Are there just not enough of you? Are you feeling not just overwhelmed at the mountain of tasks that lie before you daily, but in addition more than a bit afraid that something is slipping through the cracks? You’re not alone. Because of the complexity and the sheer number of moving parts that go into online marketing in multiple channels nowadays, you absolutely have to employ some measure of marketing automation, or else you will find it tough to compete. Let’s look at some real time savers.
Cool Tools For Marketing Automation
While there are a slew of tools available, from complete solutions that cover your company from A to Z (fairly expensive) we’re going to focus here on some you can piecemeal together that will assist in a measurable way.
Email autoresponders – Probably the most important thing to automate, as without employing this type of tool you’ve got basically no hope of building a customer email list. Loading up your autoresponder with marketing messages can help you give both customers and prospects alike the feeling that they are being well taken care of. There are a number of great email companies available that can handle this seamlessly for you, such as AWeber, GetResponse, iContact, MailChimp and others.
Managing social media – Keeping your finger on the pulse of numerous social media accounts daily is not just a full time gig, but a hard one as well. You need to use 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 tasks – As everyone knows there are lots of small tasks that require attention daily, or the whole house of cards may collapse! Some of the better tools to come down the pike the last few years are the development of task masters like IFTTT and Zapier. These tools, (similar in intent and application) can be lifesavers when it comes to automating tasks between two different services. Very handy, indeed!
Marketing Automation Works
Make sure to not let customer and prospects slip through the cracks with all your automation. Being there for effective customer service is an important piece of business too!