Get weekly tips, trends & strategies. Subscribe now.

Additional menu

Kathryn Aragon

B2B Growth Consultant

marketing automation
You are here: Home / Product Reviews / How to Use Marketing Automation to Save Time & Money

How to Use Marketing Automation to Save Time & Money

By

We’re living in an era of such rapid digital transformation, we’re seeing serious disruptions within the business space.

But this does open up some opportunities. While technologies are changing at breakneck speed, they’re also helping us broaden our reach, attract more prospects, and engage existing customers.

One area that’s especially promising is automation—in email marketing, content production and management, lead nurturing, social media marketing, and digital advertising, among others.

Are you looking for effective ways to implement automation in your marketing operations?

Here, we explore how you can leverage software solutions that contribute to your business success.

Lead tracking and nurturing

Lead management can be tiring and time consuming when done manually. Luckily, using smart automation tools, it can be a breeze.

Many CRM systems come with built-in marketing automation features to nurture and track your leads. They help you gather relevant customer data and group it systematically for planning and strategizing, making it easier for you to run a successful lead nurture campaign that constantly brings high-quality leads into your marketing funnel.

Automating your lead management process will not only accelerate your marketing results but also increase the overall conversion rates and sales for your business. And today, you can manage leads by simply tapping into the advanced features of your email service.

Here are 3 of our favorites:

Social media marketing

Engaging thousands of followers on social media isn’t easy. That’s why most businesses share content from other sources rather than creating their own. But you can make the process easier by automating the content generation process.

By using software tools like Hootsuite or Buzzsumo, you can create thought leadership stories that will trend and improve the visibility of your social accounts.

Of course, you cannot (and shouldn’t) automate all elements of social media. Things like automated likes, retweets, and direct messages go against the policies of most social platforms; in fact, there has been a persistent debate on whether social media automation is right or not.

All in all, automation brings more efficiency as long as you respect all the basic principles and ethics of social networking.

Content marketing

You can’t automate content marketing entirely, but some activities (like idea generation and content research) can be easier with the right tools. Most digital content creators spend a lot of their time researching, a task that can be simplified with keyword research tools like SEMrush and content curation tools such as Feedly and Quora.

Similarly, businesses can minimize the resources spent in coordinating content creation and publishing by using project management platforms like Asana and Trello. This can particularly come in handy when managing a team of both in-house and freelance writers, SEO specialists, graphic designers, content managers, and more.

Here are some of our favorite content creation tools:

Customer retention and upselling

Marketing doesn’t stop after converting prospects and making sales. Every business should also focus on retaining new and old customers by keeping them happy and engaged. This is essential for winning loyalty and recurring sales in the long-term.

Marketing automation can improve your customer engagement process. A good example is to automate follow-up emails or phone calls, ideally a few days or weeks after a customer makes their initial purchase. But you can also use automation to boost lead generation, sales, and upselling.

Here are a few of our favorite tools for these tasks:

Website operation and optimization

A website is a valuable marketing asset that every business needs today. It helps you market your products and services, build your brand, and even drive sales.

For optimal performance and results, it’s important to automate as many functions as possible.

For example, you can use Google Analytics and other related tools to track visitor activities on your site. Also, if targeting organic traffic, SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, Yoast, and Similar Web should help. You can check out this Similar Web Vs Semrush comparison for a detailed assessment of the two which are among the best tools in this category.

Other automation tools to consider for your website optimization include site speed optimization tools, image and video compressors, and security enhancement tools among others.

For websites, here’s what we recommend:

Conclusion

Marketing automation saves time and money. It can also help you sell more and more often. Whether you run a small or large business, it’s important to embrace automation for your marketing process.

And remember, you don’t have to make things complicated to get massive results. Far from it, you only need to identify critical areas of your business where automation fits naturally and helps you cut down on repetitive, mundane tasks that consume most of your days.

About the Author: Kyle Anderson is a freelance tech journalist whose typical day is spent scouring the web for the latest developments in the world of business tools and software. He loves any type of software that automates his life! For his pastimes, he is an avid lover of traveling, poetry, and photography.