow from planning to ROI measurement via content sourcing, scheduling, and publishing.
Further, like everything we’ve ever built as a part of Scoop.it, we’ve maintained our Humanrithm DNA: we use algorithms to save marketers time, but we let them be in complete control of their editorial line.
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