A Beginner’s Guide To Adding Automation To Your Marketing Strategy

Created April 8th, 2019

Every business worth its salt in 2019 has embraced the benefits of marketing automation. It’s affordable, efficient, and easy to get started with (not to mention hugely time-saving).

But there are plenty of businesses who have yet to come around to the benefits of automation. If you’re one of them, now is the time to get started. Read on for a beginner’s guide to adding automation to your marketing strategy that will grow your business.

Why automate your marketing?

Marketing automation refers to technology that essentially does the hard work of marketing for you. By automating otherwise arduous and time-consuming tasks, it delivers a whole host of benefits that can help you grow your business. Here are just a few benefits of adding automation to your marketing strategy.

It saves time

Much of a marketer’s time is taken up performing repetitive or mundane tasks, time that could be better spent elsewhere. Scheduling social posts, coordinating email campaigns, monitoring social media for mentions — these are important but time-consuming tasks that automation can do for you, saving you time as a result.

It’s affordable

While marketing automation might sound like something for big-league brands rather than your small startup, that’s far from the truth. Many automation tools are affordable or even entirely free and offer scalable plans that grow with your business.

It’s simple

Don’t let the technical-sounding name put you off — automation is simple and straightforward to do. You don’t need coding knowledge to get started with marketing automation. Many tools offer intuitive interfaces that make it easy for anyone to automate their marketing, regardless of their skills or experience.

In order to optimize your marketing efficiency and make the most of the automation process, you can use local marketing software from Adplorer and automate all aspects of your work effortlessly.

How can I get started with automation?

Virtually every aspect of your business can be automated in some way, from your shipping and order fulfillment to your sales and internal processes. But with regards to your marketing, automation really shows its value in two areas: your social strategy and your email marketing.

Social media marketing automation

Social media is a vital channel for growing your business in 2019, and adding automation to your existing social strategy takes it that step further. Here’s how to get started with yours.

How to find the right automation tool for you

There are a plethora of sophisticated but easy-to-use social automation tools out there that you can use for your business.

You’ve likely heard of the most popular tools: Buffer, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite, for example. But there are plenty of other smaller tools that work just as well, many of them free.

While these free tools are perfectly fine for solopreneurs or small startups, they often have reduced functionality which might hinder you as your business grows. Consequently, you should choose a tool with tiered pricing plans that grow alongside your business.

Ultimately, the tool you choose should be able to cater for most major platforms. Instagram and Pinterest are notable exceptions here, as they tend to have dedicated tools just for them (such as Gramto). But being monitoring all your social platforms from one tool saves you time and hassle, giving you greater oversight over your social media marketing as a result.

How to get the most from your marketing automation

The key to a successful social strategy is sharing the right content at the right time. Posting your content at the optimum time to get it seen by your customers is the cornerstone of a social strategy that gets results.

But consistently sharing social posts at specific times on a daily basis is nigh-on impossible to do yourself — this is where automation comes in.

Automation tools let you plan and schedule your posts across a range of social platforms days, weeks, and even months in advance. This saves you a huge amount of time in the long run. All you need to do is create the content in advance — it’s that simple.

Create an editorial calendar that covers the year ahead. Take into consideration various seasonal events (Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl, 4th July, etc) and create content that plays into them.

Email marketing automation

While social media has its place in your marketing strategy, it will never usurp the humble email. Read on to discover how to ramp up your email marketing with automation today.

How to find the right automation tool for you

As with social automation tools, there are countless email automation tools available to businesses: ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and Constant Contact, to name but a few.

There is no shortage of free email automation tools either. But as before, these are geared more towards smaller enterprises. As such, you might find yourself outgrowing your automation tool as your business grows and your customer base expands.

A strong email automation tool should provide you with high customization options. The ability to create your own workflows (as well as being able to choose from preset workflow templates) is vital for growing your business.

How to get the most from your marketing automation

Automation takes your emails further by letting you create tailored marketing workflows geared towards specific objectives.

Take your abandoned cart emails for example. This is a crucial opportunity for your business to chase missed sales, so it’s important to get it right. A sustained approach to your abandoned cart emails will drive sales, and automation helps you nail it.

Experiment with workflows for your abandoned cart sequences, welcome emails, and other standard marketing processes.

Email automation tools also let you target your email marketing to specific consumer segments. Many of them integrate with your social strategy to glean vital customer data which you can use to send emails to certain demographics, increasing conversions as a result.

For example, let’s say you’re launching a new product line of apparel for women aged 18-24. Rather than sending marketing emails to all and sundry, you can target only women aged 18-24 with your emails. This saves you time and gets you a better return on your campaign as a result.

And you can get more specific with this too, narrowing down to discrete customer segments to drive higher sales and engagement from your marketing. Automation streamlines your marketing right down, getting you more bang for your buck.

The prospect of marketing automation might sound daunting, but the reality is very different. It’s easy to set up and pays dividends for your business, and is well worth implementing. Follow the tips above and get started with a marketing automation strategy that will grow your business well into 2019 and beyond.