How to use marketing automation in your local business
When marketing your company online is truly looked at and laid bare, it’s hard to ignore the mountain of tasks that face both you and your staff every day. Feelings of being overwhelmed and the constant suspicion that you’re forgetting something are always present. We all 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 so is practically choosing not to compete. Let’s check out some ways we can employ marketing automation.
Tools for marketing automation
There are lots of great tools that you can spend your time and money on, for our purposes here I’m going to consentrate on three areas that can be gigantic time sucks and possess the most potential for return on investment.
Email autoresponder company – This is very likely the most vital piece to automate, for if you’re not using an autoresponder to take care of your email marketing, you may as well not be doing it at all. Loading your autoresponder with personalized content and marketing emails offers your customers and prospects the sense that they are being well cared for. You will find many great email autoresponder companies out there, but some of the best are AWeber, GetResponse, iContact, and MailChimp.
Social Media – Monitoring and running social media campaigns is often a logistical nightmare if you’re not using some sort of tool. There are plenty of good ones out there that enable you to keep track of and post to your social platforms. Have a look at HootSuite, TweetDeck and Buffer.
Automate tasks – As everyone knows there are many small tasks that need attention daily, or the entire house of cards may collapse! A few 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 in the case of automating tasks between two different services. Very handy, indeed!
Be mindful that you’re not automating too many aspects, especially customer service. Specific things require your touch, and this is one. Do yourself and your business a favor and check into automating at least some of your online business today!