As software continues to evolve and improve, more and more marketers are discussing the potential for automation in their marketing strategies. This technique can free up valuable time, allowing you to focus on more thought-intensive projects. There are a variety of opportunities and possibilities with marketing automation. Let’s take a look at some of the ways marketers can implement this technology to cut down on repetitive or time-consuming tasks.
Social Media
Social media is a giant in the marketing world, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. While this is a very important tool for any marketing campaign, it often turns into a larger project than many marketers expect. Between curating or creating content, planning a posting calendar, and actually posting to each social platform, social media management can easily become a full-time job. Automation tools can take a lot of that workload off of your plate by automatically posting scheduled content, custom curating shareable articles and blog posts, or evaluating your content to ensure that it matches your target audience.
Analytics
Collecting website and social analytics is one of the most time-consuming tasks marketers undertake on a weekly (or sometimes daily) basis. Automation takes care of this for you, and provides you with detailed reports that can be customized and tailored to your specific needs. Rather than compiling your data from Google Analytics, try Facebook’s Page Insights, an automated tool that collects the data for you and presents it in one streamlined interface.
Email Marketing
When we suggest automating your email marketing, we’re not talking about spam. Rather, automation allows you to create a more intuitive campaign that can send out emails in response to certain events, like customer birthdays or items they’ve left in their shopping cart. Instead of “cold calling” your customers with your email campaigns, you’ll have the opportunity to react to real events that can ultimately result in a conversion.
Of course, there are a variety of other uses for marketing automation, from marketing campaign management to CRM integration. No matter what their specific needs, every marketer stands to benefit from this remarkable technology.