As content marketers, we use dozens of tools and programs every day to help us improve our work. From tools that help us streamline content creation and maximize content distribution to tools that help us boost productivity, we rely on a variety of tools that directly affect the ROI of our efforts. And one tool the team at Influence & Co. absolutely loves is Zapier, who just happens to also be one of our former clients.
We love using Zapier because it makes our lives so much easier. Its system integrates with some of our favorite platforms and essentially allows them all to talk to one another. (Nerd talk: Zapier syncs up the APIs of our favorite apps, allowing us to automate tasks.)
Thanks to Zapier, we can easily automate simple tasks on our to-do lists that don’t take a lot of brainpower so we can focus on those bigger-picture projects that take more time and energy. Content marketers, rejoice!
Zapier currently works with thousands of applications, which gives you millions of possibilities for automation. It integrates with household names like Google Docs and Sheets, Gmail, Trello, Facebook, Slack, HubSpot, and more, and it adds new apps to the system all the time.
To help you save time, boost your productivity, and improve your efforts, here's a list of six of our favorite content marketing zaps — and how you can set them up for your own team:
Never forget to share an article again! You can easily connect your blog’s RSS feed to your social media accounts to automatically share your content when it's published. If you already have a team managing content on your brand's social media accounts, consider connecting this to some of your key employees' accounts, such as your sales team members, CEO, influential employees, etc., to make it quick and easy for them to promote your content.
Our team loves Slack. Because we're a growing company with a few offices across different cities, Slack is the hub for all our day-to-day communication. So when the marketing team thought about the best way for us to share newly published blog content with the company, we knew Slack would be a great solution.
Our marketing team created a new Slack channel, #the-knowledge-bank, that's open to our entire company and automatically shares new blog posts using Zapier. This keeps everyone on our team up-to-date on new content and makes it easy for employees to share content with their networks, too.
(While we use Slack for our company communication, this feature also works for other group chat platforms, such as Hipchat.)
This hack works similarly to the one above, but instead of sharing newly published content with our team, it alerts our marketing team members when we generate a new lead in HubSpot, our marketing automation system. (This feature is especially fun when we've launched a new piece of gated content because we can see in real time how it's affecting our progress toward our lead generation goals!)
We send surveys to our email marketing list from time to time to learn more about how we can create new content that truly benefits our readers. It’s helpful to store people’s responses within their HubSpot profiles so we can easily find and use that information in the future, follow up on responses, or pass along that info to our sales team.
Our internal project management system, ICo Core, includes an editorial calendar that allows our entire team to know where content is in the production process and when it's scheduled to go live. This organization keeps our team on the same page about priorities and even gives other departments insight into projects that are coming down the pipeline.
Now, if you don’t already have an editorial calendar that people outside your core content marketing team can access, you can easily create one with Zapier.
Any time a new account follows your company on Twitter, you can set up a zap that allows you to automatically tweet back and thank that person for following you. This is a great opportunity to share a piece of content with them and get them to engage with you and your content.
Didn’t see your favorite apps mentioned here? While these are some of our favorite ways content marketers can use the platforms we love, millions of other possibilities are available on Zapier, and you can browse here without even creating an account.
Taylor Oster is a marketer and designer with a passion for using helpful, educational, high-quality content to achieve tangible business results. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.