As writers, we have learned to write for people. It’s what we’ve done for millennia. We are inspired to tell interesting stories, pass knowledge, and/or entertain our readers. But content saturation complicates things, and when writing for business especially, we have to adapt our work (enter SEO content) to actually reach our target customers and broader audience.

So how do you find a balance between writing content that solves problems and provides value to your audience while at the same time appeasing Google’s ever-changing algorithm? Here are a few tips to help you find that balance.

How to reach your audience: algorithms & alternative methods

Today, we reach our audience through digital channels. One way is through organic search—when people search for a topic and select the best from the results returned. Since the vast majority of internet users use Google as their browser of choice, we’ll use it for all search references in this article. Google’s algorithm determines who wins in organic search, i.e. whose content links show up at the top.

SEO content strategy tips

Google constantly updates its search algorithm, which determines the most valuable content for a given query. What worked yesterday may not work today or tomorrow, making this an ongoing challenge.

In the past, keyword volume was the go-to SEO tactic. This lasted for years. These tactics are still important and must be incorporated into your writing. Adding some keywords and other easy SEO attributes to your work is not difficult. Renowned SEO site, Moz.com, has a great Beginners Guide to SEO to help you on this front.(2)

As artificial intelligence and predictive analytics evolve, however, so does Google’s algorithm. In other words, it gets “smarter” every day. Luckily for writers, Google is increasingly rewarding high-quality content rather than content that includes certain words but may be of little value.

Therefore, writers need to focus on quality as much as traditional SEO tactics. For example, if you can write “10X content”—content that is ten times better than that of the competition—then Google will reward you for providing its users with better content to select from. Learn more about 10X content.(3)

It’s tough to keep up, but as content writers we must stay abreast of the latest algorithm updates. Otherwise, our work disappears into cyberspace, never to be seen again.

Leveraging CRM data to target readers

Another important and essential way to reach your audience is through direct communication with your readers. A unified customer relationship management (CRM) system that includes email marketing automation makes that possible. Systems like Insightly can store so much data on prospects and customers that you can easily target them with content that resonates with them.

Audience targeting

A unified CRM allows you to segment audiences based on demographics, behavioral patterns, and interests. So, when you write a new piece, you can use CRM targeting and email automation to share your content with those you know (or assume based on the data) will be interested and engaged by it.

It’s critically important to write about topics your audience needs and wants to read about. Your CRM and marketing platform can validate that your content aligns with those needs and wants.

Think about it like this: writing for an algorithm is akin to playing basketball in pitch darkness; you might make a shot every now and then because you have a general feel for where the goal is. Using CRM data to target readers, on the other hand, is like playing with the lights on and shooting at a very wide basket. Your chances of hitting a shot (i.e., writing engaging content that easily reaches and resonates with your audience) becomes much easier.

Highly relevant and valuable content also helps you to interact with your customers in more meaningful ways and build long-lasting customer relationships.

Finding the right balance

We’ve established the importance of making your content easy to find and access. SEO plays a part there, but it’s not the only determinator of content accessibility. Using a CRM to target your audience and send your content to them directly compliments the need to write for algorithms.

Great content speaks for itself

In the end, if you write killer content that provides unique value readers can’t find anywhere else, it will most likely be successful. Quality always trumps quantity and Google’s algorithm is, in fact, working toward that objective.

Here is what Google has to say: “We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.” (4)

What does that mean? Your focus on writing for people is increasingly aligning with the objective of Google’s algorithm. As Google evolves, the gap between writing for people and algorithms will close.

Answering our ultimate question

So, should you write for algorithms or for people? The answer is three-fold.

1. First, continue writing for people because if you ignore their needs, your audience will decline rapidly. As content marketers we aim to improve the lives of our readers and make their jobs easier with helpful knowledge, best practices, and inspiring stories. In order to achieve that, we have to keep our audience’s needs in mind when planning and writing content.
2. Second, continue to write according to Google’s latest algorithm updates. Include keywords in the right places. But most importantly, write high quality content. Google is increasingly able to identify valuable content and reward it. Link your piece to other highly relevant content to give your readers options to explore more information.
3. Third, until the two above variables align—and after they do for that matter—leverage CRM and marketing automation software, like Insightly, to ensure you reach your intended audience with relevant messages and at the right time.

Read more like this:

• How to implement local SEO
• 7 ways to adapt to shifting customer expectations
• How to use buyer enablement to win more customers
• Top 10 benefits of a unified CRM

Sources:

1. “A live look at activity across WordPress.com,” WordPress, 2020

2. “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO,” Moz, 2019

3. “The Beginner’s Guide To ‘10x Content’,” Forbes, 2016

4. “What webmasters should know about Google’s core updates,” Google, 2019

The post Content strategy: writing for people or algorithms? appeared first on Insightly.

According to Gartner “77% of buyers agree that purchasing has become very complex and difficult.” More specifically, “Gartner research finds that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend more time learning independently online than anywhere else. Only 17% of buying time involves supplier meetings, and in instances where buyers are comparing multiple suppliers‚ the amount of time spent with any one sales rep may be only 5% to 6% of total buying time spent.”*

So where are they spending the majority of their time? Finding and researching as much information as they can, which without the proper guidance can sometimes lead to analysis paralysis.

The B2B buying journey has many stages and tasks, and it’s not as linear as it may appear at a first glance. Depending on the type of purchase, complex buying decisions usually involve teams consisting of a number of internal and external company stakeholders, each bringing to the table their own views, preferences, and objectives.

Customers spend about two-thirds of their buying journey just learning from different sources. A strong buyer enablement program that ensures customers get key information at the time they need it can help companies earn trust and credibility and build lasting customer relationships.

Two main types of buyer enablement

According to Gartner, buyer enablement falls into two main categories: prescriptive advice and practical tools.

Prescriptive advice

The goal is to ease customers’ buying stress with informative recommendations and best practices on what should be done and what should be avoided. Examples include blogs, white papers, webinars, etc.

Practical tools

Content that enables buyers to follow through on prescriptive advice. This can be in the form of tools for evaluating suppliers, ROI calculators, and checklists to make sure you’re staying on track and accounting for all the tasks involved in the buying process.

Buyer enablement that combines prescriptive advice and practical support in a way that addresses multiple stakeholder concerns is extremely powerful. It can help you create the critical mass necessary to influence commercial teams into being partial to your respective solutions.

Gartner survey results show that customers who have access to buyer enablement are three times more likely to make a high-quality purchase, i.e. a solution beyond what they’d originally planned, at a premium price.*

How does buyer enablement fit into the buying process?

Gartner identifies six specific tasks as part of a B2B buying journey. Each of these tasks comes with its own set of challenges that customers face and provides opportunities for solution-oriented buyer enablement content.

1. Problem identification

The pinpointing the problem that needs to be addressed is the start of a B2B purchase process. To do this, buyers may conduct research online and download content such as white papers and reports. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by information at this stage. While problem identification seems straightforward, buyers may return to it as they improve their understanding of the source or scope of the problem.

2. Solution exploration

At this stage, the buying team identifies and considers potential solutions. The task includes online research and in-person discussions with industry peers, suppliers, reading customer reviews, and consuming product-related marketing content.

3. Requirements building

Buyers evaluate how any potential solution will function within their own company and systems. They may go through a request for proposal (RFP) process to evaluate suppliers, and actively engage with sales reps to view demos and other relevant buyer enablement that helps them to answer specific questions. For example, which internal and external systems will this solution need to integrate with? Or, how will the solution fit within their company’s existing processes and procedures?

As buyers learn more about the available solutions, they will most likely circle back to this stage to refine their buying criteria.

4. Supplier selection

Once the buying team understands their internal requirements, they will be able to create a short list of the suppliers that meet their needs. However, there is always potential for internal changes such as employee turnover, budget cuts, and other issues that may force the team to re-evaluate solutions and go back to a previous stage.

5. Validation

During this stage, buyers evaluate their chosen solution by corroborating suppliers’ claims, soliciting end user feedback and references, and looking at third-party expert analyses. This is considered an “always-on” task, meaning that it’s a priority throughout the buying process.

6. Consensus creation

At the end of the day, buyers must be able to convince the rest of the buying group of the merits of their chosen solution. But consensus building tasks begin much earlier, as buyers work to develop a shared understanding of the problem and requirements, and continue throughout the process as buyers educate other stakeholders about what they have learned, work to deconflict information found through separate research processes, and ultimately agree on a solution.

Learn more about these tasks in our recent blog post.

For buyer enablement to work effectively, it needs to be integrated into all six tasks. According to the CSO Insights report, over 70% of customers speak with salespeople at the end of their buying process, after they’ve clarified their needs and done research. Buyer enablement content is one way to engage with the client earlier.

It’s important to remember that the B2B purchasing process is not linear. Gartner found that 90% of all buyers circle back to at last one step in the journey before making a final decision.* This makes it even more important to integrate buyer enablement into every step of the way.

How do you build a robust buyer enablement program?

Effective buyer enablement content addresses buyers’ needs at every stage of the B2B buying journey and helps buyers to complete the job. This requires a deep understanding of your buyer persona, as well as the social, professional, and political dynamics within the buying team.

To execute a solid buyer enablement program, you need both a content strategy and marketing technology that allows you to access and analyze customer data for targeted marketing communications and take immediate action based on these insights.

Content Strategy

To create buyer enablement content, think about the goals of your buyer as they go through the various stages of their journey, what their specific intent is when searching for and consuming content, and which form is the easiest for them to.

Gartner notes four “building blocks” or steps in a B2B buyer enablement content strategy:

1. Jobs. Identify the specific activities buyers need to complete throughout a purchase journey and information they’ll need to make decisions.For example, what information and tools will they need to help them identify a problem, explore solutions, and/or get a team buy-in?
2. Intent. Figure out specific ways you can help buyers to get the job done. Here you need to understand their intent and address it directly. For example, when comparing solutions, your buyers may want to calculate and compare ROI of different options.
3. Form. Find the best way to deliver the content. Depending on the task and stage in the buying process, you may need to provide checklists, recommendations, customer reviews, demos, calculators, etc.
4. Design. Make sure your content meets basic design standards and is easy to find and share.

Depending on your business type, customer base, and resources, you may need to include other considerations in your content strategy. Use the above steps as a framework to organize your thinking and content creation process.

But any strategy is as good as its execution. This is where marketing technology comes in.

Marketing technology

CRM and marketing automation software can help you to get a complete picture of your customer and their needs, so you can execute customer journeys that reflect and respond to buyer intent, information searches, and behavior throughout the entire buying process.

Marketing automation covers prospect definitions, segmentation, and marketing campaign execution and tracking throughout the entire customer journey. With marketing automation, you can perform key marketing functions—planning, execution, and reporting of marketing campaigns—more efficiently and accurately at scale.

For your buyer enablement content to serve its purpose, you need to align your sales and marketing teams, reach the right customer at the right time with the right message via the right channel, and measure performance. Marketing automation or a unified CRM platform for sales and marketing can help you to design, implement, and improve your buyer enablement program, so you can win more customers.

How do you measure the ROI of buyer enablement?

The most obvious measure of your buyer enablement program’s effectiveness is the number of deals closed since its launch. But before you can trust that number, you have to look at engagement from both your buyers and your sales team.

According to a new ATD research report, 59% of companies say the top barrier to delivering effective sales is reps not being held accountable for applying skills they’ve learned.** For buyer enablement content to be effective, sales teams need to understand how it helps buyers buy, when to use it during the buying journey, and how to communicate its value to the buyer.

Usage and conversion analytics can be especially helpful to measure these actions. Consider the following:

• How quickly does a sales lead convert to an opportunity, then to a customer?
• How long does it take the sales rep to engage with the buyer, and vice versa?
• Are your sales reps able to generate engagement with colder prospects through content offers? What type of content is the most effective, and when?

As you look at analytics on a regular basis, you might start seeing trends and/or find gaps between your expectations and the actual performance. Use your learnings to evaluate buyer enablement content and overall program to double-down on what works and change what doesn’t. Use customer and sales team ongoing feedback to supplement the data.

Simplify the journey, nurture the relationship

Like all good content marketing, buyer enablement should be relevant, useful, easy to comprehend, and credible. When buyers interact with your ecosystem of information, it establishes brand trust and loyalty. Ultimately, buyer enablement is an opportunity to increase engagement and deal wins with your target customers.

Sources:

*Gartner for Marketers, Marketing-Fueled Buyer Enablement, 2019

**2019 State of Sales Training, Association for Talent Development, 2019

The post How to use buyer enablement to win more customers appeared first on Insightly.

Is local SEO really that important? Should local businesses engage in it? The answer to both questions is a resounding “yes.” A few important statistics back this up.

Local SEO is important for local businesses as more consumers use smartphones and geo-specific searches to find local stores. Estimates indicate that by 2021 searches from mobile devices will drive $1.4 trillion in local business sales.(1)

Last year, 76% of consumers who searched for a local store on their smartphone visited one within 24 hours. Of those who visited a store within 24 hours, 28% made a purchase.(2) With today’s rapid increase in smartphone usage, that percentage is sure to continue rising in the coming years.

That said, what is local SEO? How does it benefit your business? How can you approach it?

What exactly is local SEO?

Local SEO is simply a local approach to standard SEO. It involves using various tactics to appease Google’s ever-changing algorithm. That algorithm determines which pages appear in which order when someone conducts a search that includes your town or city’s name, zip code, or any other geographical identifier.

How it works

If someone searches Google for “bicycle repair shop,” they will receive results from various locations. But that’s only true if their smartphone’s “location services’’ function is turned off. If that’s the case and they search for “bicycle repair shop Madison Wisconsin,” it’s exponentially more likely that your bike shop in Madison will appear closer to the top of the search results.

On the other hand, if the smartphone’s Location Services feature is turned on—and this is the case for most smartphones—the phone will recognize the user’s location and automatically return results for that area.

NOTE: In this article, we exclusively refer to Google instead of mentioning other search engines. That’s because over the past year Google accounted for 72% of web searches. After Google, 13 competitors account for the remaining 28%.(3)

The greatest SEO challenge

The greatest challenge you will face once you start to engage in SEO is keeping up with Google’s algorithm. It is constantly changing. Plus, Google keeps most of its formula a secret. Even seasoned SEO experts find it difficult to stay abreast of Google’s latest algorithm changes.

It can even seem as though Google is playing a cruel game with us. But keep in mind that Google’s objective is to present the best content to its users, and they constantly shift gears to accomplish that.

Local SEO benefits

SEO provides loads of benefits to those who master it and stay up-to-date on the latest SEO trends. At the top of that list of benefits, of course, is greater brand exposure and visibility. This increases traffic to your site and results in more sales and revenue growth. In fact, all SEO tactics are undertaken with that goal in mind.

There are many additional benefits of local SEO to consider—too many to list here. But, to give you a better understanding of the importance of local SEO, let’s look at a few of the most important ones.

Forming local business alliances

You can join forces with other businesses in your area and add links to their site on your own site. They will do the same for you in return, boosting your web traffic.

Increased consumer trust

Let’s face it, very few of us scroll to the seventh page of Google results to find the page we want. We trust that the top results are the best and tend to navigate to those sites.

Reduced money spent on advertising

Local SEO, in a way, is slowly replacing local television and print advertising as the most effective way to entice consumers to visit your store.

More reviews from satisfied customers

If you set up a Google My Business account, customers can leave publicly-visible reviews of your business. More positive reviews equal a higher Google search ranking. Moreover, people place lots of stock and trust in reviews from other patrons. Learn more about Google My Business below.

Gaining a competitive edge in your locality

Odds are that most of your competitors are not engaging in local SEO tactics. Gain an immediate edge over your competition by making your business more visible online for both in-store or online shoppers.

Effective local SEO tactics

Local businesses leverage various tactics to increase business visibility and search result rankings. Here are a few of the easiest and most common SEO tactics you can start implementing today:

Set up a Google My Business account

Setting up a Google My Business account is free and does a lot more than open the door for reviews. It provides metrics around how customers interact with your business online and places your business’s name on Google Maps.

Use popular keywords in your website content

Keyword research is a key element of effective local SEO efforts. It’s easy to find the most relevant keywords for your business, as well as their search volume and the difficulty of ranking for them.

Sites like Moz offer free keyword research tools that allow you to gather this keyword data so you can start incorporating those keywords into your website content.

Incorporate those keywords into your site’s metadata

Metadata (or meta tags) refers to the information embedded in your site’s code. If you hire an SEO expert to optimize your website for local SEO, they will know all about this. If you manage your site yourself, you can learn how to make some basic improvements by checking out this beginner’s guide to meta tag usage.

Link to highly-ranked websites

An easy way to learn how high a website ranks is to find its domain authority (DA). DA is measured on a scale from one to 100. A link to any site with a DA of 60 or above will help increase your own site’s ranking.

Moz, mentioned above, also provides a free domain overview tool. That tool allows you to enter another site’s web address, and then displays that site’s DA.

When you hyperlink to another site in your site’s content, be sure to check its DA before doing so. Linking to a site with a low DA can do more harm than good.

Be strategic with external links and run periodic SEO status checks to identify and remove or fix broken links.

Measure your efforts against your competition

The free tools mentioned above allow you to enter your competitors’ web addresses and see how their SEO efforts stack up to your own. You can gain valuable insight that will help you improve your approach and the tactics you use.

For example, you can see which keywords they rank for and what their rank is for that keyword. Then you can focus on outranking them for those keywords. Constant measurement is the best way to continually improve and differentiate your business from those of your competitors.

The final word on local SEO

With an understanding of local SEO, its importance, and key tactics, you’re ready to launch your own local SEO initiative.

As mentioned above, most local businesses still haven’t jumped on the SEO bandwagon. By starting now, you can get a head start and maintain that lead well into the future.

Completing basic local SEO tactics and picking some low-hanging fruit is both easy and produces significant results. And, you don’t need to hire a contractor to carry out these basic SEO tactics.

There are a number of step-by-step tutorials and videos on local SEO best practices you can use to start implementing SEO as part of your digital marketing efforts. The only thing this will cost you is your time. That time will be an investment in the future survival and success of your business.

Read more like this:

• Step-by-step guide to launching digital marketing
• How to implement a digital marketing plan
• From personalized to humanized marketing
• Why use marketing automation?

Sources:

1. Mobile Will Influence $1.4 Trillion In Offline Sales By 2021, Forrester Research, 2017
2. How Mobile Search Connects Consumers to Stores, Think with Google, 2016 (updated in September 2019)
3. Search Engine Market Share, Netmarketshare.com, 2020

The post How to implement local SEO appeared first on Insightly.

At Chanty, we had to learn a lot about lead generation as well as try new things before we found what actually works for us. Today we are sharing the best of our lead generation advice. Some of the hacks work well for us to get the precious sign ups for Chanty, others have proven to work great for well-known SaaS companies.

1. Lead generating content

Content marketing is nothing new. Unfortunately, there are still companies that invest into creating content, but don’t get the outcome they’ve hoped for. The good news is content marketing, if done right, could bring amazing results. Let us share our hack #1 that brings us a steady stream of customers.

Here’s a simple path you should follow:

• Determine your top competitors in the niche
• Make a keyword research for ‘Competitor Name’ alternatives, as well as ‘Competitor X’ vs ‘Competitor Y’
• Choose the keyword phrase with the best balance of monthly search queries and keyword difficulty (could be checked in Ahrefs or SEMrush)
• Write an in-depth article targeting the keyword. Among other alternatives mention your product. Highlight why it’s better than your competitors.
• Acquire some backlinks pointing to an article
• Enjoy the deluge of sign ups

This article on Slack alternatives in our blog is a living proof of this strategy in work. It’s the easiest way to go if you have a prominent competitor in the niche. If you don’t – well, there’s still the traditional inbound marketing for you to try. Determine your buyer persona, learn their pains, solve them with your content, educate, engage and provide value. Create a downloadable asset such as an ebook or a comprehensive guide and offer it in exchange for visitors’ emails. Visit Hubspot Academy to learn how to do it in details.

2. Resonating ads

I can’t help, but mention this tactic, used by Ryver, our competitor. With the obvious leader in the face of Slack, team communication and collaboration niche is pretty hard to enter. You have to explain how you are different from Slack to their millions of fans and fight for your place in the sun. Ryver made a power move and set up the aggressive ad campaign in Twitter confronting their main rival.

Ryver says they’ve seen incredible engagement with these promoted tweets compared to other tweets where they’d speak of their advantages as a team communication app. Eventually, this approach helped them generate buzz around the product, got them noticed by thousands of potential customers and resulted in the long awaited sign ups.

I don’t encourage to go against your competitor with your ad campaigns. The ethical side of this approach is controversial and completely up to you. The bottom line is it works and gets you the precious emails.

3. Referral traffic from Quora

So many marketing channels, so little time. Referral traffic could become a great acquisition channel as well. After spending one week answering questions on Quora, I was surprised to discover its traffic converts at impressive 6%.

Here’s a priceless hack we’ve learnt – wiki answers. Rather than asking friends to upvote your content and fighting desperately to rank higher among other answers, here’s what you should do.

Whenever you find a question related to your niche e.g. it’s something like “What are the best Slack alternatives?” for us, hit the three dots menu and choose ‘Create Answer Wiki’. Once you post it, it’ll be reviewed by Quora staff and, if doesn’t violate their policy, it’ll be approved. Not everyone is aware of this hack so hurry up to make use of it asap.

4. Pricing model matters

Marketing isn’t only about promotion. There are still the three other P’s, remember? It’s hard to overestimate product pricing when it comes to generating leads.

When marketing thinks of leads, business thinks of sales. Not all leads are made equal. There are leads that turn into paying customers. There are also leads that churn after a free trial or remain freemium forever. Freemium, free trial, premium or other models you employ to price your product will result in different levels of lead generation. I’ve written more about various pricing models here. Let me highlight a few points.

I’d recommend to stay away from freemium unless you are a big company backed up by investors. Freemium sounds better than it in fact is. It means customers can use the lite version of your product for free for as long as you want. With all the virality you might get by going with freemium, you should consider the cons carefully.

Think of the number of free users you’ll have to maintain in order to get a handful of paying customers. Although it may look attractive, you can quickly find yourself in a freemium trap – answering support tickets of free users and developing the features that freemium customers request.

The bottom line is price the product wisely and learn about pros and cons of each pricing model. Generating leads is good. Generating leads that eventually become paying clients is even better.

5. Conversion rate optimization

No tactics or hacks will work If your website isn’t optimized for conversion. I’m not going to repeat what’s already written on the other blogs. Let me just share our experience on this.

It is a good idea to encourage those who already signed up to share the love with friends. Offer something in exchange, e.g. we’re offering the early bird access to our app if the potential customers share the word about Chanty in social networks. This helps us increase brand awareness and attract new clients to our team messenger.

I know pop ups are annoying. That’s why I didn’t choose to put up distracting windows that appear when you are in the middle of reading an article. Instead, we’ve opted for an exit pop up. Once the user is about to leave your website, it comes out. The results have exceeded our expectations – it now generates about 10% of our sign ups.

The last, but not the least – signing up at your website should be incredibly easy. It goes without saying, you should remove CAPTCHA and other challenges in the way of your potential customers. Unless you are a well known app like HubSpot, avoid multiple fill in forms at the sign up form. Email is, in fact, all you need. OK, ‘Name’ is another appropriate field to add. Just make sure it’s doesn’t become this:

Source

If you have user-unfriendly forms that still convert, my best guess is you are holding a complete monopoly over the niche.

Conclusion

Marketing a SaaS product is complicated and involves a series of various activities. The bottom line, however, is the number of sign-ups these activities generate. These are the metrics that every founder and CEO will keep in mind when evaluating efforts of a marketing team.

Therefore, try to strike a balance of promotion, price, product and placement to meet the business goals. Staying on the ethical side is equally important. Try the lead generation and conversion optimization hacks we’ve shared in this article to boost the number of sign ups on your website. Feel free to share other tips that worked well for you in the comments below.

The post 5 SaaS lead generation secrets to try in 2018 appeared first on Insightly.

Without a rock-solid process, the addition of new topics and writers will only compound the issue. Before you can expand, you need to invest in the process itself.

In this post, I’ll show how it’s possible to optimize your content workflow by using Insightly projects and workflow automation.

Map Your Content Pipeline

We marketers aren’t always the most methodical people. Writing a blog post or designing a brochure just comes naturally. But, mapping out an automated content workflow? That sounds a little scary.

With the right tools, building a content pipeline isn’t as intimidating as it first seems. In fact, a tool like Insightly can even make things kind of fun. To get you up to speed, here’s a quick video on how Insightly pipelines work:

Since Insightly is more than just a sales CRM, you can use pipelines to create predictability in your content production. Before spending too much time in Insightly, however, you’ll want to first study how your team currently does things. Here are some questions to consider:

• Do blog posts, landing pages, and other web assets follow the same sequential pattern?
• If they differ, should you consider creating separate pipelines for each type?
• What specific phases does each piece go through during production?
• As an item passes into a new phase of production, are there specific tasks or actions that always occur during that stage (such as obtaining sign offs or publishing a piece)?

Work closely with your team to map out the “guts” of your content workflow. It might even make sense to host an in-person meeting during which ideas are thrown onto a whiteboard for easy visualization. Investing this time upfront will help you avoid significant changes later on.

Set Things Up

After studying your current process, it’s time to get busy in Insightly. For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that your team decides it needs three unique pipelines for:

• Blog articles
• Landing pages
• Other web pages

Since most of what you crank out is blog related, you decide to focus on that pipeline first (wise decision!). To set it up in Insightly, you’ll just jump over to your pipeline settings page. If this is your first pipeline, there won’t be anything listed under “pipeline name.” Give your new pipeline a name, check the “for projects” box, and click “add pipeline.”

Once added, you’ll then want to add your stages. To do this, click “edit stages” and key in your desired production phases. Here’s a very simple example that might make sense for your business:

Congratulations! You’ve just added your first content production pipeline. When that next blog post idea pops into your head, simply add a new Insightly project that utilizes this same pipeline.

Automate Each Step in Content Workflow

As you were adding pipeline stages, you might have noticed a drop-down option for activity sets. In case you’ve never heard of activity sets, here’s a quick overview of how they work:

In short, as a content piece moves into a new stage of production, Insightly can automatically create and assign batches of tasks or events.

By now, your brain is probably racing with all of the possibilities. For example, when items are moved to “pitch,” Insightly can do the following for you:

Assign a task to your assistant, Rhonda, reminding her to create and attach a blank collaboration document (within one business day)

• Create a task to pitch the article within a week (manually assigned later)
• Create a placeholder task for the writer to request pitch approval

Creating an activity set only takes a couple minutes, and it can easily be linked to your pitch stage:

Voila! By linking an activity set to the pitch phase, you’ll ensure that your team (yourself included) avoids overlooking important steps. Each new content piece (aka an Insightly project) is updated with the steps necessary to complete the pitch.

In reality, the pitch phase is probably not the only stage of your content production that could benefit from activity sets. Linking additional activity sets to other pipeline stages can be wise; just don’t try to overdo it. Consider gradually phasing in activity sets and testing each one individually. Few things are more aggravating than automation that creates more confusion than clarity.

Embed Work Instructions into the Process

Auto-assigning tasks is a step in the right direction. But, doing so isn’t a guarantee that the work will be done to your desired level of specification.

Increase the quality of your team’s work output by embedding work instructions into the process. Take, for example, the task that reminds Rhonda to create a blank document. You’ve shown her how to access the shared drive, find the correct folder, copy the template, and use the correct naming structure. With everything else on her plate, however, she sometimes skips a step or two by mistake.

To remedy this problem, update the task template to include a bulleted list of steps. Rhonda will appreciate the helpful reminder when new pitch requests arrive. You’ll appreciate not having to continuously repeat yourself.

Measure Your Production

Insightly also makes it easy to monitor content cycle times, bottlenecks, and other important productivity metrics. Just hop over to your project reports and filter for items within the blog pipeline. Insightly instantly returns a list of sortable content pieces, including those that you’ve recently completed. Drag and drop column fields to slice and dice status information, cycle time data, linked author profiles, and much more.

As your content backlog grows, Insightly’s charting features become increasingly helpful. For example, with a few clicks, the previous table can be converted into the following chart, displaying a visual representation of your content allocation (by status).

No more pivot tables or complicated spreadsheets. Everything you need to track is at your fingertips in Insightly.

Get Scalin’

Each new article magnifies the inefficiency of your current (broken) workflow. It’s time you took the next step and leveraged Insightly’s project management features for the betterment of your marketing team.

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