Successful entrepreneurs leverage the power of automation. And the renowned marketers of this era apply the same strategy when creating their marketing strategy. Of course, if you take everything on your own shoulders, you will not be able to meet the bottom line.
So, where do you want to spend your time, energy, and focus: in creating strategy or executing your strategy? Hold on, can we even automate marketing?
Yes, modern-day digital marketers have dozens of automation tools at their disposal. All they have to do is use them in the best possible way. Marketing automation is possible.
No worries if you have no idea about marketing automation. Let’s start from scratch.
What is a Marketing Automation Strategy?
Marketing automation is a relatively new concept in which digital marketers use various tools to automate content publishing and tracking results.
By using these tools, marketers save a big chunk of their daily time which they devote to other pressing tasks, such as planning and strategy creation. Also, they don’t have to deal with repetitive tasks that have no such value.
Another benefit of marketing automation is you can avoid common errors. Imagine sending a Welcome email instead of a Thank You message to someone who recently made a purchase on your website.
Developing a Successful Marketing Automation Strategy
1.Understand Where You Can Use Automation
First of all, understand where you can use automation. For example, email is one area where you can use automation tools to automatically send an email to a new subscriber, a weekly newsletter to all the subscribers, etc.
Further, there are quite a few social media marketing automation tools available. Using these, you can create hundreds of posts in advance and schedule them for the entire month.
You can even use a chatbot to welcome a visitor to your site and answer the most common queries.
This way, you will not only increase engagement on your website but also increase conversions as users will get all their doubts cleared immediately.
2.Automate Social Media Posting Where Possible
Some social media platforms give you the option to schedule posts in advance. Instead of keeping content creation and posting in parallel, prepare content in advance and schedule it.
Whether you are a digital marketing agency in Dubai or handling social media for your business, this automation will reduce your marketing efforts. And you won’t have to worry about posting a certain post at a particular time.
Digital marketers today are leveraging this automation to post timely content on religious occasions, festivals, and other such significant events.
Here are some of the popular social media tools you can use for this automation:
- SocialPilot
- HootSuite
- ShareIt
- Buzzsumo
- Sprout Social
- Buffer
- CoSchedule
- Scoop.it
- Sendible
- Meet Edgar
- Zoho Social
- Agorapulse
3.Automate Emails
Influencers, writers, affiliate marketers, and even small businesses use email marketing to boost engagement and conversions. And why shouldn’t they when email marketing offers a staggering ROI of 400%?
Every dollar you spend on email marketing brings a return of $4. But do you want to keep an email marketing manual? Imagine writing and sending a custom email to every new subscriber.
And the most difficult part is consistency. If you send an email every Wednesday, not being able to send one on a given Wednesday due to lack of time would leave a bad impression.
Here are some of the best email marketing tools that we recommend:
- ActiveCampaign – best for small businesses & enterprise
- Benchmark – best for agencies
- Sendinblue – best for transactional emails
- Drip – best for small-medium e-commerce businesses
- Omnisend – best for medium-large e-commerce businesses
- Autopilot – best for marketing automation
- HubSpot – best for B2B service companies
- MailerLite – best for personal projects
- ConvertKit – best for bloggers
- EmailOctopus – best for developers (uses AWS)
4.Create Benchmarks
Maybe you have automated your marketing strategy but you are not getting the desired results. Or you are not sure if your strategy is even progressing or not. That’s why you should set benchmarks to set your progress.
If you are able to achieve your benchmarks on a regular basis, you will see your business growing. Conversely, if the results are not there, you can go back, revise your strategy, and come back again with a fresh one!
5.Regularly Audit What’s Working & What’s Not
Now then, you have automated your marketing process. Chances are you have spent a few bucks on paid tools. And you’re expecting a great return on investment. But it’s not that simple. You have to experiment and iterate until you start getting the desired results.
That’s why it’s important to track analytics and analyze what’s working and what’s not. Maybe social media automation is not working because you are posting at the wrong time. Or you can’t continue to pay monthly for a social media tool you are using for automation.
You can also spy on the best performers in your industry; how they have achieved automation in their marketing. Study and emulate the top performers to replicate their success.