7 Ways to Automate the Marketing of Your Business

You’ve secured a few new clients and they’re impressed! Business is continuously booming. However, you’re starting to feel overwhelmed by your work calendar; the day seems to run out before you’re able to finish all the tasks on your calendar. That calls for a change.

Streamlining marketing efforts can be a challenge as a company grows. Fortunately, there’s a solution that business owners can leverage to make those efforts more cost effective, organized, and effective. The answer lies in ‘marketing automation’.

It doesn’t matter how skilled your employees are if your business fails to scale its marketing. Even the best personnel will fizzle due to the burden put on their shoulders. With marketing automation, you can ensure that top talent has time to focus on their core responsibilities while software does the other jobs for you.

To help you start off on the right foot, we’ve listed a few ways in which you can automate the marketing of your firm.

1. Set Up Autoresponders

Instead of manually replying and following up with each prospect, create an autoresponder series using email marketing software. Software like MailChimp and Active Campaign will allow you to set up an automated email series. They also integrate with other tools like sales, analytics, and marketing software. You can also configure the software to send emails based on the actions people take on your website, such as “abandoned cart” emails when they add a product to their shopping cart but leave the site without making a purchase.

2. Put Social Media on Autopilot

Posting business updates and engaging with audiences on social is kind of a full-time gig, and it is even more time consuming if you have to create ads too. Thankfully, automated social media marketing tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite are taking off a lot of pressures by letting business owners schedule updates in advance, post visual content, and view social media analytics like shares and comments to better analyze their campaigns. Another tool – titled AdEspresso – enables you to A/B test Facebook ads; you can analyze different ad sets and then pick a ‘winner’ to use in your Facebook marketing campaign.

3. Use Content Discovery & Scheduling Tools

Content curation is allowing companies to stay relevant in all that internet noise. However, curation can be a boring, repetitive task, especially if you have more than one channel to post on. The good news is that you can even automate this aspect of your marketing, while also attaining consistency in your communications. That’s where a content discovery engine comes in handy. Putting in a keyword is all that needs to be done to arrive at dozens of curatable content pieces. As long as you’re analyzing every post before hitting ‘publish’ – you should be good to go. Tools like DrumUp are made for this purpose.

4. Build Funnels That Do the Work for You

Putting marketing funnels together is one of the most resource intensive tasks in a business. Again, marketing automation tools can help reduce the burden of performing this task effectively. We recommend using Salesfusion. It is a robust tool that drives revenue for companies by aligning their sales and marketing departments. It does that by allowing users to create a revenue funnel for both activities. Customized conversations are digitally transferred between departments. Personnel from both teams then look at and measure these conversations to ensure that the right lead is communicated to at the right time by the right company figure. It’s the type of CRM that is worth the investment.

5. Leverage a Chatbot

Customers demand instant answers, so you either need to be on social media or the live chat software, or set pre-determined messages for people to view and seek answers from. That’s where chatbots can be a blessing in disguise. And though they sound like they come from a flick like the Transformers, they are really just a software algorithm with a friendly face. They utilize analytics to analyze and answer the requests put forward by customers. You can use them for a variety of things including product recommendations, customer service, and showcasing the right piece of content to the relevant customer based on their preferences.

6. Segment Lists

Segmented email subscribers engage more with email marketers and also have a high open rate. It doesn’t get any better than that. It’s easy to segment too – all you have to do is separate contacts based on their age, engagement, interests, and other similar traits, and then tailor your communications to fit their needs. Because you’re able to address pain points via segmented emails, the prospects are more likely to get in touch with you when they are in need of a product or service. Throughout a long sales cycle, segmented email lists will work better than generic email blasts that don’t take preferences or interests into account.

7. Place Short, Dependent Fields Throughout Your Site

It’s easier to capture data from people when you’re using dependent fields throughout a site. Bonus points if you’ve considered that already as people prefer utilizing shorter fields. The shorter form can be used to ask people if they’re interested in receiving regular emails from you, whether they’ve heard of your business before, and if they’d like to speak to a sales representative to get more information about a product or service that you’re offering. Fields like these will also enable you to collect data for social media contests, which can be a great way to infuse life into a dead marketing engine. What’s more, if a large chunk of people fills out a specific field, you can showcase a benefit beneath it (such as a free giveaway) to encourage them further.

Ready to automate?

The takeaway is that marketing automation can take a while to configure but can save users a ton of time. So, if you put in the effort up front, it can deliver good results in the future