Note: This post has been guest authored by Kamy Anderson, who is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing on emerging technologies in the areas of corporate training and education. He is an expert in learning management system & eLearning authoring tools – currently associated with ProProfs Training Maker.
Marketers love automation, and for a good reason. The efficiency tools this practice relies on help facilitate the most important areas and achieve crucial marketing objectives.
Day-to-day productivity, marketing ROI, campaign management, database quality, lead and customer acquisition, performance tracking, and alignment with sales are only a few of them.
But automation is not only about making things easier for professionals. Its other main goal is to save resources – money, energy, and time alike.
Without further ado, we introduce you to our top five time-saving automation that modern-day marketing cannot do without, and neither can your flourishing business organization.
1. Workflow and Collaboration Platforms
In a fast-paced marketing environment, every second means the difference between stagnating and growing. Let the momentum pass you by, and stagnation may be the least of your worries. And there are a lot of moving parts to think about.
On a day-to-day basis, the amount of workload in marketing can scale to levels that go far beyond easily manageable. Often intimidating, to-do lists can hardly be tackled with traditional methods.
We should stop to think about what this entails in a more practical context.
Workload leads to burnout, as always in business, from which then productivity suffers too. Even if deadlines are met, the quality inevitably legs behind quantity.
This is where the various team and project management tools enter the scene, to help marketing teams attack their workloads from a unified front, and as a well-oiled machine.
Task management and collaboration platforms such as Asana, Zapier, Basecamp, or Trello automate day-to-day operations, from assigning tasks to measuring performance.
By automating menial tasks, they don’t only save time, but also allow marketing professionals to focus on what really matters – creative thinking and problem-solving.
2. Automation Tools for Content Writers
Automating content curation and distribution is already a tried and tested practice, and we’ll talk more about it in a few minutes. For now, we’re interested in automation for writers.
Content writing is the most creatively arduous task in marketing. It takes time and intellectual effort to complete a 10x article; the more value it offers to the reader, the more challenging it is.
Unfortunately, no automation tool can do this job instead of a writer. Though we’ve seen some applications of AI in content writing, that’s mostly limited to brief social media posts.
But smart automation tools can still help content writers with research, and greatly so.
For instance, tools like BuzzSumo and Headline Analyzer let writers identify engaging blog topics and score headlines based on specific keyword research and readers’ demand.
This is a neat little automation trick that saves both time and energy, allowing writers to use their creative juices and productivity hours for developing content that converts.
3. Supercharged Emal Marketing Blasts
In 2017, email scored as the number one most effective marketing channel for B2B lead generation. Its success rate is still very strong and is nothing less impressive in B2C sectors.
Because it so easily trumps other marketing methods, email has become the focal point of many business tool developers. Nearly everything about email marketing can be automated:
- Trigger and drip-feed emails
- Subscriber segmentation
- Email copy personalization
- Email copy split testing
- Email marketing analysis
Automated email marketing will continue to save your time by sending out emails to your customers and prospects automatically, based on a schedule, or triggers, you define.
At the same time, this offers a more targeted approach to email marketing, as automation allows campaign creators to collect, analyze, and use behavioral data from their company’s website.
Then there are trigger emails, which help reduce, if not eliminate, cart abandonment – without automation, this retargeting technique would hardly be as effective.
Product recommendations in personalized emails are yet another email marketing automation technique that works like a charm when it comes to lead nurturing and conversions.
4. Omnichanneling and Social Listening
Returning back to content marketing, we are yet to cover two key aspects of this dominant approach to lead generation and customer acquisition – content curation and content distribution.
Both urge us to talk about social media in terms of multiple channels.
Regardless of their specific niche and target audience, content marketers cannot avoid Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube. That’s already five channels to manage.
Building an online presence on multiple social networks manually would hardly be feasible. Even the best marketer would agree that this would be a dreadfully time-consuming process.
And since omnichanneling has too many benefits to be ignored altogether, clever marketers use automation to help them achieve consistency without putting in too much time and effort.
This type of marketing automation comes from omni channeling tools such as DrumUp that serve as centralized dashboards for various social media activities and campaigns.
Along with allowing them to edit, post, and share content on multiple channels at the same time, they also automate social listening – the process of monitoring digital conversations.
5. Fully Automated Marketing Insights
Last but not the least on our list of marketing automation solutions are tools that collect invaluable insight across various channels, analyze data, and report back to marketers.
We’ve already mentioned social listening features, but similar analytical capabilities are included in all reliable marketing automation tools, be they for content, email, or social media.
ProProfs Quiz Creator Software solutions are just as effective. As an all-in-one marketing tool, an online quiz & Online Exam Software can generate leads and subscriptions, engage and retain existing buyers, and collect feedback from dissatisfied customers.
Educators are not the only ones who can benefit from online exam software solutions. Marketers can too, especially from features that automate real-time insights and reporting.
Conclusion
Following the “work smarter, not harder” principle, savvy professionals use automation for almost every aspect of marketing. You can keep up the pace only by joining them.
At the end of the day, the single most valuable resource you have is time.
Automation tools are here not only to help you preserve this precious asset but also to boost your marketing efforts by leaving some much-needed room for creativity.
