How to use marketing automation in your local business
When marketing your business online is truly looked at and laid bare, it’s tough to ignore the mountain of tasks that face both you and your staff every day. Feelings of being overloaded and the uncomfortable suspicion that you’re forgetting something are always present. Every one of us face this. Online marketing is monstrously complex beast, and to tame it you simply have to employ some varieties of marketing automation to handle the amount of moving parts that marketing in multiple channels requires. Not doing so is virtually choosing not to compete. Let’s check out some ways we can put into action marketing automation.
Cool tools for marketing automation
There are lots of great tools out there that you can spend your time and money on, for our purposes here I’m going to focus on three areas which can be gigantic time sucks and possess the most prospect of 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 up your autoresponder with personalized content and marketing emails provides your customers and prospects the sense that they are being well cared for. There are a many great email autoresponder companies out there, today some of the best are AWeber, GetResponse, iContact, and MailChimp.
Managing social media – Keeping your finger on the pulse of numerous social media accounts daily is not only a full time gig, but a difficult one at that. You need to use some sort of tool, and there are several good ones out there which allow you to keep track of mentions, shares, Tweets and even enable you to post to your social platforms. Take a look at HootSuite, TweetDeck and Buffer.
Automate all of the tasks you can! – The advent of tools like IFTTT and Zapier are making many marketers lives easier! These tools, while similar in design, each concentrate on automating tasks between two or more different services that you currently use. A true virtual assistant!
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!
