If you are a marketer, these scenarios may sound familiar to you:
- You always feel there is more to do
- There is always a need for more brainstorming
- You are in constant worry of not proofreading your blogs, web pages, and ad copies enough
- You are anxious about staying up to date with current events for real-time campaigns
- You often look at marketing data for better planning, but it is not enough
- You want to speak to your customers more to understand them better
- and so on
To sum it up, you need more time to do your marketing right.
Why not leverage marketing automation to automate the daily mundane tasks in marketing so you can buy more time for what really matters?
Yes, you might already have a marketing automation tool, but are you using it productively? Is it saving your team any time?
According to Email Monday, 51% of marketers use some form of marketing automation, while the other half still continue to do it all manually. Are you among the latter?
Then you must consider automating these five basics, laborious processes in marketing in 2023 to save your team some time.
5 Marketing Processes You Need to Automate in 2023
Improve the productivity and efficiency of your marketing programs and campaigns by automating one or more of the following marketing processes in 2023.
Lead Nurturing
Nurturing your leads is one of the most critical marketing functions to push your leads further down the marketing funnel. Lead nurturing engages your lead further and further by sharing interesting and relevant content with them.
But if you choose to do this manually per lead, it will take you forever to complete one single cycle of lead nurturing.
CRM and marketing automation tools bring capabilities onboard to simplify your lead nurturing process. Cloud-based tools such as Pardot, Mailchimp, Active Campaigns, and Marketo help you build lead nurturing programs that engage your leads and capture timely data on your leads' actions to make your campaigns more effective.
Hubspot is one of the most widely used marketing platforms for lead generation and nurturing. Learn how you can do more with Hubspot so you can focus more on strategy and creative campaigns.
Lead or User Onboarding
The onboarding process is one of the most critical processes built by a marketing organization. It is the first exchange between a contact and a brand once they subscribe and become a lead or customer in your marketing system.
Sending out welcome emails, sharing helpful training and educational content, segmenting into specific groups are some of the tasks involved in the onboarding process.
Managing these tasks manually while creating copy and graphics consumes a lot of bandwidth for you and your team.
Use marketing automation tools to create simple yet effective automation workflows for your lead and user onboarding activities. You can also templatize these workflows for the future and use them for other similar processes.
This will help you save time and effort and eliminate the risk of manual errors in your onboarding process.
Social Media Marketing
Did you know that automating social media posts and ads can save you more than 6 hours per week? That's right.
Consistency is an essential factor in getting above-average engagement rates on social media. But consistency means more creative posts, and more posts need more time.
With social media automation, you can take away the tedious part of publishing multiple posts per day per week. You can use social media automation tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and SproutSocial to schedule multiple posts in advance on the day and time that works best for you.
Social media tools also provide automated competitor analysis and reporting of your social media metrics. Another thing taken care of for you by automation!
Content research and planning
Content marketing is an extensive function that includes strategy, research, planning, SEO, content creation, promotion, and performance analysis.
Granted, not everything in content marketing is suitable for automation, but there are specific processes such as research for content and content planning that can be automated.
Research is one of the most time-consuming tasks of content marketing. Using tools such as BuzzSumo, and Ahrefs, you can generate relevant and popular content ideas for your marketing plan. Whether it is social media, blog, or video content, these automation tools help you get topic ideas quickly.
All you have to do is share relevant keywords and specify your target audience, and voila, you have topic ideas for the entire month!
Sales alignment and handoffs
Bridging the gap between sales and marketing is one of the biggest challenges business leaders face across the globe. Yet, the alignment of these two 'rival' teams is critical to the success of an organization.
Communication between sales and marketing is essential to push leads further down the sales pipeline. Automating this communication through email notifications and alerts can simplify the process, save time, and eliminate manual errors.
For example, when a lead becomes an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), your automation system alerts the sales team via an email notification to connect and follow up with this MQL. This way, your marketing team does not need to intervene, and the handoff of the lead is straightforward.
Automating sales and marketing collaboration can also foster transparency and accountability, avoiding conflicts.
Conclusion
Setting up marketing automation for your processes can seem daunting at the beginning. And you are not alone - 61% of companies say the implementation process of marketing automation was complicated for them. To make the transition easier for you, talk to one of our process experts and get consultation on choosing the right automation tool and evaluating the best processes for automation.