Automated Marketing - 12 Amazing Techniques

Marketing is important to any business, but it can be a time-consuming process that have most businesses skipping over this key strategy more often than not.  However, if you are a business owner who knows that marketing is a necessary aspect to the survival of your business, you are going to want to jump onto the automation bandwagon as early as you possibly can.  Any marketing that you can automate will save you so much time on all those repetitive tasks, that include posting on social media, sending out emails, and all those other time-sucking items.

While it is possible to delve into the pros and cons of automated marketing, which happens to have way more pros than cons, it is better to peruse the best techniques when it comes to utilizing this phenomenal option.

Here are the 12 amazing techniques that you need to know when it comes to automated marketing:

1. Automate Wherever You Can but Start Small

While it will eventually be necessary for you to automate as much as you possibly can, so that you can keep your focus on the rest of your business, you can start small.  It might be best to automate the one thing that overwhelms you the most and then add automation in more areas from there.  Most businesses will begin with lead qualifications for automation, as they need leads to attract customers.  However, once they have that in place, they will quickly set up automated emails, social media posts, and even report regenerations.  There is no right or wrong place to get started, just do what makes the most sense for you and your business.

2. Make Improvements to Automation All the Time

It is going to be necessary for you to improve your marketing automation all the time, as technology is always changing and growing.  Therefore, what worked wonderfully a year or two ago will no longer work as well now.  There are always options for creating new tasks for automation and ways to fine tune all your settings to continue getting the results that you desire and need.  The improvements are all part of the starting small technique from above, because the improvements come with adding more tasks and continuing to do some fine tuning as you continue with your marketing automation.  Don’t worry if you forget about making some small changes to your marketing automation every once in a while, because it can be fairly forgiving.  You might not get the results that you want during that time, but that can easily be fixed when you finally take the time to make the changes that you need to.

3. Consider Your Long-Term and the Benefits it Will Provide

Automated marketing has been designed to handle large amounts of information at one time, much more than a human could ever sort through in the same amount of time.  As you continue to use this automated process, you will find that you can continue to target your audience better and you will have the time to focus on the things that are more important to you.  Imagine focusing more on quality campaigns and connecting better with your customers, simply because you do not need to spend your time on the more tedious intricacies of what you are now automating.  Your long-term needs and goals may change over time, which may have you automating even more in the future, but the benefits that you see should always remain mainly the same.

4. Stay Away from Bad Automations

There are always going to be a couple things that you are not going to want to automate, because the results are going to be worse than you could ever imagine.  If you already have a process in place that is not working well, it is recommended that you make changes to make it better, if not perfect, before you even attempt to turn it into an automated marketing process.  Once you begin to automate your marketing, you will instantly see what could be considered a bad automation, and that will make it easier to see what items you need to wait on before you implement the automation process.

5. Never Purchase Lists of Emails

It can be so tempting to purchase those ever-present lists of emails that are sold by third parties, so that you can try to persuade more people to read what you have to say.  There are so many laws against this process though, which means besides working your company to the bottom of your customers and non-customer list and becoming popular in the spam inbox, you could actually also ruin everything that you have worked so hard to create.  Plus, these lists can be quite expensive and hardly any gain is seen from them anyway.  That means that if you manage to not alienate anyone, and do not get caught by those everchanging laws, you still will not be any further ahead from your ill-sought marketing practice.

6. Choose Your Automated Marketing Software Carefully

There are quite a few automated marketing software companies, but some of them are way better than all the others.  When you are choosing an automated marketing software, you are going to want to keep in mind what you want to use it for.  Some software only includes a few options, while others offer everything that you want plus a whole lot more.  It can be easy to overbuy when it comes to software, but if you know that you will use every feature at some point in the future, you are better off purchasing the one that has everything instead of the ones that offer very little.  After all, you don’t want to switch everything over to a new software program once you have already set it all up once!

7. Determine the Score of Your Existing Content

As you begin to automate everything that you can, you should already have an idea of how well your existing content is performing.  When you determine this score beforehand, you can easily see if your automated marketing is working well or making things worse than they were.  It is only then that you can take the necessary steps to change what you need to in order to keep things moving in the right direction.  There are a few different software programs that can help you determine your score in the beginning and then keep an eye on how it improves or declines afterwards.  The good news is that if your score is excellent on certain things, you can automatically copy and use that same format, style, and topic to keep things as it is.

8. Always Use A/B Testing

You may think that the automation that you just created is the best one in the world, but when you take the time to test it against another option, you may be surprised with the results!  There are testing tools that you can use that will allow you to use a select group of people to see which option they prefer.  This will allow you to monitor the performance and outcome of each option that you create, while making tweaks along the way until you find the perfect one!  Of course, everyone is going to have their own opinion, so do not think that you are going to have the same people falling in love with one or the other.  You will basically need to see which one performs better time and time again and then use that one.

9. Customize Your Email Lists

Using a few automated features will allow you to customize your email lists into gender, age, location, and even interest in specific content.  This will then allow you to only send emails to specific groups of people and have them catered to those people accordingly.  This will ensure that your marketing methods are not going to waste and that you are targeting the group of people that you want to with the emails that you are creating content for.

10. Create Series to Automatically Post on Your Social Media Accounts

While automating social media posts has been a thing for a long time now, there are other ways that you can use it to improve your business.  In addition to scheduling the content that you have created for certain times of the day, switching things up as necessary to keep it fresh, you also need to consider your long-term goals.  Those goals will have you wanting to increase your social media views, likes, and interaction.  A series about a specific topic will keep bringing people back to your social media pages, while generating more leads at the same time.  This might take a little more work than simply scheduling posts, but the results that you will see will be worth it all.

11. Collect Data and Analyze Everything

You might think that everything that you automate will easily help you determine what you need to do, but you will still need to collect it all and analyze it to see what you can do to make things better.  This will ensure that you can keep your customers happy, keep your marketing strategies fresh and in working order, and keep growing your business.

12. Always Finish with a Personal Touch

Yes, automated marketing might save you a ton of time, but no customer is going to feel like they mean anything to you if all your emails and other means of correspondence comes off like it was created by a robot.  It is still going to be necessary for you to have personal interactions with each one of your customers, so you can create relationships that will last for many years.

As you are writing content to send out automatically, make sure that you are using a personal tone and allowing the automation software to insert personal greetings and even personalized signatures from you.  This will ensure that each one of your customers will feel as if they are special and that you wrote that email only to them.  The results that you see will be much better than what you would get if you wrote a monotone script that had no personality or personalization at all!

These twelve techniques and tips will help you as you start to automate as much of your marketing as possible for your business.  Once you get started on this process, you will be amazed at how much extra time you have to focus on other parts of your business.  While you may use some of that spare time to set up the automation in the beginning, you may find yourself wondering what to do with that time later on.  One option is to focus on expanding your business, but you can also use that time to spend with family and friends who may have felt neglected as you grew your business to where it is today.