How Automation Helps Your Online Marketing
When you’re running your own business, time is always a precious commodity. It’s more than likely that you don’t have a great number of employees to designate tasks to. This means that you’re frequently doing the majority of work yourself and every minute counts. Luckily, there is a variety of automation options available that can help in a number of different ways to save you time and streamline your operations. This is particularly true in the realm of marketing.
A survey among online marketers asked them what were the biggest benefits for them of using automation. The results were:
74% – Saved time
68% – Improved customer engagement
58% – More timely communications
58% – Increased opportunities including up-selling
Automation benefits online businesses in a multitude of ways. Once youl gain an understanding of why you need automation and where you can employ it, you’ll want to implement it right away.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software and web-based services to execute, manage, and automate marketing tasks and processes. These services take over manual, routine and repetitive tasks so that you don’t have to do them. They are purpose-built to help with specific aspects of marketing.
Benefits include:
Taking over repetitive tasks so that you don’t have to do them. Automation saves you time, allowing you to focus on more important aspects of your business. There’s no reason that you should be performing these tasks when a program could perform them for you.
Improving customer service. Automated services can make your customer service processes more reliable. They can assist with customer support so that you can offer an even better, more convenient and seamless experience for your customers.
Higher quality email marketing. Email marketing simply cannot be done effectively without automation. Email marketing programs sign up new subscribers, manage your list, broadcast messages, and deliver you analytics on the effectiveness of your email marketing.
Lead generation. Automation programs can take over lead generation processes so that you can better qualify leads and nurture them more effectively.
Building and maintaining customer communication. Automation allows you to build better relationships with your customers. You can manage many more interactions through automation than you could without.
Social media engagement. You can use automation to streamline many of the tasks you perform manually on social media, while still maintaining the critical personal element.
Content creation and publishing. Automation can assist with some aspects of content creation, as well as publishing content on a regular schedule.
Reduce your budget. With automation, you don’t need to hire more staff to handle routine tasks. There are various ways automation can drive down your operating costs.
Why Automation Isn’t Always Appropriate
As an online marketer, you should implement automation anywhere you can. Look for any opportunity where an automation service can take over routine tasks or help you produce better results. However, you should be aware that there are certain aspects of a business that should never be automated. Automation here can cost you more than it saves you.
If you over-automate, your customers may feel disconnected. If you’ve ever called a company and had to wade through a long automated system, you know how frustrating this can be. It gives you a feeling that the company is cold and impersonal, that it doesn’t really care about its customers’ well-being.
There are some aspects of your business which require the personal touch. These include direct customer service, one-on-one social media communications, and other aspects of relationship building. Customers can’t build a relationship with a robot. We’ll cover this in more detail and more specifically later, but for every task you consider automating, always take a moment to think about how this could potentially cause trouble.
Once you understand marketing automation and how it can help your business, you will be able to:
Establish clear goals for your marketing automation strategy, such as list building, promoting a product, lead generation, customer engagement, etc.
Create a social media automation strategy that you can implement right away.
Create an email marketing automation strategy and get started building your list
Create a strategy for automating your content marketing
Create a strategy for automating customer follow-up to help build long-lasting relationships with your customers
Put together an integrated automation plan for your overall marketing strategy.
It’s important to consider automation in each aspect of your marketing so you can have a strategy that’s ready to implement, saving you an immeasurable amount of time.
