Category: Marketing Automation

We share a lot of the same goals as our customers, but perhaps the most important one is that we, like you, want to work less and accomplish more. After all, isn’t that what automation is all about? Small business owners are busy people who wear many hats, including marketer, salesperson, product/service provider, HR and…
The post Email and CRM: Where Marketing Automation Meets Personal Sales Follow-Ups appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Sixty-eight percent of online experiences begin with a search engine. So if you want to make sure that your content is in the right place at the right time, you have to be thinking about SEO at every single stage of the content creation process. SEO — or search engine optimization, for the uninitiated —…
The post How to Prioritize SEO in Your Content Creation Process appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Just as important as having a great inbound marketing strategy is knowing what metrics you need to be tracking to tell if it’s effective. Inbound marketing (i.e., emails, blog content, social media, ads, and everything else you do to attract customers to your brand) is critical to success. However, it’s not enough to just put…
The post The Qualitative and Quantitative Metrics You Should Measure for Your Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Benchmark Email.

For small and lean businesses, marketing automation is a game-changer. Companies use it to automate repetitive tasks, create and schedule lead nurture campaigns, and facilitate sales follow-up, so nothing slips through the cracks. However, each marketing automation tool is not created equally. The more reliable and efficient your automation tool is, the more redundancies it…
The post How to Shorten the Lead Cycle with Marketing Automation appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Many small businesses prefer to use Instagram marketing over other social media platforms一the visual medium enables brands to highlight their products with creative immediacy, while the caption length offers more opportunity to inform and educate than, say, Twitter. Hashtags make posts easily searchable, increasing brand awareness and garnering new followers, and Instagram posts average four…
The post The Small Business Guide to Understanding Instagram Insights appeared first on Benchmark Email.

submitted by /u/Padmnabh [link] [comments]

What makes a good customer support team? Positive customer experience, quick response time, teamwork, a shared vision for the future, achieving the organization’s goals and targets, and the right mix of consistency and agility. Simply put, the foundation of great customer service is building relationships and being comfortable using customer support tools. A good customer…
The post How to Build a Thriving Support Team and Department From Scratch appeared first on Benchmark Email.

With the rise of influencer culture in the digital era, social media has become a staple of mobile marketing. As a result, user-generated content has never been more relevant. Nowadays, any influencer with a large enough following can successfully launch a brand to superstardom with a well-planned influencer marketing strategy. Even though influencer marketing is…
The post 9 Influencer Marketing Pitfalls That Cost Time And Money appeared first on Benchmark Email.

➡️You can now plan and schedule posts to Mastodon using Buffer. Learn more and get started at https://buffer.com/mastodonMastodon is currently going through an explosive phase of growth. Some people say it reminds them of the early days of Twitter. Why is it growing so fast, and why now?It’s largely due to its decentralized structure and mission to build a safe and stable social network without any corporate interference. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Mastodon is not-for-profit. It’s not owned by anyone and is run by the community that uses it. It primarily uses a chronological feed and it doesn’t serve ads or collect your personal data.In other words, it stands in stark contrast to the “big tech” social networks you’re probably more familiar with and offers something new and exciting.But because Mastodon has a chronological feed, unless you are posting consistently and at all times of the day, your posts might not be seen by a large chunk of the community.This is where scheduling comes in.With Buffer’s newest integration, you can plan your Mastodon posts in advance and schedule them at specific times to reach your audience when they are online. It’s particularly powerful if you want to share across multiple timezones and spread your posts out – rather than posting all your ideas at once.How to schedule Mastodon posts with BufferFirst things first, if you don’t have a Mastodon account yet, you should get yourself set it up with one. It’s not as daunting as some people make it out to be. Check out our beginner’s guide to Mastodon to learn how.1. Log in to Buffer and connect Mastodon as a channelIf you’ve already got an account, getting it connected to Buffer is your first step. Log in to Buffer and go to the channel connection page. Mastodon will be one of the new options.2. Choose your serverAfter choosing to connect a Mastodon channel, you’ll be prompted to choose a server. Buffer automatically suggests some of the more popular servers, but if your profile is on a server not on the list, you can choose the “Other” option and manually type the server address.3. Authorize Buffer on MastodonFrom there, you’ll be taken through an authorization flow and in a few clicks you’ll be all set to start scheduling posts from Buffer to Mastodon.4. Start scheduling out your postsThis is where the fun starts; it’s time to start creating and scheduling content for Mastodon. In Buffer, you can create content for any of your connected channels using the composer. Here’s a short demo video highlighting how easy it is to create content for Mastodon.And here are a few tips for creating a Mastodon post using Buffer.Each post can contain up to 500 characters. Some instances allow for more characters but this is the default limit.You can include links and no matter how long the link is, it will count as 23 characters so there is no need to use a link shortener to save characters. In fact, using a link shortener is actively discouraged.You can mention users by typing out their full address, e.g. @alice@example.com. Note that any usage of @word will be interpreted as mentioning the local user with that handle, if that user exists. Only the username part will count against your character limit – the domain is not counted.You can use a #hashtag to make your post discoverable to anyone searching for that hashtag. Hashtags can contain alphanumeric characters and underscores, but cannot contain numbers only.You can add images up to 8MB in size and up to four images can be attached to a post. You can upload a single video or GIF (GIFs are converted to soundless videos).Using the Hashtag Manager in BufferHashtags are a great way to improve discoverability on Mastodon and with Buffer’s hashtag manager you can save groups of hashtags and insert them into your Mastodon post with a single click.Scheduling with Buffer’s iOS and Android appsIf you like to schedule your content on the go, you can use Buffer’s iOS and Android apps to post to Mastodon. Here’s a quick video showing how it works. The hashtag manager is also available on our mobile apps.Feedback and what’s coming nextIt was super fun to build this integration in partnership with some very supportive and generous beta testers. They helped us iron out bugs, better understand the Mastodon platform, and improve the user experience before launch. We feel very lucky to have a community that is just as excited about this as we are!And now that we’ve launched V1, we’re already starting to think about how we can add more power to our Mastodon integration. Scheduling boosts? Analytics? These are some of the requests from our beta community.What do you think? How can we make Buffer for Mastodon even better? We’d love to hear from you. You can connect with us on Mastodon at https://mastodon.world/@buffer (we’d really appreciate a follow!) or you can find us at all the other usual places.Get started todayMastodon scheduling is available on all Buffer plans, including our free plan. To learn more about how Buffer can help build a consistent and engaging presence on Mastodon, and to get started, go to https://buffer.com/mastodon.See you in the fediverse!

Effectively marketing a business requires quite a bit of content. That being said, you don’t always have time to create the various kinds of content you should be creating. While diversifying your content strategy with as many different types of formats as you can handle is usually the way to go (more on that later),…
The post Which Should Your Small Business Prioritize? Blogging or Podcasting? appeared first on Benchmark Email.