Digital marketing campaigns offer cost-effective, measurable results for your business. Unfortunately, managing all the details of these campaigns can be time-consuming. Between developing your marketing strategy, creating your content, and monitoring the results, digital marketing can seem overwhelming, or even unfeasible, for small businesses.
Digital marketing automation is the solution. By automating some marketing tasks, you can still deliver results for your business while saving lots of time and effort. In this article, we'll be talking about different marketing automations that can help make your life easier as a business owner or digital marketer.
Marketing automation involves using software to handle tasks without a person's direct involvement. Typically, you just need to set the automation up once, and then it can repeatedly complete your marketing tasks.
People often think of email campaigns when they hear about marketing automation, but there are actually many different types, including:
In all likelihood, there are automations out there that will integrate well with any of your preferred digital marketing channels. When you use marketing automation solutions, your team has more time to focus on crucial business tasks like working directly with customers.
How you use marketing automation software will depend on your goals and marketing process. Here are some common ways to use a marketing automation tool as part of your social media marketing efforts.
While it may seem small, it can take a lot of time to go to all of your social platforms to schedule each individual post for a specific time. That's where marketing automation comes into play. With marketing automation, you can schedule your posts to go out to each platform at once, all from one place. That way, you can spend more time creating great social media content to engage your customers, and less time on scheduling.
For example, with our social CRM, Optimize HQ, you connect all of your social media accounts one time. From there, you can post to all of those accounts in real time or schedule your content for later publishing.
Marketing automation can also bring all of your platforms' analytics together in one place. Check out your insights to see how your pages compare and view how things have changed over the months. You can even view your organic vs. paid traffic to see just how well your ads are performing.
Understanding your posts' performance is crucial, letting you know what works and what doesn't. Rather than guessing and hoping for the best, use automated platform analytics to make informed decisions about your campaigns going forward.
When you're short on time, you might respond to comments on social media less frequently. However, keeping a strong line of communication with your customers is crucial — it helps build trust and reliability for your brand.
Automation can be a huge help for marketers and business owners when it comes to responding to customers online. Setting up automated responses on platforms like Facebook can help you stay on top of your communication.
To set up these automatic responses on Facebook, go into your Messaging settings and turn on Instant Replies. Then, compose your message and click save. Anyone who sends you a message will get your automatic response right away.
Beyond social media automation, you can also automate marketing tasks like assigning lead scores or sending out follow-up emails.
Think about your business's marketing campaigns and the repetitive tasks that slow you down. That's where the opportunities for automation are. For example, if you use email marketing, consider automating your subject lines with the recipient's first name for more personalized messages.
Marketing teams often use automation to organize customer data according to where they are in the customer journey as part of the lead management process. With so many tools out there, you should be able to find the perfect solution for all of your marketing automation needs.
In today's fast-paced environment, many business owners and marketers don't have the time to complete all of their marketing tasks manually. Automations help you save time so you can focus on important tasks, like planning out your campaigns or connecting with your customers.
Automated workflows also benefit your business by:
If you're a business owner or marketing manager, our social CRM platform, Optimize HQ, can help you manage all of your campaigns in one location. You can schedule posts, respond to reviews, and view insights from each of your social media accounts.
If you want to learn more about how Optimize can help manage your online presence, schedule your free consultation today!
We'll help you manage your online presence so you can focus on what you do best—running your business.