We’ve talked about what mistakes you should avoid when it comes to online marketing automation, now let’s talk about when you should use online marketing automation.
Before we get into the when, let’s explore the why.
- The biggest benefit from online marketing automation is being able to establish a consistent online presence to build your relationships and share helpful information with the community you serve through your business or project.
Consistency is key to everything you do and being that time is limited, automation can help you achieve this goal. As for the areas you want to focus on when looking into online marketing automation, they are email and social media content.
Setting up your email is helpful to get you going with building a list of those people who want to follow your blog or your announcements. There are different ways you can set this up. If you want to keep it simple at first, start by picking an email marketing platform like Mailchimp.
Mailchimp is very user-friendly when it comes to connecting a subscription form on your website and updating it with templates. I use Zoho for now, but I’ve chosen it for the CRM (customer relationship management) option they have. I use Mailchimp too, but because it doesn’t have a CRM option, I am not inclined to use it as my main email marketing tool. Also, Zoho isn’t as user-friendly as Mailchimp, so if you can’t really spend time learning how to use a new platform, you should consider starting your email marketing through Mailchimp or other similar email marketing tool (another renown one is ConstantContact).
Another nice thing about Mailchimp is that they’ve recently integrated a Facebook ads feature, so eventually you could use it to set up Facebook ads. Since, Mailchimp is widely used they keep adding to the marketing applications you can integrate when using it (more to come on the topic). For a quick comparison of Mailchimp vs Constant Contact you can go here.
For your social media content, I like Hootsuite, but there are other options (here’s a view of 9 alternatives to Hootsuite). In using Hootsuite, I’m able to schedule my social content while also tracking my social channel activities and conversations. It’s free up to 3 social networks, but with limited features. However, when you’re first starting, small implementations of your social activities are easier to get going with than trying to do a lot at once.
If you want to be active on only one social network, so let’s say Facebook. Facebook has a scheduling feature within your page options. Twitter and other social networks like LinkedIn don’t have scheduling potential within them so you’d have to share manually.
To keep it simple I’m not diving into a full on exploration of each of these options; but in time I will, with separate blog posts dedicated to those specific marketing areas. In the meantime, what’s important for you to take away from this blog post is that you want to start being consistently active in one of these two areas: email marketing and/or social media marketing.
Thanks to online marketing automation tools you can start with email and social media marketing, without having to put in too much time and without giving up quality. It’s like keeping in touch with friends and family, you consistently reach out to them to say hello or ask how their day went or share something interesting you’ve read recently.
What challenges are you facing with email marketing or your social media marketing activities? Let me know so that I can help 🙂
