Whether they’re manual or automated, you should always create a marketing system for anything you do more than twice. 

That could be anything from promoting backlinks to researching keywords. You’ll save time if you have a go-to way to do it instead of doing it at random every time.

In this post I want to explain 3 of the most important marketing systems you should have in place:

• Mention monitoring and promotion
• Keyword research for SEO
• Email outreach to build relationships

These are things you can try yourself, right away, and figure out the most optimal way to run them whenever you need to. It doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or a large company, establishing scalable marketing systems is a crucial part of managing the impact your company has online.

Let’s get into it!

Mention monitoring & promotion

What do you do when a blogger links to you? Do you even know if a blogger has linked to you? What about when people are talking about you on Twitter? Do you reply? Engaging with others in the public sphere is a way to build brand trust.

PROMOTING BACKLINKS

It’s essential to keep up with people talking about you on the web, and with tools like Mention and BuzzSumo, there’s no excuse for not knowing. Mention is actually a free service for a certain daily quota of mentions, including links and tweets.

Every day you can get an email digest of your most authoritative mentions, or you can direct them to come into a Slack channel (works with both tools). Since a huge part of content marketing is reciprocation and relationship building, you should leverage your mentions by reaching out to the writer, sharing their article, retweeting them, and linking back to them.

The problem is that this has a little bit of a barrier to entry. The solution is that it can mostly be automated with Zapier, or formatted manually in just a few minutes a day. Once you’ve set up Mention (free) or BuzzSumo (premium) to notify you either in Slack or by email of your new mentions, you can simply send the links to an assistant to have them processed — whether that’s lined up for social promotion or added to a database of pages that should be linked out to in future blog posts.

STAYING UP TO DATE WITH MENTIONS ON TWITTER

Unless you have a dedicated staff member on Twitter (not advisable unless you offer support over Twitter, or you’re a very big company!), you’re not always going to have time to check social media during work hours. What if there was a way to get notified of the tweets that matter?

If you — like countless businesses — use Slack, you can get a stream of tweets that reference your brand without even leaving the messaging app. At Process Street, we have a channel that streams in all tweets that mention our URLs, brand names, or employees. If you’re interested in engaging your customers and other companies on Twitter without investing too much time and energy, click here for a guide from Slack on how to set that up.

Keyword research for SEO

Provided your website is set up properly, pretty much anything you post online is going to be discoverable by people searching in Google. Once you realize that, you’ve got to think a little more deeply about the kinds of terms you’re using in your content’s title and body text.

If someone searches your target keywords and finds your post, are they going to be happy with what they see? Actually, are you targeting any kind of keyword at all?

Keyword research is the process of finding the best way to describe your content to Google and to human beings. This post is about marketing systems, so I’ve put that in the title and in the body text so it complies with on-page SEO guidelines.  Once you have a good way to describe your content in a few words, it’s time to check variations of those phrases to see which has the highest volume (the amount of searchers who type that term in) and the lowest competition (the amount of other pages targeting the same term).

Thankfully, Google themselves have made a tool that can do that for you! There’s quite a lot to learn about SEO, and there’s a fully documented 3,000+ word process I wrote on that here, but I’ve described the basic idea — now head over to Google Keyword Planner and try it out. Here, for example, is what it turns back when I type in ‘marketing systems’:

So, every month 1,900 people search for that term, and there aren’t too many other strong pages targeting it exactly. What I’ve just described is a basic strategy, but if you do only this and make sure to optimize on-page properly, you’ll be outclassing all but the most SEO-focused websites out there.

Email outreach to build relationships

As I said while talking about the first marketing process, relationships are one of the most important parts of marketing, especially in the age of influencer marketing.

One way you can build relationships with other writers and influencers is by mentioning them in your articles then sending them an email letting them know you’ve done that. When you’ve used someone else’s knowledge as a source for your own writing, they’re going to feel flattered (plus, sending them an email telling them they just got +1 backlink is like sending them a $10 bill).

Here’s the basic process:

1. Write an article linking back to 10 medium-popularity influencers (people with between 1,000 – 10,000 Twitter followers is a good start)
2. Find their emails or hand it off to an assistant
3. Send them a personalized email with a link to your article

With any luck, they’ll be using the same process I described at the beginning of the article, and you’ll get links and shares in return!

Here’s an example of an effective outreach email I got:

Emails like this ( ones which reference our work specifically) get our attention and are a great starting point to a relationship. Since this email was sent, I’ve shared a lot of her content, guest posted on her blog, and I’m a regular commenter. That just goes to show the power of email outreach as a form of content promotion and to build lasting connections with other marketers and influencers.

What kinds of marketing systems are you using in your business?

What works, and what doesn’t? Let us know in the comments.

Benjamin Brandall is head of content marketing at process.st. His personal blog is at benjbrandall.com