When marketing your business online is truly looked at and laid bare, it’s tough to ignore the mountain of tasks that face both you and your staff every day. Feelings of being overloaded and the nagging suspicion that you’re forgetting something will almost always be present. Every one of us face this. Online marketing is monstrously complex beast, and to tame it you have to employ some varieties of marketing automation to handle the amount of moving parts that marketing in multiple channels necessitates. Not doing this is virtually choosing not to remain competitive. Let’s examine some ways we can employ marketing automation.
Cool tools for marketing automation
While you will find a slew of tools available, from complete solutions which cover your small business from A to Z (fairly expensive) we’re going to focus here on some you can piecemeal together that will help in a measurable way.
Email autoresponder company – This is most likely the most vital piece to automate, for if you’re not utilizing an autoresponder to take care of your email marketing, you might as well not be doing it at all. Loading up your autoresponder with personalized content and marketing emails provides your customers and prospects the feeling that they are being well taken care of. You will find many great email autoresponder companies out there, but some of the best are SendReach, AWeber, GetResponse, iContact, and MailChimp. Read my next article on SendReach
Managing social media – Keeping your finger on the pulse of numerous social media accounts daily is not only a full time gig, but a difficult one at that. You should utilize a good tool, and there are several good ones out there that enable you to keep track of mentions, shares, Tweets and even allow you to post to your social platforms. Take a look at HootSuite, TweetDeck and Buffer.
Automate all the tasks you can! – The appearance of tools like IFTTT and Zapier are making many marketers lives easier! These tools, while similar in design, each concentrate on automating tasks between two or more different services that you currently use. A true virtual assistant!
