Since their introduction marketing automation tools have become an indispensable part of a marketer’s toolkit. Recent technological advances have now made it possible to streamline the marketing process by reducing the amount of time staff need to spend on menial and repetitive tasks, instead allowing them to focus on other, quite frankly more important duties.
Whilst there are many undisputable positives to implementing marketing automation as part of your business, the process shouldn’t be rushed – the tools you pick to help do the job will be essential in ensuring that it is a positive addition to your overall business strategy. The desire to add automation functionality to your business can sometimes overtake the effectiveness with which the tools are used; this can be, in part, due to unfamiliarity with the process or a hastily chosen tool that doesn’t suit the needs of your business.
Here we look at three automation tools that will help make your marketing strategy more effective.
Scoop. It
Social media is now an essential and inescapable part of any marketing strategy. One of the challenges many businesses face is creating and maintaining a consistent brand presence and voice across the many (rapidly growing) social channels, requiring continuous upkeep. For smaller businesses without a dedicated social media manager this can be especially difficult. We like Scoop.It for assisting with this, it is a dedicated service combining content curation and content marketing automation to help manage social media campaigns, track mentions and grow your brand’s profile.
BlueVenn
Customer data can be a blessing and a curse depending on how familiar you are with analytics. If you often feel more like the latter, then it is worth considering the use of a customer data platform like BlueVenn.
BlueVenn, through its application of (more complicated sounding than it really is) multi-channel marketing automation, will help to bring together customer analytics by blending online and offline customer data on an easy to use and understand platform. Things like responses and customer interactions, from any and/or all channels, will flow back to you directly to form a Single Customer View, greatly simplifying the overall process.
ActiveTrail
With so much focus dedicated to lead generation, not many think about the next steps: retaining and nurturing. Doing this manually is simply not time efficient or scalable making it a perfect candidate for automation, reducing chances of human error in the process. Building these relationships can be a lengthy development but one that can be streamlined using a tool such as ActiveTrail. Your audience’s activity will trigger the content drip, helping marketers avoid unnecessary and irrelevant communication. You can tailor the platform to send a range messages based on different user actions like opening email links or visits to specific web pages.
Ultimately, marketing automation will continue to grow and become an even more essential part of many businesses’ operations; getting ahead of the curve and implementing the right tools for you will ensure that your company stays ahead of the competition.
