In this 6-minute read:
- Benefits of marketing automation
- What marketing processes should be automated?
As a business owner or manager (or anyone who works really), you should always be looking for ways to make your daily processes more efficient. This helps save time and money and increases productivity.
Automating processes, or parts of a process, can really help in the way of productivity. What solutions are you currently using to help automate your marketing tasks? Are you using any?
We’re going to provide you some of the best automated marketing solutions out there and show you which processes you can benefit the most from automating.
With Womply Email Marketing, you can turn customers into regulars and get more repeat business with targeted emails that send automatically when customers transact with you. Learn more when you sign up for Womply Free!
Benefits of automating marketing processes
You likely know the benefits of automating your daily workflows and processes. It cuts down on time spent, saves money, and ultimately increases productivity so you can do more and make more.
Depending on the solutions you are using, some of your automated systems can even help bring in more qualified leads by adding your criteria and using a lead-scoring system.
And with automated processes that work together between marketing (bringing in leads) and sales (converting those leads), your sales and marketing team can become one and become a more productive sales force.
Most automated processes also provide analytics and data that you can use to improve your marketing and sales efforts. It’s easier to collect this data through the software you use than it is to do so manually.
What marketing processes should you be automating?
Now that you’re all in for automating some processes, what processes should you automate? Think about the marketing tasks that you or your team spend the most time on and where you can become more efficient.
Is it taking forever to scour social media channels and blog articles for content ideas? Do you have to regularly export email contacts for your email campaigns?
Don’t let things like this slow you down. Find solutions that can help make those processes simpler.
Lead tracking
We hope that you already have some kind of CRM or lead tracking software in place. If you don’t, you need to–particularly if you plan to continue growing your business. A good CRM offers automatic lead capturing from contact forms (usually on your own website).
Your CRM will store these contacts for you and identify the best lead opportunities. Several CRMs even integrate with your website, social media campaigns, product sales, and other marketing solutions. This is basically your all-in-one marketing solution. So if you don’t use anything else on this list (though we recommend you do), at least find a good CRM for your company.
Some top solutions for lead tracking:
- Hubspot
- Salesforce
- Pipedrive
- Close.io
Email marketing
If you are regularly sending out emails to customers in an effort to maintain them as your customer or to new leads to try to convert them, then you should strongly consider an email marketing software.
Most CRMs will even integrate with your email marketing solution so you can easily send out emails to all of your pre-existing contacts.
A good email marketing solution will allow you to schedule out email campaigns and set up workflows based on how users interact with the email. For example, let’s say you send out a coupon via your email campaign. Your software will be able to see how many people have click to use the coupon or if they even opened the email. You can set it up to send a follow-up email reminding your customers that you still have this awesome deal going on.
Another awesome use of email marketing software (combined with your CRM) is to send out emails when someone leaves something in their shopping cart on your website. You can set up a process to send that customer an email with a discount a day later to encourage them to finish the sale.
Best solutions for email marketing:
- MailChimp
- Constant Contact
- Sendinblue
- Womply
Check out our guide: How to choose the right email marketing solution for your business
You might also like: Why small business email marketing should be your top priority
Social media posting
Social media is another great place to automate your processes, especially when it comes to scheduling and monitoring posts. Do you go back and forth between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram constantly to check your notifications or create posts?
Consider a social media marketing software that will allow you to manage this all in one place. A good solution will allow you to schedule out posts to multiple platforms at once, monitor your comments and notifications all in one dashboard, and create automated reports based on the analytics from each of your social accounts.
Best solutions for social media posting:
- Agorpulse
- Hubspot
- Hootsuite
Go deeper:
- Which social media site matters most for local businesses?
- 14 best types of social media posts for small business
Content marketing
We know what you’re thinking here: how on earth can content marketing be automated? Sure, the content you put out there should be created manually for the best quality, but the way that you get your ideas doesn’t need to be.
Instead of scouring the internet for hours and hours every week to find new content ideas, you can use a solution that brings the ideas to you. A good content marketing solution will do all of the scouring for you and generate relevant feeds and ideas based on the criteria you provide.
Best solutions for content marketing:
- Feedly
- DrumUp
- Google Alerts
- Buzzsumo
Project management
There’s even a fair amount of automating that can be done when it comes to managing your marketing tasks, from making assignments to planning out your projects. Even if you don’t need or want the automation here, everyone can use a little help organizing their tasks.
Best solutions for project management:
- Asana
- Trello
- Wrike
- Proofhub
- Smartsheet
Learn more about these solutions with our guide to top 5 project management solutions for small business.
Review management
Having a tough time getting customers to leave new reviews online? Then you can definitely benefit from a good review management solution. Most solutions will allow you to monitor and respond to reviews for multiple platforms all in one place.
A good review solution will also allow you to invite customers via text or email to leave reviews on the platform of your choosing (Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.).
Online reviews are crucial to converting new customers online and helping your business show up in local search engine results.
Some top solutions for review management:
- Womply
- Podium
- Birdeye
- Thryv
Want to learn more about Womply Reputation Management or Email Marketing?
Womply Reputation Management allows your business to easily manage all your reviews on all the important sites from a simple dashboard with one login. You can manage reviews, reply, and easily remind customers that you appreciate their online feedback. Pretty neat, right?
But that’s not all. With Womply’s automated email marketing engine, you can create meaningful customer connections with just a few clicks. Thank your customers, ask for feedback, share holidays, and more, automatically, with every transaction.
Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!