Let’s be honest, we’re all having to get more done with less time and resources. What was once a whole department of marketers is now 2 or less people having to handle everything. Meanwhile, there’s more places to market on. You now have to focus on your social media, email campaigns, content creation, SEO, local advertising, and on and on.
So, what can you use to help you maximize productivity while still remaining sane? Automation. Marketing automation is just simply letting software do a lot of the daily tasks that you normally would. It helps you save time, and of course, money.
Automating Email
This is probably one of the easier places that you can save time and energy. Email automation based on what a person does can keep you from having to manually keep track of who does what on your website.
For example, when a person fills out a contact form on our website, they’re put into an automation workflow that sends them emails throughout the sales process.
If they do something different on the website they get an entirely different set of emails and links back to the website. While it took some time to initially set up, it’s easy to A/B test and swap new emails in that are more relevant or we think will be more effective.
As we get several leads a day keeping track of each of them would be next to impossible without marketing automation. For some of our clients who do large e-commerce it’s even more necessary that they automate their email processes.
Automating Social Media
Social media automation can be several different things. It can be the automation of posting the content. But it can also be the automation of social listening. Paying attention to competitors and industry leaders can be time consuming. But with an automation dashboard you can do both.
When you partner it with automating your content it can help save you so much time in the long run.
Automating Content
This is probably the wrong term – it’s not so much automation as it is just good general planning. Creating a content calendar can keep you on track for months ahead of time. Sure you can swap out a blog or a video that’s really timely, but generally you get the opportunity to not think about your topic for weeks at a time.
For us this is really important, as we’re creating content for lots of different companies every day. Staying ahead is one thing, but as any writer can tell you, half the time is spent thinking of what to write about. This saves us hours on blogging a day.
Automating Reminders
If you notice in the email automation email image I was able to assign a lead depending on the contact form to a specific person. At a company where two people handle sales it’s not as big of a deal, but when you have larger sales forces this cannot be underestimated.
It’s often the job of marketing managers or a marketing and sales manager to hand out leads. With an automated processes they can not worry about who’s next.
Additionally you can set reminders all along the marketing and sales processes to do other tasks. You can set reminder templates to carry out activities and never worry about missing a deadline or step along the way.
Is Marketing Automation for You?
Even if you’re a large organization with a lot of marketers at your disposal, automating some processes will allow your team to reach even further than they would otherwise.
There are few places where automating your marketing wouldn’t be helpful. While we use the SharpSpring software to assist us and our clients in this, there are plenty of ways you can do it with the tools you already have. Google calendar, MailChimp, and social platforms like Buffer allow you to do a lot of this. We just prefer to use one tool to rule it all.