If time is money, then data is gold. What if you could find a way to save money and make your gold work harder?
That’s the promise of marketing automation. These days, what used to be manual tasks done by marketing teams can be relegated to software. That means that lead generation to keep your service or product top of mind can now be done by simple forms of Artificial Intelligence that analyses data to capture potential leads at an early stage.
The entire purpose of automation is to do this at scale, hence saving you precious manpower hours from having to wade through data and performing manual actions. Here are two of the most important aspects of digital marketing that startups and small and medium businesses can get on top of. These are low hanging fruit that founders can execute themselves instead of relying on a marketing team or agency.
Social media management
Managing social media is a full time job. After all, you would have to reply to comments, like pictures and reply to direct messages on top of creating content. Social media automating platforms can take care of all this for you on top of giving you the tools to plan and schedule posts ahead of time. Bear in mind to stay clear of social media bots that promise to like and follow and unfollow users in order to grow a following. It’s tempting, but it will run you the risk of being banned from Instagram – and that’s never great for any business.
Suggested software
Have a look at MobileMonkey, which integrates multiple chat platforms from Facebook to Instagram into one place. This lets you reach your customers, cultivating relationships with users in order to convert into sales.
Email marketing management
One of the most valuable forms of marketing is in building your email database to reach current and potential customers without needing to rely on social media platforms. New startups not in the digital space would sometimes rely on collecting emails in person but one quick step every entrepreneur can do is to set up email collections forms on their website. The next step up would be to use software that can let you send triggered or timed emails to subscribers. These are often customised and can be triggered based on a set of customer actions. When a particular event is triggered, for instance, if your customer adds items into their cart but then drops off without making a purchase, a specific email can be sent to them in a reminder.
Suggested software
There’s plenty of well known automated email marketing tools. Mailchimp would be a great start for startups just building a new email database while more established businesses can dive into the likes of Sendpulse, Sendinblue, or Drip.
