Top 5 Ways To Automate Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing consists of many facets, each requiring a lot of time, resources, energy, and brainstorming to complete. Many of the tasks built into each of these components could easily be automated.

What Is Automation In Digital Marketing?

Automation in digital marketing uses technology to carry out tasks that are usually done by humans but don’t necessarily need to be. These tasks are generally simple and somewhat repeatable through tools and software with pre-programmed rules and algorithms that speed along the process.

Why Is It Important To Automate These Tasks?

The less you have on your plate, the better you can focus on things that need most of your attention.

Bigger and more complex tasks like content strategy, creative writing, designing, and the like are better left in human hands to ensure authenticity, quality, and connection with the audience. Having small and repetitive tasks out of the way allows each member of your team to allocate more energy where it’s needed most.

Benefits of Digital Marketing Automation

Without a doubt, digital marketing automation has boosted revenue and consumer engagement even for the world’s top-performing companies. Some of the benefits your business can enjoy when applying automation include:

Saves Time

It cannot be stressed enough just how much time automation can save each one of your departments and team members. With the ability to run repetitive tasks through tech, marketers now have more time for profit-boosting tasks.

Improves Budget Allocation

While it takes a certain amount of investment to acquire the right software, automation can save on operational costs and improve budget allocation over time.

Not only do you spend less on hiring and training staff but your existing team members also have the freedom to focus on core tasks, making their work days more productive. More productivity equals faster turnover, happier customers, and a satisfied team.

Monitors Results and Targets Audiences

With an automation set, you can better monitor your ads and target consumers with more precision. Tools that provide real-time data in terms of engagement, purchasing behavior, demographics, and the like can be very advantageous when putting together strategies and optimizing campaigns.

Keeps Branding Consistent

Strong branding is very important to keep your audience’s attention and stay top of mind. Automation tools provide ways to centralize and retain your brand across all visuals, copy, content, and communications that you publish.

What Are The Top 5 Ways To Automate Your Digital Marketing?

There are multiple ways to utilize automation in your online marketing and the top 5 opportunities to do so are:

#1 Automate Responses on Chat Platforms

One of the best ways to achieve customer satisfaction is by providing solutions promptly. Automated responses via chatbots are the perfect way to do that.

These chat tools allow your audience to instantly get answers to frequently asked questions without the need to dedicate a huge team sitting at the desktop.

Moreover, these chatbots are quickly learning how to analyze questions and respond as humans would. Of course, quality software must be in place to achieve this but it is well worth the investment instead of hiring and training a full team of customer service representatives to handle the bulk of interactions. This manpower can be put to better use elsewhere.

Instead, you can have a small dedicated team to address inquiries and concerns that the bot cannot solve, which is often already narrowed down to subject matters that humans are better at handling.

#2 Automate Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing has been around for decades and it’s one of those strategies that have gotten better with time and advanced tech.

No matter what stage of the marketing funnel your audience is currently in, there is an email fit for the occasion. Newcomers can have a welcome email sent automatically as they subscribe to your brand, interested audiences can have abandoned cart reminders sent to those who need a little more convincing, and birthday greetings and exclusive offers can be sent to your loyal customers to further strengthen your top of mind.

There are many ways to leverage email marketing strategies and just as many opportunities to automate them. Doing so not only helps in nurturing leads, building loyalty, and creating an impact, but it can ultimately increase your return on investment (ROI).

#3 Automate Your Social Media Posts

Whether you are new in the industry or have been around for decades, having a strong and engaging social media presence is crucial to keep your brand afloat. 

It’s also important to narrow it down and choose channels that your target audience is using so that your marketing efforts can be maximized - there is no need to be on every single app.

While you are busy managing the day-to-day of the business, automation can help keep your socials active. You can schedule posts ahead and have them publish automatically at your most engaging times. Pair this strategy with a chatbot to keep things running smoothly!

#4 Automate Areas of Your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC platforms such as Google Ads already have robust automation features built-in that allow brands to optimize campaigns easily and efficiently.

Some ways you can automate areas of your PPC advertising campaign include streamlining your keyword research and development, performing A/B tests, adjusting bids on target keywords, enabling and pausing campaigns, ad groups, and ad sets, and finally - running reports.

All of this can save you time from manually adjusting campaigns so that you can spend more energy building your strategy.

#5 Automate Your Company’s Workflow

There are several people from differing departments involved in delivering a successful marketing strategy. For this cross-departmental collaboration to run smoothly, all team members must move at the same pace and be on the same page. The best way to ensure this is through workflow automation.

Tools designed for internal communication, easy sharing of data, delegation of tasks, and so on can greatly increase productivity, lessen confusion, and lower the risk of missed opportunities.

This can also help improve the many stages of your brand’s marketing funnel, from nurturing a lead to retaining a customer. By knowing what the next task is via curated workflows in place, tasks such as data entry, following up, scheduling projects, submitting requirements, getting approvals, and the like can flow more easily.

Key Steps For An Efficient Marketing Automation

Before committing to an automated marketing strategy, it is important to undergo four key steps to ensure that the tools are maximized and efficient enough for your needs.

Step 1: Identify Tasks To Automate

Identify what the most repetitive, time-consuming tasks are in all departments and determine if they can be completed with little to no human interaction. Those that fall under this category are what you can apply automation tools on.

Step 2: Select The Right Automation Software

Depending on what tasks you need to automate, choose software that provides for it. Most tools offer a free trial, which is perfect when seeing which is the best fit for your brand.

Step 3: Train Your Team Members

To let automation do its job, your team members must first understand their role. They must know where and when automation fits into their workday and give them the time to test out new systems while taking into account any concerns they may have. After all, these tools are to help them be more productive and motivated.

Step 4: Evaluate

After some time, review how the automation tool worked for your team and brand. Did it make work easier and faster or are there areas that could be improved? Make the necessary adjustments until you find what works.