How To Automate Your Business

3 Digital Marketing Aspects You Should Automate

In our world today, time management is business owners strive to achieve! One way to do this is knowing how to automate your business. In this contributed article, we will look at 3 digital marketing aspects that you should automate.

Digital marketing is vital to your business, but do you ever find yourself living your life in reaction to social media notifications or emails, like Pavlov’s Dog, jumping to attention each time you hear a “ding” from a notification?

The digitally connected world we live in can be incredibly harmful to living a balanced and successful life; particularly in terms of our emotional well-being and social lives.  One of the best ways to ensure a more balanced life is to automate your digital marketing by creating a network of an automated process, systems, and apps to automatically take care of marketing tasks such as following up on emails, posting to facebook, and so on.

This will not only free up physical time, it will give you peace of mind, and a sense of certainty that things are being taken care of – without you having to always be in an alert state of reaction.  Essentially, it will allow you the time you need to be calm, focused, and responsive rather than reactive.

If we think about a brick and mortar business for a moment, a type of business that is less able to automate their processes – even a traditional store or restaurant will make use of a point of sale system in order to automate their accounting processes, and save time with tasks such as stock taking and even reordering items.

Tim Ferris in his New York Times Bestselling Book, The Four Hour Workweek talks about the importance of automation in our work lives so that we can focus on managing our business in the sense of working ‘on’ the business rather than working ‘in’ the business.  Whilst Tim, along with several other millennial productivity experts urge us to go one step further and outsource our tasks to a virtual assistant; ideally, someone living in India or Asia on the basis of cost – this article looks at automation as it relates to technological systems.

In this article we’re going to look at automating a number of the most time consuming digital marketing tasks the majority of business owners contend with; things such as being inundated by emails, following up on sales leads, and managing our social media presence.

1. EMAIL MARKETING

There are plenty of time-starved business owners frantically sending out an email to a customer thanking them for their order and letting them know when it will be shipped.  The key point with automation is that it frees your time to be working ‘on’ the business at a strategic level rather than ‘in’ the business where you are wasting your time doing the same job as a low-level employee.  You could use something like MailChimp in order to start automating your emails at very low cost.

2. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Managing your social media marketing campaigns can be extremely time-consuming.  Many business owners consider hiring a virtual assistant in order to manage this time-consuming task even though there are several free apps such as HootSuite and Buffer that can help you automate this task.

3. MARKETING FUNNELS

Your marketing funnel is made up of several stages through which browsers (who will hopefully go on to become customers) move from first awareness of your brand or website through to making a purchase.  A marketing funnel is essentially the process of converting a visitor or browser into a paying customer, and sites such as Clickfunnels can automate this process in a very efficient and visually engaging way.

Images courtesy of Pixabay.

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