Digital Marketing This Week: A Beginner’s Guide To Automation – Episode 31

For the latest episode of Digital Marketing This Week, we’re giving you a beginners guide to automation.

If you missed the live webinar, you can catch the full episode here.

• What aspects of marketing can be automated.
• What tools you can use to get started.
• Tips on what to avoid when you’re automating

Let’s start by defining what automation is–

What Is Automation?

Just to clarify, automation is NOT about having a machine take care of everything. While that’s true to some extent, what we are looking to do is to minimize the amount of time that you are spending working on your marketing.

Basically taking the simple, more tedious tasks and automating it so all you have left to do is maintain it and you have more time to focus on other aspect of your business.

There are numerous things you can automate, but we’re basically talking about these things today, starting with–

Email

When it comes to emails, use an atuoresponder–even if you’re just starting out, autoresponders like MailChimp is completely free and is very useful. You can scale up eventually, maybe switch to AWeber and Infusionsoft as you expand.

You can also streamline the segmentation of your users by creating multiple lists and setup link-click rules for a more curated, customized and personalized conversation with your audience.

Gmail also has filters as well that makes it easier for you to sift through the volume of emails.

Social Media

I’m going to go ahead and just say it–use Buffer.

There are other platforms, like Hootsuite, which is great if you’re managing multiple accounts, but Buffer is really easy to use and is intuitive in such a way that it gives you suggestions on what to share.

Here’s a tip though–keep an eye out for what works. What type of content is getting engagement? What gets the most likes and shares? Use it as a peg on what kind of content to produce.

Advertising

Use conversion pixels and let the platform do the work for you. You want to keep an eye on it but you can rest assured that it will work to find you new audiences and users or potential customers.

And then you can retarget so you can reach your desired users and target audience more efficiently.

Tracking

This is where Google Analytics come in. There are numerous softwares available out there, but I’m partial to Google Analytics and Clicky.

Tagging refers to the actions that your users are going through in the entire buying process, which you can then whittle down to segments.

And again, you can use this to retarget.

Hiring

When it comes to hiring, there are a couple of things we do that I can share–

First is to do “easter egg” job descriptions, where you create a basic job descriptions that has a couple “easter eggs” In it. For example, asking the applicant to tell you what their favorite breakfast food is when they apply.  It’s the simplest way to sift through candidates that know how to follow instructions, and saves you from having to sift through applicants who aren't detailed oriented enough to follow direction.

Here's another hint: Use Google form application where you can now add more specific skill sets to filter out your candidates and start basing your review on more exact terms and skills.

Content

What we’re automating here is the automation of ideas–

A couple of our go-to things here are Google alerts and Feedly.

Alerts work to automatically send us a search list of new content and is sent to us directly, minimizing the need for myself to actually start scouring the Internet for anything new.

Feedly is a supercool RSS reader where I can go through various blogs and put everything in one place.

Calendar

For those who need to schedule their days down to the minute, maybe if you do hourly consultation rates or are just generally packed with back to back meeting daily, I’m a big fan of TimeTrade and Acuity to help automate the process.

In Conclusion….

Check out the full webinar to find out what my favorite and recommended marketing automation tools are and how you can use it for your own business. And be sure to leave a comment below if you have an automation tool that you think we should check out that you would like to share.

– Mercer