3 Stellar Automation Tools For Smarter (And More Efficient!!) Marketing
Take it from those of us who spend our days working in the marketing trenches, success in this industry requires a sh*t ton of work, long hours, endless exhausting creativity and critical thinking, all while acknowledging the necessity of engaging in the ever evolving landscape of the industry as a whole. Personally, when I sit down at my desk in the morning to take a look at my to-do list for the day, I am almost always confronted with 10+ items, all of which are annotated with bold, angry capital lettering that says URGENT.The point I am trying to make is a simple one - any help I can get in completing my daily tasks is greatly appreciated. I am sure you feel the same, otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this blog. Increasing productivity is a subject that garners a huge range of interest from students to entry-level employees, to CEOs and business owners.There are two sides to the coin when it comes to the subject of productivity. On one side, there is the topic of increasing the efficiency of the time you spend working. On the other side, there are techniques and methods for decreasing your overall workload. Essentially, this is a ‘work smarter not harder’ type of conversation.One of the best ways to start working smarter is to automate tasks which require less personal attention.Today, we are going to introduce you to 3 stellar automation tools which can help lighten your workload, and give you more time to focus on the tasks that really matter.
Hootsuite – Social Media Management (hootsuite.com)
We starting using Hootsuite a few years ago for all of our social media management. In that time, it has become an essential tool for us. Not only does it give us one platform from which we can manage all of our clients across each of their individual social media platforms, but it’s also a powerful automation tool which helps save us a lot of time. Well, it helps save Conner a lot of time. He’s the lead guy on our social media team.I asked him what his favorite part of Hootsuite’s automation system was and he mentioned the ability to schedule out large batches of evergreen content ahead of time. It helps focus on creating broad, overarching strategies for our clients rather than having to worry about the nitty-gritty day-to-day minutiae of running dozens of client campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.As you can see in this screengrab, scheduling, and automating posts is fun and easy! Thanks for the input, Conner.If you have been posting day by day, check out Hootsuite for yourself if you feel like you have been flushing away too much time working on your social media marketing.
Mailchimp – Email Marketing (mailchimp.com)
Email marketing is something that can be phenomenally profitable while, unfortunately, being rather labor intensive. Just dipping your toe into the email marketing pond won’t drain too many resources, but it won’t garner much in terms of return. If you are looking for a significant return you are going to need to invest significant resources. We are talking about taking time for crafting strategies, building, curating, and segmenting your lists, creating visual assets, copywriting and editing, coding, and style. It is a lot. And we can’t forget actually sending the emails and responding to them!As the man in charge of all our email marketing campaigns, let me tell you, none of this is quick, simple, or easy. The ability to automate even small portions of these tasks is greatly appreciated.Luckily, Mailchimp places a robust automation infrastructure at your fingertips. Here is just a snapshot of some of the automation options Mailchimp provides:Currently, there are 34 prebuilt options in addition to the ability to create custom workflows and automations:Which is primarily what we do for most of our clients. Building custom workflows takes more time, effort, and knowhow, but the results can be pretty awesome. Email marketing is a huge revenue driver for several of our E-commerce clients, and custom automations allow us to build and manage their campaigns in an efficient manner.
Marin – Cross-Channel Advertising Platform (marinsoftware.com)
In an industry in which we build advantages by indulging in minutia and by scraping and clawing to optimize every level of our campaigns, Marin Software has become one of our essential tools. For us, the most important element of the platform is Marin Search, which helps us optimize and automate portions of our media buys. We will allow Marin to speak for itself in describing Marin Search:
“Marin Search empowers marketers to manage daily workflows efficiently, identifying new revenue opportunities, and improve financial performance across leading publishers like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu. As a purpose-built open platform, Marin Search enables you to assemble audiences, revenue, and contextual data from any source, providing you with immediate performance insights across all your publishers and devices”
Of course, this blog is about optimization, so we should focus on the ways in which Marin helps us save time. Hey Marin, what do you have to say about saving time?!Marin helps us maximize our clients advertising budgets through predictive biding which incorporates contextual data, machine learning, and What-if analysis combined with customized, flexible rules which we set ourselves.Hopefully, these three tools can give you what you need when it comes to automating portions of your marketing efforts.For more information on how you can streamline your business, check out one of our other blogs titles: 3 Ways Google Drive Can Increase Productivity.
