Written by Sonia Baschez
When Makerpad chatted with the team at Stark about their content marketing process, we realized they were overwhelmed with the amount of mental space and time they spent searching for and keeping track of outside content and by the number of tools they were using to handle it all. Turns out the Stark team was ready for an all-around upgrade to their content practice. The goal was to decrease the number of processes and hours they currently use, automate as much as possible, and use as few tools as necessary.
Content is key to continuing to engage with the Stark community, so it was important for the Stark team to create the space needed to focus on giving them the content they want and getting feedback directly from their users. So Makerpad got to work helping them automate gathering outside content so they could focus on their own content and test out new content ideas with their audience.
Stark’s manual process: The team would search the web for relevant content and create a daily newsletter combined with internal news, events and content.
Makerpad upgrade: Amie shows you how to use Airtable and Zapier to save articles from around the web and auto-populate them into a MailChimp newsletter.
Key Takeaways:
Stark’s manual process: Similar to the above, the team would search the web for relevant content and add their content onto a social media management system to post for them.
Makerpad upgrade: Tom shows you how to use Zapier to save articles from around the web and auto-populate them into Buffer. Optional: add in an additional step to create an approval process using Airtable.
Key Takeaways:
Stark’s manual process: The team would send out surveys for feedback on potential webinar ideas. Once there’s a winner, they set up a landing registration page to get sign ups.
Makerpad upgrade: Tom combines a variety of useful tools including Webflow CMS, Typeform, Zapier and Airtable to capture people’s choice of webinar(s) and then dynamically create Webinar Registration pages.
Key Takeaways:
Stark’s manual process: In order to welcome new users to Slack, the Stark team has to manually trigger the conversation. (Note: workflows are an issue with all free plans!)
Makerpad upgrade: Amie shows you the easiest way to send automatic direct messages to New Users using a Zapier to Slack “Welcome Bot.”
Key Takeaways:
As happens with many growing companies, what started out as a way to engage with their audience and customers grew laborious and untenable. While they wanted to continue giving their audience access to Stark, the number of hours spent and tools used, was cutting into the time they could be using to create more creative and customized content. Working with Makerpad, let them see that maybe they didn’t have to compromise! By giving them the power to automate as much as possible, reducing the number of tools they were using, and lowering the number of hours they spent, we were able to give them more time to focus on creating the content they knew their audience wanted: custom Stark content.
Looking forward to the systems you set up at your company! Let us know how they work out. If you’re looking for a good place to start, here’s our Automation at Work Bootcamp.