How to Automate Your Business’ Marketing

For the longest time, marketers teams have assumed that their jobs have to involve an extensive amount of manual work. Thousands of hours spent working on Excel sheets and emails have sucked the lives out of jobs aplenty–but the reminder just a reminder to our fellow marketers out there is: It doesn’t need to be that way.

We live in an all-digital era that’s teeming with software products of all sorts and kinds, and many of these are built with the intention of automating brand marketing. All you need to do is work on setting them up and they’ll take care of the rest! Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can do this successfully.

#1 Use a Social Media Management Software

Still sharing posts on your social media handles manually? It’s time to automate this process! Using a social media management software like Buffer, Sprout Social, Zoho Social, or Hootsuite is a good place to start. Social media management solutions allow you to create, edit, schedule, and share your posts on multiple channels in one go. Some of these products have free trials or freemium tiers, so you can start using them right away.

“I know about these apps already”, you say? Well, here are a few more interesting social media automation solutions that you can use:

• Missinglettr allows you to convert webpage content and blog articles into social media posts for your company. It even automatically creates graphics that you can schedule to go out on your social media, and also creates a reposting schedule around these posts.
• Awario, while it’s not a social media management software, allows you to sniff out mentions and shout-outs your brand’s getting on social media profiles, forums, blog posts, and other sources on the internet. Other popular products in this space include Mention and Brand24. Time to turn off that Google alert you’ve created for your company and start doing this at a much bigger scale!
• InsightsAtlas allows you to gain deep insights and analytics about how your social media posts are affecting your users, audience, and followers.

#2 Manage Your Digital Business Profiles

Here’s some quick maths for you–if it takes 10 minutes to set up one digital profile for your brand and you want to create a total of 40 digital profiles, how long will you have to spend to set them all up? If your answer was “10 hours”, then I’ve got a couple of things to tell you: 1. You need to work on your math, and 2. You need to stop setting up your digital profiles manually!

Synup allows you to create, edit, and manage digital business profiles, and the best part is that it is completely automated. Beyond that, Synup also allows you to read and respond to reviews, track keywords, get analytics from your digital profiles, and do so much more.

#3 Capture Lead Information On Your Website

If you own and manage a website, you can capture the email address and other information from your website visitors using a product like Sumo. You can then add this email to a newsletter subscription list, or even get creative and request your users to give you their email ID to unlock a discount code, etc.

Sumo is fairly easy to set up and allows you to trigger full page pop-ups, smart boxes, or smart bars that will request users to enter their email addresses, subscribe to your newsletters, etc. You can even use it to trigger automated email responses or send newsletters to your mailing list. The best part? Sumo has a free plan that you can start using right away that covers most of the functions you’ll need.

#4 Build Automated Email Workflows

While enterprise grade tech products like HubSpot allow you to do this #likeaboss, as a local business, you’re probably better off using a software like Delivra to get this done. Delivra allows you to create beautiful emails using its drag-and-drop editor and also set up customized emails for every phase of your customer’s journey.

Beyond just that, Delivra allows you to send text messages, run A/B tests, track email clicks, build mailing lists, and build integrations with several other SaaS products like Salesforce, Zoho, Shopify, Magento, etc. Delivra’s plans start at $99 per month, and if that pricing seems a little steep, you can look at an alternative like GetResponse that starts at $15 per month and also allows you to create landing pages for your website.

#5 Create Your Own Chatbot!

Yep, you can create your own custom chatbot for your website with almost no effort in today’s world. Popular conversational marketing platform Drift allows you to create a fully-automated chatbot for your website with customizable playbooks that can be built to suit your product/services’ needs.

While Drift has a free plan, you’ll need to pay for a monthly or annual subscription if you’d like to access their custom automated bots feature.

Stop reading and start automating!

It’s no longer just a matter of “staying ahead of the curve” or “exploring tech products”–automating your marketing will save you, your team, and your company hundreds of hours worth of time and effort, while accelerating your brand’s growth. While some of the products listed on this how-to post require a small subscription fee, they will truly help you take your brand’s marketing to the next level. Have fun doing it!