10 Boring Marketing Activities You Need To Automate right NOW

How many hours per day do you spend sending out emails, reminders, checking- through leads and organising your contact lists? Instead of focusing on these mundane repetitive tasks, your team could be thinking of creative ideas to improve your business, closing sales with prospects, attending events to bring more business in and much more. Just imagine the possibilities, if all these boring, repetitive tasks you and your team do every day could be automated! Are you ready for our magical solution? Yes… It’s marketing automation! For those of you, who are not completely sure of what marketing automation is, here’s a quick definition:

Marketing automation is software that aims to automatically complete repetitive tasks for you. These repetitive tasks could include sending emails, social media posts, managing website activity and so on ( KDM Digital, 2017).

Now that you have a basic understanding of marketing automation. Here are 10 boring marketing activities you can automate with a trusty marketing automation package:

1. Follow-up emails: Automatically send out emails to a user or customer has engaged with you. For example, you could send out welcome emails to new blog subscribers or a “nice to meet you” email after a meeting with a prospective client. You can even create a whole follow-up sequence for contacts you met at a networking event or users who downloaded an eBook of your site.
2. Promotional emails: Did you know more than 68% of companies spend a week or more creating just one email (The Litmus 2017 State of Email Report)? Don’t wait until the end of the month to send your newsletters out, create them all beforehand and schedule them. This is especially useful if you plan on sending multiple emails in one month, such as a series of countdown emails for a sale or new product launch. Just automate them all and watch them go off when the time is right!
3. Social media posting: Similar to promotional emails, posting on social media can also be a time-consuming activity. It is best to schedule your posts for the next week or so in advance. Tools, such as Buffer even allow you to share content from your blog straight onto social media without doing any heavy lifting.
4. Blog post sharing: You can automatically set up monthly newsletters with your blogs RSS feed integrated into them. So, every month when your newsletter goes out, it will automatically show the recent posts from your blog. You can even automatically post to social media when you publish a new blog post, as well as automatically sharing old ones. Once this is set-up, you don’t have to do anything else, apart from watch your blog posts get more visits.
5. Lead-flow process: Lead flow processes can be especially time-consuming. With marketing automation, you can automate the process of lead nurturing by sending out a series of personalised emails to keep your leads warm and engaged. Each email will slowly nudge your leads towards making a purchase. You can even learn more about your leads during this process by sending out a quick survey to see what content they would be interested in and then personalising future emails to match their interests.
6. Event reminders: Marketing automation makes sending out event reminders super easy. You can easily set-up 10 days, 5 days and 24 hours and even 30 minutes reminders until the event. This could be a quick email or even a text message if you have your contacts phone number. And after the event, you can follow-up with your attendees by automating your feedback and testimonial process. Making the whole task of event-planning a lot easier.
7. Content Curation: 68% of marketers use articles from websites other than their own as part of their strategy (Content Marketing Institute, 2014). As a marketer myself, I can tell you that the process of content curation can be tricky. Which content should I share? What is trending right now? Which site is trustworthy? The good news is that there are plenty of sites that automate this for you! For example, Google Alerts, Feedly, Buzzsumo, Flipboard and so much more. These tools can collect and organise content from third-party sites making content sharing a whole lot easier for you.
8. Sales Process: A good marketing automation tool will come with a sophisticated lead scoring feature which will automatically calculate the scores of your contacts based on their engagement and other criteria you set. The right lead scoring system could easily show you which contacts are ready to make a purchase and which ones are going cold. You can even automatically notify your sales team of the contacts which are ready and create a re-engagement campaign for cold leads to getting them on track again.
9. E-commerce Processes: If you’re running an e-commerce store, you’ll be happy to hear that processes, such as cart abandonment and product recommendations can easily be automated saving you time! For example, you could try sending valued customers product recommendation newsletters with the goal of either cross-selling or up-selling items to them. Not only does this improve customer satisfaction, but it also increases sales and saves time!
10. Online Advertising: A pretty new introduction to the world of marketing automation, is automated advertising. Some of the features of automated advertising is being able to rotate and schedule new ads automatically based on dates or performance. You can even schedule ads at different times during the day to get optimal performance and get automatic alerts based on metrics such as cost per action (CPA).

More and more companies are moving towards automated marketing and to be honest, wouldn't you? Marketing automation not only saves time but is moving towards a more intelligent form of marketing where you can automatically nurture your leads without spending too much time. And the remaining of your time could be focused on activities that can’t be automated, such as closing sales.

Want to learn more? Register here for the March 15th webinar “What is marketing automation and why is it so important?” to get in-depth information on this topic.

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