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If you want to overcome your competition in the world of marketing, or at least keep up with it, it’s inevitable to make automation an integral part of your marketing strategy.
Stats show that 63% of companies that outgrow their competitors have one thing in common – they’re all relying on automation in their marketing strategies.
And while there are some tasks you can easily automate and save significant amounts of your resources – time, energy and money, there are others that would be seriously harmed if they lack a genuine human touch.
Read on to learn which marketing tasks you can automate, and which you never should.
Automate Your Email
Email automation is a real gift for marketers. Instead of manually segmenting your customers, and personalizing your emails, with the help of automation you can now send well-targeted and highly-personalized email campaigns at predefined times.
If the tool you use is also AI-powered you can get even more benefits, as it will use the data it has collected to adjust the sending time based in when a particular recipient is mostly active.
With such advantages, your email campaigns will be more appealing to your customers and more successful when nurturing them through the sales funnel.
If you’re not already using an email automation tool, consider giving it a try.
Generate Leads
Automation can help you achieve some great results when it comes to lead generation too.
Instead of spending hours organizing your data for a future follow-up after your campaign, you can get all the details you need in real-time, the moment a lead shares their email address: who they are, where they work, their social media profiles, which places they visit etc.
Furthermore, you’ll be ready to respond right away with an email that has been personalized according to collected data, increasing your odds to get a conversion.
A/B Testing
Tweaking little details on your webpages, such as navigation bar, mages, videos or calls to action, can mean a big difference when it comes to the way your visitors engage with your content. Email marketing campaigns, social media marketing as well as paid search also need to be tracked and monitored continuously.
Automating these tasks means you can run A/B testing simultaneously for different features, and determine what are the corrections you need to make based on the feedback of your target audience.
Some of the best-known tools are CrazyEgg and Optimizely, but you can check out other solutions too.
Customer Service
Embracing new technologies, such as AI conversational chatbots, can make a real difference when it comes to the quality of your customer service, thus significantly boosting your customers’ satisfaction, improving your brand image and your customers’ loyalty.
According to ServisBot, the time of the epic chatbot failures is behind us, thanks to the advancements in technologies such as speech recognition, NLP and machine learning, as well as a more strategic approach to chatbot implementation.
Nowadays, any business process that is centered around conversational interaction is a candidate for a chatbot. Current AI chatbots can successfully handle 80% of customer queries, and as they are available around the clock, they can make your business more available to your prospects.
Numerous, still mostly menial tasks can be managed by a chatbot alone, with no need for human interference, thus taking a burden from off the employees’ shoulders and leaving them more time for complex matters.
Social Media Marketing
You can’s expect to have successful social media marketing campaigns unless you automate certain tasks.
To be more visible on social media, you need to post frequently, several times a day. Your latest content piece needs to be shared multiple times, just so that it draws some attention.
You can make this possible by pre-writing and scheduling your posts via Buffer and using a tool to automatically access relevant content related to your business, and share it on your profile.
And while there are a lot of SMM tasks you can automate, including building a community of followers, you should never use automation to engage with your prospects on social media channels.
Making a genuine connection with your customers is crucial for a successful marketing campaign, and no software can achieve the level of authenticity needed to forge and nurture such relationships.
Content Marketing
Automation can be very helpful in content marketing, too.
You can successfully use automation to get an insight into the most recent and engaging topics in your industry and get ideas for your own posts, or you can use some SEO automation tools so that your content ranks better in searches.
It’s a good idea to use Grammarly and automate the spell and grammar check, and be sure your posts are don’t have any mistakes. There are plenty of tools to automate the promotion of your posts and boost their visibility and engagement.
However, a task you should never automate is content creation. All of the content you publish on your social media channels, or on your blog, needs to be genuine and created by actual human beings, from the very same reason as stated above.
So, unless you have automated all of these tasks already, what are you still waiting for?
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