Content Marketing Management Using Zoho Apps

Content Marketing is about presenting your message(s) across multiple channels in a way that clearly and consistently reflects your brand (and the ideas you're sharing). Executing a strong content marketing strategy means having unified messaging, which requires a connected team using connected marketing apps or platforms. 

As a B2B marketing strategy team, Beckmann Collaborative's primary goal in content marketing is to drive engagement at every touchpoint using an easily managed process. Let's emphasize this part - having an Easily Managed Process is key to being successful. You can write the best copy and make cool images, but if it's too complicated to get it published and shared, then it's useless. 

The marketing data from different apps must be connected for actionable reporting and consistent user experience. The good news is that it's no longer expensive to have an all-in-one connected tech solution for marketing. So you're not stuck managing siloed marketing platforms. 

You can plan and execute any type of marketing campaign from a single technology platform - Zoho One.  Zoho offers an integrated suite of apps that make it easy to create and manage all of your marketing platforms without cluttering up email inboxes. It also helps teams to stay organized, try different things, and ultimately help with growth.

How to Manage Content Marketing

Before digging into the specific Zoho apps for content marketing management, here's an overview of how we use software in general for marketing. The goal is always to make us super efficient while not negatively impacting the content quality. Content is King after all.

Overall Content Management

For so many business owners and marketers (to be frank), starting from blank page is a huge challenge. One of the ways we overcome this barrier to content creation success is by getting organized. We use a simple, yet robust content calendar to hold our ideas and keep track of all our activities - blog posts, social media posts and events. A good content calendar shows you a snapshot of your marketing campaigns, your blogging plan, email plans, social posts, etc. Creating this as a shared document in an accessible place for the team makes it efficient.

Content Templates

The second part of fighting writer's block is using a template. You can create campaign templates, social media posting templates, email templates, SMS text message templates, and even blog templates. Having outlines to provide direction is both a time saver and brand consistency tool.

A/B Testing

Being a data-driven company, we often run A/B tests on different pieces of content. From emails to landing pages and more. The focus of A/B testing is to increase conversions and improve user experience.

Zoho Apps for Content Management

The main apps we use for ourselves and with clients include Zoho Social, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Survey, and Zoho CRM.

Zoho CRM is the heart of this system - as the holder of all data. The CRM helps us track leads from all sources, see their progress, build relationships, and convert them. In addition, we leverage the CRM as a customer nurturing center to see what content they are engaging with.

Your Zoho CRM can show the social media and email interactions you've had with a Lead or a Contact throughout their lifecycle. In turn, this can guide your future content marketing strategy. 

Zoho Social is our social media management tool that we use for scheduling posts, as well as monitoring mentions and responding to them. We also use it to track social media performance. This app helps us stay connected to our customers and drive them back to our website or blog posts.

Zoho Campaigns lets us manage both broadcast and drip email campaigns. It includes workflow creation, segmentation of lists based on topics and fields, and sending out emails with personalized content from contact profiles. It has helped us reach both prospects and customers with relevant information in a timely manner. 

We use this tool to make sure that we send out emails at the right time with relevant information which is important for building relationships with customers - especially if they are looking for specific information such as pricing or product features before making a decision on buying from us.

Zoho Survey is more than collecting customer feedback and market research. We get creative and use it to deliver fun quizzes or polls. This helps us identify the needs, pain points, and interests of our prospects and customers. It also helps our business understand how we can improve based on the feedback given by our customers.

Here is an example:

Using Zoho Survey, you create a simple "personality quiz" and publish that link using Zoho Social to your social platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. When a prospect fills out the quiz, he or she is automatically added to your contacts list on Zoho Social and created as a new Lead in Zoho CRM. Using an engaging marketing strategy, you can guide this Lead through your process of converting them into a sale. You can invite him/her to opt into your newsletter (with a link to your Zoho Campaigns form). Maybe you will send a direct message within a social platform. And Lead Scoring in your CRM can help with identifying the highest quality leads, then automations can deliver customized messages based on lead interests.

Apps for Marketing Operations and Productivity

In addition to the marketing apps from Zoho, we also use productivity and collaboration tools to keep the team connected - Zoho Workdrive, Zoho Cliq, and Zoho Projects. These tools help with our marketing operations to keep us all up to date while managing our individual tasks.

Zoho Workdrive is very similar to Google Drive or OneDrive. This platform enables us to create and share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other files across our organization.  We have templates set up for different types of documents that we use often such as meeting notes or content calendars. And we can track progress and campaigns among our team and share it with the clients too. This helps us get an overview of where each project or campaign is at any given point in time, and it keeps everyone updated with the latest information.

Zoho Cliq is like a more unified version of Slack or Microsoft Teams. This app allows us to chat in real-time so that we can collaborate internally, with outside agencies assisting us, and with clients. Even non-Zoho users can have a free Cliq account to chat with us. This makes it easier for everybody in the organization to access important updates relevant to their respective projects without having to rely on emails or text messages for communication purposes.

Zoho Projects is highly useful for managing our daily tasks for each project. In our case, each client is set up as a project. However, clients can create a project just for monthly content marketing management and another for a special campaign that requires different tasks. While getting started with Zoho Projects can be daunting to setup, the long-term use can be quite powerful. 

We Have a Passion for Efficiency and Processes

Though it's fun to be creative and write content, so much of what we do well for clients is marketing operations. Often, we work with clients to create systems, processes, and workflows to make sure all of the cool marketing ideas come to fruition. This may also come in the form of a communications strategy, detailed process document, or workflow diagrams.

If you're curious about how we work with clients using Zoho tools to improve marketing operations, then please feel free to reach out.