As busy business owners we want to get as much out of our marketing as possible without spending 24/7 writing blogs or networking in Facebook groups. Because life’s too short – and there are multiple other jobs to do when you run  your own business – but we know that marketing is important.

What’s the answer? Automate your marketing.

Disclaimer: Automating your marketing will save you a huge amount of time and effort but it doesn’t replace the need to engage with your audience and talk to your customers. But we can streamline many of the repetitive “back end” tasks and increase our lead generation with minimal extra work.

The Golden Rule of Marketing Automation

The secret is to keep things simple. That might sound like an oxymoron (because for some people the word “automation” conjures up a nerve-jangling image of complicated “tech” systems) but the clearer your marketing strategy and sales process, the easier it is to automate. Jumping in to use some of the tools recommended below without a clear strategy will take you down all sorts of unnecessary rabbit holes.

Using my Shine & Profit Online coaching model as the model for the key marketing “functions” I’ve divided the recommended automations accordingly (plus there are some general time saving business tools):

#1 Content Creation {ATTRACT ~ NURTURE}

Every business needs a content marketing strategy and this can be time consuming if you don’t have the tools to help you curate and share content easily.

Some of the most popular for finding content automatically include:

Google Alerts (curates content from the media, blogs and social media using your chosen keywords)

PostPlanner (shows the most viral social media posts and memes for the last week or month)

Feedly (curates relevant content based on your chosen new sources, blogs and gurus)

#2 Email Automation {CONVERT}

After attracting new potential leads, the next step in our marketing process is to CONVERT them into customers. This process can be automated using email sequences called “autoresponders”. Popular email autoresponder providers include:

Mailchimp (it’s free so a good choice if you’re new to running a business or doing your own marketing)

ActiveCampaign (my favourite and recommended email provider). ActiveCampaign allows you to create automations (see example) that completely automate your marketing sequences. Some examples include:

• Creating a “show up” sequence for a webinar or training event
• Cleaning your database by automatically tagging inactive subscribers
• Segmenting your subscribers based on which links they click on in your emails
• Moving your subscribers from one automation to another based on their actions and preferences (so your marketing becomes very targeted as you only show information of interest to your audience)
• Creating a “follow-up” sequence for prospects you’ve had a 1-2-1 call with
• Automating your follow-up process.
• Using intelligence to make a more efficient sales pitch.
• Send a drip campaign after each purchase.
• Inviting prospects to a new training based on their interests

There are many other email autoresponder providers available including Aweber, InfusionSoft, Convertkit, Ontraport, Get Response, amongst others.

#3 Syndicate Content {Attract ~ Nurture}

Once you’ve established a constant source of fresh, relevant content the next step is to share it widely across the internet and Social Media. Some recommended tools for “syndicating” your content – so you appear everywhere! – include:

Networked blogs (share automatically from your blog to social media)

WordPress plug-in’s such as Simple Social Share

You can also automate the content sharing process using tools such as:

IFTTT -where you set up “applets” to automate many marketing processes including:

• Add anyone tweeting a certain keyword to a Twitter list or Google sheet
• Add webinar registrations to your email list
• Notify one of your team members every time you add a new video to YouTube
• The possibilities are endless and will save you a massive amount of time, even basics like organising your calendar or inbox too

Zapier

Zapier is another great tool for automating marketing and sales processes. Zapier allows you to integrate your various online tools with each other. You can see a small example of some of the possible integrations below: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you using Facebook Live to build your audience (please do – it works amazingly well!) there are handy tools to automate the post-event syndication, such as LiveLeap and Social Sharing (wordpress plugin) which will automatically share your FB Live recording onto your blog.

#4 Social Media Automation {ATTRACT ~ NURTURE}

There are a slew of time saving Social Media tools – to help you schedule your content, recycle your popular posts and tweets and share your best content widely. Here are some of my favourites (tools we use every day at Modern Marketing Spark):

Buffer (share, schedule, find and recycle your best content)

Hootsuite (schedule content and follow tweets based on keywords)

Postplanner (find and schedule the most viral content and memes)

MeetEdgar (schedule content according to different categories)

Confused about which Social Media scheduling tool is best for your business? Read my blog post comparing the pro’s and con’s of the top Social Media Scheduling Tools.

TubeMogul

Hubspot is another popular (but pricey) option

There are also platform specific tools such as:

communi.it (Twitter management

Manage Flitter

TweetDeck (Twitter management)

Grum (Instagram scheduling tool)

And many others – which ones do you use? {I will add to this list as time permits}

#5 Sales Tools {CONVERT ~ SCALE}

Using some of these tools you can easily UPSELL your customers from a low priced offer to a higher one, scale up your marketing, and boost your sales. Not bad for a process that you set up that runs behind the scenes 24/7. Some of my favourites include:

LeadPages (landing page software with templates to automate webinar sign-ups, lead magnet optins, and the facility to split tests your pages to see which is converting best)

Other similar options are Unbounce, and ClickFunnels

Can you see the power of marketing automation?

Taking things to the next level you can use LeadPages, SamCart, OptimizePress2 (a wordPress theme) to add UPSELLS and One Time Offers to your sales funnel so prospects are moved very quickly through the customer journey. If they’re keen they can digest more of your content and offers straight away.

Combining these tools with your email provider you can NURTURE leads, SEGMENT them into CUSTOMERS or PROSPECTS, and stay in touch with them using content that’s relevant to where they are in the customer journey, and based on their interests. All this is done automatically using the tags and tracking provided by your email provider (see above)

#6 Business Tools 

Supporting your marketing and business functions is critical for the busy entrepreneur, and there are some great tools available. For example:

Calendly  – automate your schedule by linking to your online calendar

Asana – project management software. With Asana you can set up recurring tasks and assign them to your team members so tasks never get forgotten.

Google Suite including Gmail and Google Forms

Google offers a wide range of business tools, many of which you can set up and automate using, for example, Google Forms for collecting survey or questionnaire data. You can also combine Google Forms with other platforms using Zapier or IFTTT.

With Google (GMAIL) you can also set up filters to keep your inbox clear – so that emails from a certain person are automatically moved into a folder, or are flagged us as important.

So are you ready to add Rocket Fuel to Your Marketing Engine and automate your marketing?

If you need help finding, integrating or using any of these tools please get in touch. Use my online calendar (do you see what I did there) to schedule a 15-minute Clarity Call