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Marketing can be overwhelming, especially for small business owners or solopreneurs forced to wear multiple hats to keep their businesses afloat. Between managing various social media, email marketing, lead generation, and customer relationship management, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.
That’s where marketing automation can help. Marketing automation is simply using technology to streamline and automate marketing efforts so you don’t have to do it all manually.
The ultimate goal of automation is to make your marketing efforts more efficient and successful. In this article, we’ll explore everything you need to know to level up your marketing with automation.
With a wide range of new tools and technologies available, businesses can now automate many marketing tasks that once required a lot of time and attention.
Here are eight different types of marketing automation and tool recommendations you can use to automate your marketing efforts.
Email marketing has been the bread and butter of reaching and engaging customers for decades. But with an estimated 347.3 million emails sent daily, it’s become increasingly difficult for businesses to cut through the noise.
Email marketing automation is all about using technology to automate various tasks associated with email marketing, from designing and sending emails to managing contacts and tracking performance. With the help of email automation tools, you can create targeted and personalized email campaigns without spending countless hours manually sending individual emails.
And the automation doesn’t end with email sending and scheduling. There are tools available that allow you to segment your email lists based on behavior, personal preferences, location, and other super-specific targeting criteria. Others enable you to store your contacts and create drip campaigns designed to gradually nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel.
Some email marketing automation tools to consider include:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms allow you to automate various tasks involved in managing customer relationships. CRM automation helps you streamline those processes, ultimately enabling you to improve customer engagement and increase revenue for your business.
CRM automation tools offer many features and functionalities, including lead capture and segmentation, sales pipeline management, performance tracking, and more. These tools can help you centralize customer data in one place and provide a 360-degree view of your customers and their behaviors.
Some of the most popular CRM automation tools on the market include:
With around 4.89 billion social media users worldwide in 2023, social media has become one of the most important aspects of any company’s marketing presence. Simply put, to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace, you must use social media.
But, like other marketing efforts, marketing on social media isn’t easy. In fact, it can be incredibly time-consuming – especially if you’re doing everything manually.
Social media automation helps you organize and simplify tasks associated with managing and running your social media accounts. This includes everything from scheduling posts ahead of time to automating responses and creating new content.
Here are a few social media automation tools worth checking out:
When we talk about advertising automation, we’re really talking about the ability to automate and simplify digital ad campaigns. This includes everything from retargeting and location-based targeting to keyword research and dynamic ad creation.
By automating your advertising, you get an influx of time and resources that allow you to make data-driven decisions and adapt quickly to changes in the market. It also enables you to analyze your customers’ behaviors and preferences, ultimately making your advertising more effective.
Here are some of the most popular advertising automation tools on the market:
With 6.92 billion people owning and using smartphones daily, mobile marketing has become one of the most effective ways to reach people. Mobile marketing is very broad, ranging from push notifications and in-app messaging to social media marketing and SMS (text message) marketing.
Mobile marketing automation makes mobile marketing substantially easier, helping you streamline your marketing efforts, save time, and improve performance. Many tools available on the market offer features for segmenting customers based on specific criteria, customizing campaigns, sending texts and responses automatically, and tracking analytics.
Here are some of the most popular mobile marketing automation tools available today:
It’s no secret that businesses thrive on leads. But once you’ve generated a lead, what do you do with it? In the old days, you’d write down their name and put them through a strenuous and highly manual sales process. But with the advent of lead management tools, that’s not necessary.
Lead management automation allows you to manage and nurture your leads with technology. These tools typically allow you to set up automatic or recurring action items that start the moment you capture the lead through the entire sales and follow-up process.
Some of the more sophisticated lead management platforms allow you to track and prioritize leads based on behavior. Others offer features for lead scoring, which is essentially the ability to assign a numerical value to each lead based on various criteria, like website visits, email opens, and form submissions.
Lead management automation tools essentially give you top-to-bottom storage, organization, task management, tracking, and analytics to streamline your business prospects.
Some of the most popular lead management automation tools on the market today include:
Marketing analytics tools make it easy to collect, track, and analyze marketing data and performance metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, social media engagement, and email campaign performance. So, not only do they collect data, but they provide comprehensive insights from it.
Many marketing analytics automation tools automatically collect data from various sources and assemble them in one easy-to-read format. This all but eliminates the need for manual tracking and reduces the risk of errors.
The most comprehensive marketing analytics automation tools on the market today are:
Copywriting is a critical component of marketing. Whether you’re looking at a product description, a one-sentence advertisement, email campaigns, social media posts, or a 2,000-word webpage outlining a company’s services – it’s all about the copy.
Copywriting takes a lot of focus, research, and a deep understanding of technology and consumer psychology. Good copywriters are worth what you pay them, but if you need to save some time and money, copywriting automation is the way to go.
When we talk about copywriting automation, we’re referring to new technology that can help you create, edit, and optimize copy. These tools offer various options that make the copywriting process easier, including identifying and fixing grammatical errors, generating high-quality content in seconds, and performing arduous tasks like keyword research or article outlining.
Here are some must-have copywriting automation tools available to business owners and solopreneurs today:
While we have covered some of the most popular marketing automation tools, there are still plenty of options we haven’t discussed. So, here are a few additional marketing automation tools worth considering.
Zapier is an automation platform that lets you connect apps and automate your marketing efforts. The software currently offers the ability to connect over 5,000 of the world’s top applications, including some of the critical marketing and analytics tools we mentioned above.
ManyChat is a chatbot platform that allows you to automate customer interactions on Facebook, Instagram, and SMS. With this innovative tool, you can create chatbots that answer questions, schedule appointments, and even process payments.
Omnisend is an email marketing automation platform designed for ecommerce businesses that allows you to create automated email campaigns based on customer behavior. This is especially useful for customer retargeting and direct email marketing.
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing automation platform with CRM, email marketing, and sales automation tools. With EngageBay, you can automate your marketing and sales processes, manage your contacts, and create customizable email campaigns, all in one place.
Mautic is an open-source marketing automation platform that allows businesses to create personalized and automated email campaigns. It also offers website analytics and lead management. Mautic’s ultimate mission is to give everyone equal access to state-of-the-art marketing automation.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, marketing automation tools are essential for businesses of all sizes. With the right set of tools, you can streamline your marketing and increase your profits while giving yourself the time and space to focus on the other crucial aspects of your business.
While each tool listed above serves a specific purpose, they all have one thing in common – they make marketing easier, faster, and more effective.
So, whether you’re a solopreneur, a small business owner, or part of a larger organization, investing in marketing automation can help eliminate manual tasks and take your business to the next level.
Marketing.biz is your source for all marketing education and resources.