Imagine just leaning back and having your marketing activities run on autopilot. Well, this notion isn’t too farfetched. The aim of marketing automation is to do just that – to automate some of your more repetitive marketing efforts. In one of our recent blog posts, we have talked about how to get your Growth Machine running and ultimately have your customer and user base grow by themselves. Aligning and simplifying certain tasks and processes plays an integral part in setting up this machinery and achieving growth goals. But before we talk about some of the numerous ways to automate your marketing efforts, let’s take a step back and shed some light on the term itself.
What is marketing automation?
You can probably think of some of your daily marketing tasks that are somewhat repetitive. Those tasks aren’t necessarily difficult, but they do take up quite a bit of your time and effort that you would rather put in elsewhere. This may include sending (follow-up) e-mails to customers, posting on social media, or typing big chunks of data into a spreadsheet. Luckily, chances are high that marketing automation can assist you in carrying out these very tasks. Marketing automation tools enable you to set up workflows and have them run in the background while you tend to other tasks, thereby saving time and increasing overall efficiency and productivity.
Now you might be thinking that marketing automation is something that’s solely for companies with a big budget. Actually, marketing automation is for businesses of all sizes – especially small companies that tend to be strapped for time and resources can benefit from automating. Check out our free guide with 100 low-cost and no-code marketing tools!
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Automating e-mail marketing
Are you using e-mail marketing as a channel to target your audience with relevant content?
- No? Then you might want to consider picking it up.
- Yes? Good!
E-mail marketing is a great and effective way of communicating with prospective and existing customers alike – and on top of that, it provides plenty of room for automation! Tools, such as Mailchimp and HubSpot allow you to create triggered, relevant, and personalized e-mails and automatically send them to the corresponding audience. A popular example of this would be to greet a new subscriber to your blog or newsletter with an automated welcome campaign. You can keep feeding them relevant content and nurture them towards buying your product or service. Your automation efforts shouldn’t stop after you have successfully turned a lead into a customer. Of course, you want them to keep coming back, so why not just send them an automated e-mail with special offerings, new products or even a personalized birthday wish?
Automating social media
If you’re still at the beginning of building your social media presence and are maybe only testing one channel at a time, you’re probably okay with taking care of uploading your posts manually. However, if your business is active across several social media channels, posting regularly, maybe even multiple times a day, becomes incredibly tedious. Even though most social media networks let you schedule your posts directly on their platform, logging on to each platform to schedule content will take up a lot of your time. Scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite offer a workaround as they let you schedule your social media posts across all platforms within one tool. If you schedule all your postings for one month ahead, you won’t have to worry about it anymore until the beginning of next month. Great!
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Automating lead generation
Marketing automation isn’t only for marketing teams – it can also support sales teams in generating B2B leads. Instead of manually reaching out to potential clients on LinkedIn, you can use tools, such as Phantombuster or Duxsoup to boost your network and send automated messages to your connections. You probably have already been on the receiving end of such automated connection requests and messages. Before you can start with the automation of your LinkedIn outreach, you need to determine who exactly you want to contact and connect with. Going through hundreds of LinkedIn profiles and copy-pasting their information into a spreadsheet is certainly not the most efficient way of doing so. You might have guessed it already – this can be automated. With the tools mentioned above, you can set targeting criteria to scrape LinkedIn profiles and have them neatly extracted into a CSV file for your further marketing automation efforts. Lead generation has never been this easy!
Conclusion
Automating your repetitive and time-consuming tasks can help a great deal in improving your efficiency. By making use of marketing automation tools, you are freeing up time and resources to focus on bigger projects. And if done correctly, marketing automation will enable you to continuously grow your customer base. Do you need some sparring to figure out what makes the most sense for your business? Sign up for a free growth marketing consultation with one of our experts here!
