In this age where there is rapid advancement in technology, there are a lot of ways to make things easier and to automate them to save time and energy that can be focused on other important things.
If you have a business, you need to find ways to make things simpler and less time-consuming. One way of doing this is by automating some processes in your business. Marketing tasks for example are costly, time-consuming, and tedious. You can automate some of these tasks in order to save time and money.
Automation is an integral part of sustainable growth for your business. Contrary to popular belief that automation drives towards extinction of certain jobs, technology will actually help modern marketers improve and evolve. Automating some marketing tasks does not totally mean that people who work in the marketing industry will lose their jobs. It just means that they can continue doing their jobs and focus on other aspects of marketing that cannot be automated and that need more attention.
Benefits of Automating Marketing
- Increased productivity
- Acquire more customers
- Align sales and marketing
- Improved campaign management
- Increased marketing ROI
Marketing Activities That Can Be Automated
Emails
A lot of companies use email as part of their marketing campaign and it takes time to produce just one email to make sure that sending this email won’t be a waste of time. According to studies, 68% of companies spend a week in creating just one email. Just imagine when how much time marketers spend on just creating emails instead of focusing on other things that are more important for the company. The automation of email creation plays a role here. It can save your company a lot of time and money.
Checking emails is also part of the job of a marketer or anyone who works. Checking emails is time consuming especially if you spend time looking at emails that you thing are important but are actually junk email. It also takes time to delete mails that are not important. There is actually a way create an automation wherein you will only be notified when specific people send you an email so that you won’t need to check your email every time you get a notification that you received a new mail.
You can create an automated welcome email that can be sent automatically to new subscribers or clients. You can also use set up an autoresponder especially since most subscribers are engaged in the first 48 hours after signing up for an email list.
Emails Tracking
Another way to send automated emails is by setting an email when a particular link is clicked on your company’s website. You can use a tool to track the behavior of your visitors so that when they are interested in a certain product or service in your website, you can automatically send an email with a detailed description of that product, service, or event they were interested in.
You can also send an automated email when a customer has picked products and put them in a shopping cart and he suddenly turns off your website. The notification email is to remind him he has made a purchase on your website and it is ready for checkout.
Another automated email that you can send is a reminder that a subscription or a free trial is about to expire. Possibilities here are endless, just be creative and you can find many more email marketing ideas.
Content Promotion
Promoting the content of your website can be time consuming especially if you need to log in to different social media accounts and edit posts based on the features of each social media platform. There are certain tools that can help you automate this process without having to do anything after you have finished setting up the automation.
CRM Management
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are different platforms that you can use to link the CRM software to social media platforms. With these platforms, you can monitor the mentions of your brand online and you can quickly give feedback to negative mentions or thank loyal customers for their patronage. They help track customers and their interactions automatically.
Lead-flow Processes
Generating leads is time consuming but is important for your business. You can cut down the time that you spend on leads by automating them. Once you automate this process, you won’t need to manually keep track of your website traffic and conversions. The tools will help keep track of them for you.
Marketing Analytics
Analytics for marketing is very important because this will drive you to come up with your next steps or move for your marketing strategy. There are a lot of marketing analytics tools that are available in the market. Most of them can even be integrate to produce better and more accurate results.
Tools to Automate Marketing Tasks
As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of tools and platforms that can help you with specific marketing tasks to save time and money. These tools won’t hurt your budget as they are either free or affordable and you can use them to effectively manage the marketing processes in your company.
Here are some popular tools that can help you automate some of the marketing tasks:
Zapier
Zapier is a very useful tool when it comes to automating marketing processes. It helps you create an automation workflow wherein you will only receive notifications when specific people send you an email. Zapier can also automate the sharing of content to different social media platforms. You can also automate lead-flow processes through Zapier. It allows you to add new sales to an email platform or CRM automatically.
Drip
Drip is designed for automatically sending scheduled marketing emails. You can set up an autoresponder to send client emails by automating tasks based on visitor and user triggers. One example is sending welcome email to a new customer, 2 days later another product email and one more at the end of the week.
Buffer
Buffer allows you to share content from your website to social media platforms. It allows you to schedule the distribution and promotion of content to your different social media platforms. Place content for queueing and pre-configure the time slots when they would be sent out. Buffer also has advice and great insight to educate anyone who wants to learn how to improve the efforts in promoting content.
HubSpot
HubSpot helps companies keep track of and organize its customers. They allows you to keep track of interactions. It also compiles the data that it gets from customers in just one dashboard for easier access. In this way, each customer experience is mapped out. The dashboard also lets teams sort out contracts that are won or lost. The CRM feature of HubSpot can also track the emails, calls, and meetings for each customer while generating paths to purchase. Aside from the CRM feature of HubSpot, this platform also offers other features essential for marketing such as landing pages, blogging, analytics, lead management, social media, email, SEO ads, web traffic analysis, integrations, etc. You can also automate lead-flow processes by using HubSpot. HubSpot’s marketing analytics allows you to easily measure every aspect of marketing from the moment of acquisition. It allows you to keep track of the entire customer lifecycle from website visitors to paying customers. It also reveals key trends in the data.
Wishpond
This platform is known for its lead-generation tools such as contests, popups, and landing pages. It helps businesses track websites and score leads. It also offers an integration with most of the CRM tools that are commonly in use in market today.
Intercom
Intercom lets you get in touch with your customers through personalised messages in just a matter of seconds. This tool shows you the users of your products and it also gives you the ability to reach out to these customers through in-app messages and targeted and behavior-driven email.
Quuu
Quuu is a tool that allows you to automatically curate content based on topics and categories that you choose. It lets you share significant content with your audience on a regular basis. The content is hand-curated by the Quuu team.
MailLift
MailLift can be used to send out notes and letters on your behalf with an added personal touch. This will make your customers feel that they are valued and special while your marketing team focuses on other important matters to grow your business. This personalized handwritten letters has integration with Salesforce
Salesforce
This is a great CRM marketing platform with many features. it combines system for sales, service and marketing in one place and easy to follow interface. Salesforce can also link the CRM software with social media platforms.
IFTTT
IFTTT helps you automate some activities by streamlining workflow based on triggered events with more than 4,000 preset trigger events to choose from. You can also set up your own trigger. Once the trigger events are set, you won’t need to do anything. The automation of IFTTT will take care of everything else once you post a content to your website.
Azuqua
Azuqua allows companies to build custom processes and serves as a marketing automation software. it goes well with SaaS applications and
has a big App libary ready to use like Ftp, DropBox, Bing,Amazon and many more apps.
The automation of marketing tasks and activities doesn’t require spending loads of money on it because there are various tools, platforms, and applications that are either free or affordable which you can use to optimize and improve your marketing strategies.
Sure there are many more – What are your favorites?
