Saving your sanity with marketing automation!
When marketing your business online is truly looked at and laid bare, it’s hard to ignore the mountain of tasks that face you and your staff every single day. Feelings of being overloaded and the constant suspicion that you’re forgetting something will almost allways be present. Every one of us face this. Online marketing is monstrously complex beast, and to tame it you have to employ some forms of marketing automation to handle the amount of moving parts that marketing in multiple channels requires. Not doing this is virtually choosing not to compete. Let’s check out some ways we can apply marketing automation.
Tools for marketing automation
There are lots of great tools available that you can spend your time and money on, for our purposes here I’m going to focus on three areas that can be enormous time sucks and possess the most prospect of return on investment.
Email autoresponders – Possibly the most important thing to automate, as without using this type of tool you have basically no hope of managing a customer email list. Loading up your autoresponder with marketing messages can help you give both new customers and prospects alike the feeling as though they are being well taken care of. There are several great email companies available that can handle this seamlessly for you, such as AWeber, GetResponse, iContact, MailChimp and others.
Managing social media – Keeping your finger on the pulse of several social media accounts daily is not just a full time gig, but a hard one at that. You need to use some kind of tool, and there are several good ones out there that enable you to keep track of mentions, shares, Tweets and even allow you to post to your social platforms. Take a peek at HootSuite, TweetDeck and Buffer.
Automate tasks – As everyone knows there are lots of small tasks that need attention daily, or the whole house of cards may collapse! Some of the better tools to come down the pike of late are the development of task masters like IFTTT and Zapier. These tools, (similar in intent and application) can be lifesavers in regards to automating tasks between two different services. Very handy, indeed!
Make sure to not let customer and prospects slip through the cracks with all your automation. Being there for effective customer service is a vital piece of business too!