In today’s overcrowded digital marketing landscape, businesses need to focus on attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

But, if you’re still using Excel sheets to build your plans, it’s time you sit down and rethink your strategies carefully.

Automating your business doesn’t necessarily mean investing in an expensive AI-powered tool.

It doesn’t mean replacing people with machines.

By leaving some repetitive processes to machines, your employees will save time and be able to focus more on the creative aspects of their jobs.

Project Management

Project management software is a platform or tool that is designed to help teams plan, coordinate, execute, and report on tasks and projects. In short, it’s designed to help you get work done. There’s an incredibly wide variety, from personal to-do list tools to comprehensive, “all-in-one” software (like monday.com) that facilitate the production of every type, size, and shape of work for businesses great and small. One of the best parts of many project management software today is their ability to automate mundane tasks and emails. Not sure which PM software to choose from? Check out this complete list of all the platforms and tools out there to help you improve the way your team works.

Smarter Lead Generation

No matter if you’re generating 50 or 5000 leads on a monthly basis, sticking to manual processes doesn’t make any sense.

By automating your business processes, you can generate more quality leads and improve your sales, ROI, and conversion rates.

Let’s take an example of automated lead nurturing and segmentation.

There are numerous tools that will help you learn more about your leads’ location, preferences, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. This way, you will provide them with highly targeted content and personalized offers. Most importantly, they will be offered an exceptional user experience and support along their entire buyer journey.

Collecting Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback regularly helps you figure out what it is that they want from you and tailor your strategy to their expectations.

With numerous online survey platforms that give users the opportunity to get paid to take surveys online, you can easily set up your survey and promote it widely across various channels to put it in front of the right people.

You can also use social listening tools (more on them in the social marketing segment) to track your brand and product mentions.

Net promoter score (NPS) surveys are also a great, almost fully automated feedback generation option. NPS survey is a single question you ask your customers after they complete the desired action, to understand how satisfied they are with what you have to offer.

Highly Targeted Content Marketing

Content marketing is based on lots of creativity, doing a solid research, and keeping up with the hottest trends. As such, automating is may be a tedious task. However, there are numerous time-consuming processes like content research that can be automated.

There are numerous content curation tools like Feedly, DrumUp, Buzzsumo, and Storify that will do the content discovery, monitoring, and filtering for you.

The idea behind these processes is simple- machines will do the repetitive and boring part of the job for you, while you will have more time to focus on doing your research and the creative aspects of content creation.

Also, don’t forget that quality content creation usually involves numerous process stakeholders, from content developers to graphic designers. You need to provide your teams with the uninterrupted flow of information and help them collaborate in real-time, regardless of their location.

Even though there are numerous platforms that are specifically dedicated to content marketing management, some popular project management tools like Basecamp, Asana, or Trello may help you here, as well.

Real-Time Social Media Conversations and Simplified Content Sharing

To get the most out of your social media marketing, you need to cover the 3 essential components of customer engagement on these channels and these are:

• Publishing content across different social networks
• Offering real-time customer support and instant conversations
• Building a strong community

And, that’s where automation comes to shine.

For starters, there are numerous social media management tools that will help you schedule your own and curated content and share it automatically across multiple channels.

When it comes to social media interactions, there are many activities you’d like to optimize.

You could, for example, invest in social media monitoring tools that would notify you whenever someone mentions your brand, products, and even your competitors online. This way, you can participate in your customers’ conversations in real-time, providing them with relevant answers and support.

There are also AI-powered chatbots that are mimicking real-life conversations. These sophisticated pieces of software are constantly learning various conversational patterns and, when integrated with your major social media channels, they can provide your customers with grammatically correct, accurate, and relevant information.

Finally, automating community building is almost impossible, as these practices are supposed to be performed by real people. Even though many marketers resort to automated likes and retweets, these techniques are violating some basic principles of social media marketing and you should stay away from them. On the contrary, you can still automate the process of targeting the right prospects, people who would really be interested in what you have to offer.

Back to You

Marketing automation doesn’t have to be based on expensive, complex systems only large companies can afford. Small businesses can take advantage of these processes, too.

The examples mentioned above show you that even some basic practices like optimizing your social media marketing can bring you small wins and help you engage your customers more effectively.

How are you automating your marketing efforts? Which tools do you use? We would like to hear from you!

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