Marketing teams always assume that their jobs have to involve an extensive amount of manual work. Thousands of hours spent working on Excel sheets and emails have sucked the lives out of our jobs aplenty–but just a gentle reminder to my fellow marketers out there: It doesn’t need to be that way, you can automate a ton of your marketing.
We live in an all-digital era with an endless amount of software products, and many of these are built with the intention of automating brand marketing. All you need to do is work on setting them up and they’ll take care of the rest! Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started on your automation journey!
#1 Use a Social Media Management Software
Still sharing posts on your social media handles manually? It’s time to automate this process! Using a social media management software like Buffer, Sprout Social, Zoho Social, or Hootsuite is a good place to start. Social media management solutions allow you to create, edit, schedule, and share your posts on multiple channels in one go. Some of these products have free trials or freemium tiers, so you can start using them right away.
Are you thinking, “I know about these apps already”? Well, here are a few other interesting social media solutions that can help you automate your social media marketing:
- Missinglettr allows you to convert webpage content and blog articles into social media posts for your company. It even automatically creates graphics that you can schedule to go out on your social media, and also creates a reposting schedule around these posts.
- Awario, while it’s not a social media management software, allows you to sniff out mentions and shout-outs your brand’s getting on social media profiles, forums, blog posts, and other sources on the internet. Other popular products in this space include Mention and Brand24. Time to turn off that Google alert you’ve created for your company and start doing this at a much larger scale!
- InsightsAtlas allows you to gain deep insights and analytics about how your social media posts are affecting your users, audience, and followers.
#2 Manage Your Digital Business Profiles
Here is some quick math for you–if it takes 10 minutes to set up one digital profile for your brand and you want to create a total of 40 digital profiles, how long will you have to spend to set them all up? If your answer was “10 hours”, then I’ve got a couple of things to tell you: 1. You need to work on your math and 2. You need to stop setting up your digital profiles manually!
Synup allows you to create, edit, and manage digital business profiles, and the best part is that it is completely automated. Beyond that, Synup will also help your business gain visibility by optimizing all of your profile channels and help you create a trustworthy online presence by generating more 5-star reviews that you can respond to, manage and analyze, in one platform, instantly.
#3 Capture Lead Information On Your Website
What are you doing about your website conversions? Ever consider a product like Sumo? Website visits are the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to automating your marketing. You got them to your site, now, convert them. Using software like Sumo can help capture the email address and other information you may want from your website visitors while they are interacting with your website. You can then add your new contacts to a newsletter subscription list perhaps, or even get creative and request your users to give you their email ID to unlock a discount code, etc.
Sumo is fairly easy to set up and allows you to trigger full-page pop-ups, smart boxes, or smart bars that will request users to enter their email addresses, subscribe to your newsletters, etc. The best part? Sumo has a free plan that you can start using right away that covers most of the functions you’ll need.
#4 Build Automated Email Workflows
While enterprise-grade tech products like HubSpot allow you to do this #likeaboss, as a local business, you’re probably better off using a software like Delivra to get this done. Delivra allows you to create beautiful emails using its drag-and-drop editor and also set up customized emails for every phase of your customer’s journey.
Beyond just that, Delivra allows you to send text messages, run A/B tests, track email clicks, build mailing lists, and build integrations with several other SaaS products like Salesforce, Zoho, Shopify, Magento, etc. Delivra’s plans start at $99 per month, and if that pricing seems a little steep, you can look at an alternative like GetResponse that starts at $15 per month and also allows you to create landing pages for your website.
#5 Get a Chatbot!
A couple of things here. You can either create your own custom chatbot or you can choose from the many chatbot / conversational marketing vendors in the market. Cost can definitely be a deal-breaker between choosing to build your own or adding another vendor to your tech stack, but going with a provider has its perks. Popular conversational marketing tools like Drift, allow you to create fully-automated chatbot experiences for your website with customizable playbooks that can be built to suit your product/services’ needs.
Whatever you chose, implement one. From a consumer’s point of view, there is nothing more frustrating than not being able to get answers when they are looking for them. And from a marketers point of view, why would you not want to convert that visitor at the moment they are at their highest intent to purchase?
If you want to explore all of your options, here are the companies recommended by G2. Before making a decision, make a plan. Are you integrating your chatbot with a CRM to implement ABM campaigns? Are you looking to deliver multiple experiences to your audiences based on how they find you and where they land? It’s all possible, and more importantly, it all can be 100% automated!
Now, stop reading and start automating!
It’s no longer just a matter of “staying ahead of the curve” or “exploring tech products”–automating your marketing will save you, your team, and your company hours & dollars, while accelerating your brand’s growth. Though some of the products listed on this how-to post require a small subscription fee, you will find automation truly takes your brand’s marketing to the next level. Have fun doing it!
