If content marketing is king, then automation is the palace that keeps all marketing campaigns running smoothly and seamlessly.
Marketing automation gets you away from performing tedious tasks. It gets you on track so you can rock your creativity and design campaigns that bring bigger results.
With today’s tools, there are more ways to automate your marketing than ever before. Here are five of our favorites and how you can use them to get away from your boring to-do list and back to what you love doing most.
Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is one of the top marketing automation programs available today. It combines a variety of services into one program, which limits how much time you need to spend connecting and toggling through various tools.
With Infusionsoft, you can automate:
- Social media;
- Lead magnet distribution;
- Your CRM;
- Funnels for new leads;
- Marketing campaigns.
It’s easy to set-up each of your campaigns, new funnels, and CRM in one place. Then, the system runs seamlessly in the background collecting new data and driving more business.
When you’re ready to look at your results or login to check on the status of your marketing, the data is in one place. You’re not sent on a goose chase trying to connect the dots between programs. Instead, you’re able to see what’s working in your marketing and areas for improvement in one area.
Infusionsoft can be costly but considering the time savings, it’s a bargain for many small and medium businesses.
Buffer
Social media can be all-consuming. Not only does it take time to login and create a post that’ll drive engagement, it also sets you up to get sucked into the news feed, stealing your productivity.
Buffer changes that.
With Buffer, you can automate your social media marketing across a variety of platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. Within Facebook and LinkedIn, you can connect profiles, pages, or groups to separate your various posting areas. This makes it simpler to schedule social media and then move on.
Buffer also has a browser add-on. This comes in handy for quickly scheduling a post about an article you read online without having to copy the link, go to each social media network, and then post about it. You can schedule your post and send something valuable to your followers in a single click of a button next to the web address saving you significant chunks of time.
When you’re ready to check in on how you social media is performing, you can use the analytics tool available through Buffer. Here, you can break down your most recent posts, most popular posts, the least popular posts, and more. Sort the data by date and then export it to bring to your meetings. This reporting feature alone will save you hours.
Buffer is free for most users with the option to upgrade to a more robust business level.
Zapier
If you already have your marketing set up and scattered across a variety of tools, making the switch to a new solution can seem more daunting than continuing to toggle between programs. In this case, Zapier will be your new hero.
Zapier is a program that automates interaction between online tools. Some of the most popular types of “zaps” marketers use include:
- Automatically posting RSS feeds to Facebook pages or Twitter items;
- Sending an RSS feed to a Buffer profile;
- Adding a Google contact to a MailChimp list.
The list goes on and on. With the amount of tools Zapier links up with, the possibilities are (almost) endless.
Creating a zap means telling Zapier how to connect two applications. First, you need to start with a trigger application. Then, you need to choose which application you want Zapier to connect to so you can perform a secondary action automatically.
Once you’ve selected your two applications, you can define how they’ll talk to each other.
In the first application, you’ll specify exactly what needs to happen within the application for it to trigger the zap. Then, you’ll define how the trigger action will present itself in the secondary application.
The interface is easy to use and the instructions are easy to follow so setup is a breeze (even if it sounds complicated now).
Once you’re up and running, you won’t have to think about your zaps running in the background. Your programs will talk to each other automatically, saving you from performing time wasting marketing tasks.
This tool is free for the first five zaps you create.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an email marketing program. In its free version, you can manually send emails to a variety of lists. Upgrade for only $10/month and you can automate your messages.
Automating your emails through MailChimp is ideal for any marketers setting up a lead magnet or funnel. For example, you can instantly trigger an email to be sent to someone who is added to your list with a link to an e-book or report
MailChimp has a variety of pre-designed workflow sequences to make it easier when setting up your automated emails. You can choose any of the ones available or create your own.
With an automated email workflow in place, managing your leads is easier and faster. You don’t need to rely on a sales team member to manually reach out and contact a person after sign up. Instead, you can send a series of emails with details, follow up information, and any other messages you need your prospect to hear during the buying process.
Once you have your series of emails set up, you will get a variety of statistics, including click through rate, open rate, and more. You can see which emails are performing well and where people are unsubscribing. From here, you can adjust your messaging faster to make your funnel more effective.
StealthSeminar
One of the best ways to capture new leads and drive new sales is to host a webinar. However, webinars are time consuming to prepare and host.
StealthSeminar makes it easier to automate your webinar without making it seem like a pre-recorded event.
With Stealth Seminar, you can prepare your webinar, put together a good video, and then set it up to recur automatically. You can also use these to generate income by scheduling your events and charging for them without needing someone in front of the computer or camera.
If you host teleseminars, StealthSeminar works with mp3 files too. Simply convert it to a webinar to automate it in their system.
When you’re done, you can make it easy for your attendees to automatically replay your webinars using auto replay pages. You don’t need to do a thing on your end when someone wants to rewatch your marketing content.
The product works seamlessly with other marketing tools, including MailChimp and Infusionsoft.
StealthSeminar is currently on special for $97.00 for the first 30 days (normally $197.00) and $69.95 every 30 days thereafter.
Automation is King
Spending your time on automated marketing tasks is a waste. By using and connecting your marketing tools, you can save significant amounts of time and get back to focusing on what you do best.
Want an extra hand getting started? Reach out to us for help automating your specific marketing campaigns. We’re experts in making it faster and easier for you.
