5 Easy Steps to Automate Your Marketing

There was a time when you would be walking in the mall and you would often get handed a business card or flyer promoting a business. While offline marketing is still important, there is often an easier way.  

Now you have digital marketing automation processes that simultaneously market your business on different platforms. With just a click of a button, you can reach millions of customers without even shedding a sweat.

What is Marketing Automation?

Before we dive into how you can do digital marketing automation, let’s become well acquainted with the concept of marketing automation.

In simple words, marketing automation is the advancement of technology and the use of software that manages all marketing steps and processes, across all channels, automatically.

The benefits of automating your marketing are the time and effort cut and how daily tasks such as sending emails, follow-up messages, sending invoices and posting on social media can be done with an automating strategy.

As a word of warning, you shouldn’t forget about offline marketing methods. We still love the idea of speaking face-to-face, having a radio advert or giving out a business card, which can be made easier here.

That being said, marketing automation can be a great way to give yourself more time to focus on these marketing methods. So let’s show you our 5 steps of digital marketing automation.

Follow these 5 easy steps for digital marketing automation

 Step 1: Know the steps that need automation

Now you might think that this step is very simple, but you’d be wrong. You cannot automate any step you feel via software. You must see which steps are repetitive and can speed up the marketing process for better efficiency.

Below are some tasks that can be automated are:

• Contacting existing customers
• Confirmation messages
• Email responses
• Sending invoices
• Pre-write social media content can be pumped out on specific dates
• Analytics (generating reports, record revenue, etc.)

Try to stay away from automating tasks that need creativity and employee input such as content creation, problem-solving, etc. Once you are accustomed to automation processes and software, only then start robotic key tasks that make a major difference in the efficiency of your processes.

Step 2: Which marketing automation tools to select

Now that you know which steps to automate, let’s talk about how you can start automating them and which tools would fit best for you. With so many different marketing automation tools available, it can become overwhelming with deciding which one to choose. Let us help you with getting familiar with a few well-known marketing automation tools:

1. Marketo

This is one of the most famous marketing automation tools many organizations use. Marketo caters to both marketing and sales teams with loads of features that help your teams go beyond basic marketing automation.

2. ActiveCampaign

This tool is another perfect sales and marketing automation tool with pre-built automation recipes, hands-on training, value-added templates, and free migration. It is an all-in-one software that provides email marketing, SMS marketing, and a CRM tool.

3. Edgar and Buffer

This tool fits well with social media users who need to manage their daily activities such as publishing posts that are reoccurring. These tools help you maximize your social activity and engagement while focusing on other tasks.

Step 3: Always have automation targets

Digital marketing automation is only beneficial if it meets the targets you’ve set for your business. Otherwise, if you invest a lot of your budget in marketing automation tools that don’t help you reach your targets, do you think that’s helpful? You should make sure your targets are being reached.

Step 4: Revise and Improve

There is no such thing as perfect, make sure you are always going over your automation tasks to see improvement. Try to set targets and select the right KPIs for your business, this will help with seeing how much positive impact has occurred due to the automation process.

Step 5: Have an automation culture

Try to have a work culture that accepts automation and can build rather than fall from these steps. This type of mindset is not instilled in every employee. Therefore make it an effort to have your workplace openly tackle automation. 

The whole marketing automation is a complex and very long process as the businesses who are trying need to understand the new business model fully. Therefore, going step by step is the only key to success and letting the expert mind take the initiative would be better.

Tell us in the comments below that have you tried digital marketing automation yet or what is your experience in it?