If you work in marketing or communications, you surely have heard, are aware of and most likely are already working with different tools that help you manage and automate many of the marketing activities and tasks. If you are not using these tools, you are at a clear disadvantage.
In this article I will share how you can automate some tasks that machines do better than humans, so you can be much more efficient and devote your time and the time of other people at the agency to those tasks where humans can add the biggest value.
In no time, the alternatives for promoting a brand or company have increased drastically and everything has become quite complicated. The Internet has brought new alternatives such as social media, where each social media site has its own features, characteristics, updates and changes. We also have search engines, content, bloggers, new media, different advertising platforms, mobile technology, analytics, etc. We also need to build meaningful relationships with bloggers. In this new & much more complex digital environment, we should keep an eye on what is happening and how we can use the means that are at our disposal for getting the best results for our customers. Fortunately, there are tools that allow us to greatly simplify the needed tasks and activities that we do and allow us to be much more effective with our time and budget. In this context, any tool that helps us make better use of our existing resources and perform certain tasks better, should be considered very seriously.
Is it worth using marketing automation tools?
The question should not be whether to use automated marketing tools or not; it should be more about which tools to use. These tools perform many tasks much better than humans and are much more efficient. A clear example is email marketing. Through an email marketing campaign, well designed, one can send highly customized (and automated) campaigns to many people at the same time. These campaigns can be adapted to the user’s behavior. Doing this task with people would be very expensive and repetitive. Moreover, humans could never do these tasks as well as these tools do them, reaching a high level of sophistication. Using these tools can help us focus our time and resources on those activities, so that the agency can add more value to items which machines cannot do, for example, defining the overall strategy to follow with a customer. Once the strategy is defined, let the different automation tools help you execute those tasks successfully.
What tasks can technology do better and more efficiently?
To narrow down the focus, I will concentrate only on those tools that use the process of recruiting a prospect and converting that person into a customer. I will separate these tools into three categories.
1. The tools that focus on attracting prospects to a website.
a. Tools that help you manage and grow social media accounts, for example, those that help you organize and post content. These would be tools such as BufferApp or HootSuite, as well as other tools and apps that help you manage your social media accounts. There are many tools that will help you do this.
b. Advertising/remarketing: Advertising is not generally considered an automated marketing task, although it can be. Advertising networks like Adwords and others let you manage campaigns automatically so that, for example, the one that is performing the worst can be automatically disabled while the one that is performing better gets most of the attention and budget.
c. Creation of good and relevant content: ContentBreeze is an excellent tool to help you generate great content for a specific niche market.
2. Tools that let you collect information from your subscribers/prospects.
a. Here would be all those tools that help you collect data from visitors. For example, forms to subscribe to a newsletter that collect the data of the person and delivered a free report or ebook automatically to that person. These tools can be configured to behave in different ways and be adapted to the behavior of the person visiting the site.
3. Tools that help maintain a relationship with subscribers over time (lead nurturing tools):
a. These tools deliver information over time, for example, email marketing services. There are all kinds of programs, some which are very sophisticated, that allow you to know your subscribers really well and automatically collect their information based on their behavior and how they interact with the content you provide. Based on this, you could get to know them better than if you had talked with them, since you would know them by what they do, not by what they say.
b. Tools for creating content for newsletters. ContentBreeze can help you automatically create a great newsletter in a few minutes.
Automating certain marketing activities will be very beneficial for your agency and customers. You just have to make sure you do not lose the personal touch and interact with those potential customers who contact you. If you use these tools, you’ll be able to be more efficient, invest your resources better and get better results for your customers.
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