2016 March 18 Archive - EXEIdeas – Let's Your Mind Rock

Successful marketing is a full-time job. From the research to the implementation, you often have to commit a lot of payroll hours and a huge budget to get the results you need. Whether you have a small business or you are just struggling with your balance sheet, you may not have the time or the money to invest.Marketing automation can help. By using a suite of tools or one comprehensive software solution, you can streamline the process for a lot of your marketing tasks and get results faster. Not only will you save time and money, but you’ll also get a greater return on your investment.Look for these marketing automation requirements in any software that you use:Analytics:Research takes up a huge chunk of time when putting together and tracking your marketing campaigns, and much of your research comes from analytics.The right automation software will have analytics built right in, saving you time on moving between platforms or dashboards. You can look up information on potential keywords, get data for your website such as unique visitors and bounce rate, and get data on your social media networks such as number of shares or retweets. The breadth of analytics data you are able to get depends on the type of functions that the software provides.Content Curation:Writing content is probably the next most time-consuming task you have as a marketer. But you don’t have to write all the content yourself to keep your channels full.Content curation allows you to find the best content being published in our niche and to share it with your audience, ensuring that they get helpful and entertaining content. You still position yourself as an authority and a valuable resource by providing the content, even if you didn’t write it, and you ensure that visitors stay active on your site and social networks.Marketing automation software helps you find content more easily, monitoring trending stories and topics in your niche. You can even get alerts when new stories are published.Social Media Management:You need to publish on your social media channels multiple times per day to get the most engagement from your followers and the most exposure for your brand. Yet few people have the time to monitor their social networks all day.Marketing automation software allows you to schedule social media posts, respond to comments, and track industry influencers all from one dashboard. You can even monitor multiple networks on the same dashboard.Unlike tools like Hootsuite that only allow you to manage your social networks, marketing automation software allows you to manage social networks and other marketing tasks.Email Marketing:Email marketing is a powerful lead generation and marketing tool. Automation software helps you manage your email marketing including signups, content creation, distribution, and analytics.You can integrate some of the other tools in the software as well, such as linking to social networks in your newsletters, publishing curated content, or incorporating some of the keywords discovered in your research.Using this software helps you to manage your email campaigns in a more timely manner and get more data to help you make decisions that get results.Lead Management:Closely tied to email marketing is lead management. You may get your leads from your email signup list, but you can also get them from social media, blog comments, sales, contest entries, and more.With the right software, you can create an extensive lead database that shows you all the points of contact you have had and allows you to build mini-profiles to glean insights on effective marketing practices. You can then parse the data to build the right lists for each campaign you have, whether it is a sales mailer or a social media outreach. By identifying the right leads for each campaign, you can improve your chances of success.The right software will also include tools for lead scoring so that you know the strength of each lead in your list.Ad Campaigns:Whatever ad platform you use for your campaigns will include tools for helping you manage them. However, by incorporating your ad management into an automation program, you put all your data in one place and can make smarter choices.Marketing automation software allows you to draw on your analytics to create your ad campaigns, and it can manage lead information generated from those campaigns. You can create smarter campaigns that net you a much larger ROI based on the data available.With the right marketing automation software, you can integrate multiple aspects of your campaigns into one central location. That allows your team members to save time on creating and coordinating the campaigns, and it reduces the risk of miscommunication that can lead to costly errors. Everyone is on the same page because they are using the same software, and they are all saving time and saving you money. Your whole team will be much more efficient.