Automation is a gift to marketers. It allows us to set and forget those pesky manual tasks (like sending out 5,000 emails) and focus more on the fun stuff like messaging, brand voice, blog writing, and video production.
Of course, if you don’t know much about marketing automation, figuring out where to start can feel overwhelming. So here are a few marketing tasks you should be automating, but maybe aren’t.
And if you aren’t, that’s okay. Better late than never.
Since we’ve already mentioned emails, we might as well start with email automation. Instead of manually sending out emails to your customers, you can set up email blasts to go out at designated times. Additionally, you can set up conditional emails that are sent when visitors or leads do something specific like download an ebook or sign up for your email list. Once you’ve written the text for these emails, your email automation tool substitutes the customer’s name in and handles the rest.
Social Media
If you write a fantastic blog post, it won’t be worth a thing if no one ever sees it. In order to catch the attention of online readers, a blog post has to be shared multiple times. While that may feel like a lot from your end, it’s probably barely enough to register on the screens of individuals who are scrolling past numerous posts a day.
Even once you’ve come to terms with the fact that you have to promote your material this often, it’s hard to remember, especially with the many other things you need to do to run your business. Instead, you can pre-write tweets and Facebook posts, for example, and plug them into your automation software so that your material is pumped out throughout the week.
Marketing Funnel
Excellent. That e-book you published or webinar you produced was a massive success, and you’ve collected a lot of emails. But now you have to spend time organizing that information for future follow-up. Did you know you could simply automate this process?
Instead of spending hours manually formatting a spreadsheet and organizing names, phone numbers, and emails, you can have that information automatically pulled into your CRM or your email marketing tools. This way, following up on leads and closing deals is significantly quicker.
Analytics
Analytics are an inevitable part of working in marketing. In order to justify your expenses, you need to see that you’re achieving some return on investment on your efforts. Instead of spending time tracking campaigns manually in spreadsheets and figuring out how to represent that data, sophisticated marketing analytics tools can track your campaigns, record revenue, and generate powerful reports that give you a 360-degree understanding of how much money each dollar spent on marketing generates.
A/B Testing
A green button may work better than a red button. One blog title may draw more readers than another. This is a test that you can run automatically and simultaneously for a variety of features like call-to-action buttons, images, videos, and more. Little tweaks can lead to big results, and A/B testing can help you determine where to make those adjustments.
Marketing automation can save you an enormous amount of time, especially if you’re a small business owner who needs to put as many things on autopilot as possible. With these marketing elements managed, you can focus on the more enjoyable parts of marketing your business such as meeting with potential customers, talking about your product, and sharing your vision for your company.