Automation is a trend that is undoubtedly going to continue transforming our lives as we go into the third decade of the 21st century. A lot of the conversation regarding the process of automation revolves around the fact that it may take away jobs from people, leading to a large-scale unemployment crisis. While this may be true for manufacturing, construction, or even retail jobs, automation is not all that bad.

Creative fields, for example, may stand to gain a lot from automating certain processes. These kinds of jobs require human ingenuity and thinking processes that machines are simply incapable of as of right now. For creatives, automation can lighten a lot of their workload while at the same time allowing them to focus on more demanding and important tasks.

If you’re a business owner, you should know that there are a lot of beneficial marketing automation tools at your disposal in 2021. According to customer relations experts from getweave.com, implementing them is one of the best ways to grow your business and expedite your advertising efforts. These types of tools are most useful in such areas as improving email marketing campaigns or increasing the efficiency of cooperation between your sales and marketing departments.

Getting into marketing automation solutions can be pretty confusing, especially when you consider that some of these tools can actually end up hurting your business. Keep on reading this article to achieve a better understanding of marketing automation tools and what areas they can help you with.

Social Media

Operating your company’s social media accounts is one of the most significant aspects of running a business in the 21st century, regardless of whether you’re in charge of a large corporation or a small business that is just making its first moves on the market. Social media marketing can make or break your reputation, which is why you should be particularly careful when implementing automation in this particular area. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to do it, though.

If done correctly, automating some of your company’s social media activities can be incredibly helpful. Namely, it will allow your marketing team to take care of the important stuff, such as creating quality copy for upcoming posts or devising a marketing strategy for the next quarter ahead of time.

Some of the best social media marketing automation tools include:

• Post scheduling features. That way, your employees won’t have to worry about posting at the right times, nor will you ever miss a post that you were supposed to publish a long time ago.
  
• Chatbots. Having a chatbot on platforms such as Messenger or WhatsApp will increase your response times, solve some of your customers’ most common problems much faster than a human, and redirect the difficult questions to a marketing representative.
  
• Analytics. Sure, Facebook’s own analytics tool for businesses is decent enough, but investing in proper marketing automation software will bring it to the next level, helping you extend and retain your reach much more efficiently.

Email Campaigns

Digital marketing is not all about Facebook, Instagram, and similar platforms, although it may seem like it sometimes. If you truly want to reach the most customers possible, your content should reach people via email and traditional websites with blog posts as well. Marketing software that can automate your email processes will free your employees from having to do daily repetitive tasks, such as manually sending out various newsletters to hundreds of email addresses. It will enable them to focus on creating premium quality content instead.

Customer Relationship Management

When talking about automation and CRM, it is crucial to stress the fact that this does not entail actual interactions with your customers. With the exception of pre-programmed chatbots that can answer the simplest of questions, machines don’t tend to do very well when it comes to relating to actual human beings. What they can do, however, is provide a clear, easy-to-use interface for your employees that will allow them to reach the source of your customer’s query and answer it professionally in no-time.

Website Improvement

The best marketing automation software will also provide you with a drag-and-drop interface for creating and managing your website, landing pages in particular. It will help you save money on web designers and IT staff, as well as allow our marketing team members to realize their creative vision for each page better.

Using marketing automation to track and edit your online presence can also work wonders when it comes to tracking down the customer journey, starting with the moment they click on your ad and ending with your client retention efforts. Real-time tracking of these events can help you come up with better, more effective strategies for the future.

Generating and Catering to Your Leads

Lead management can be a real pain sometimes. Although you can divide them up into groups and devise marketing strategies based on that, the truth is that all leads are individuals with varying tastes and responses to marketing initiatives. A marketing automation solution can help you adopt an individual approach to lead generation and management, taking a lot of the weight off your marketing and sales team members’ shoulders!

The Bottom Line

Marketing automation for small businesses is one of the best things you could do to expedite your marketing efforts and free up your employees’ time to focus on creating content and more advanced lead nurturing. If you use marketing automation correctly, you’re going to be able to grow your small business much faster and stay in constant contact with your customers without too much additional effort on your part.

Remember that before you decide on a particular marketing automation platform, you should familiarize yourself with its reviews and user opinions so as not to end up with a subpar product that will harm rather than benefit your marketing efforts.