When we think of digital marketing, it can be hard not to get that little shudder of dread. Just how as a business do you successfully manage various social media platforms, email marketing and online enquires, all while trying to juggle all the other daily tasks of your business? Fear not, by implementing automated digital marketing tools into your business, you can help save yourself time and resources. Automated digital marketing doesn’t need to be a scary prospect, either. In fact, many of us have been making use of these automated tools for years, we just didn’t realise it. Every time you’ve used a mail merge to add the names and/or addresses of your customers to a letter or used a tool to send a newsletter to multiple email addresses at once, you’ve been making use of an automated digital marketing tool.
What is an Automated Digital Tool?
An automated digital tool is just the fancy name for a piece of software that will, ultimately, make certain business tasks feel far easier. These tools can do repetitive and time-consuming tasks for you, such as sending emails, posting to social media and dealing with calls-to-action on your website with very little input on your part. This allows you to instead concentrate on other aspects of your business that need attention, without worrying that you missed a Twitter post or an Instagram picture on World Coffee Day.
What Are the Benefits of Automated Digital Marketing Tools?
These days, implementing automated digital marketing tools has evolved passed the concept of a mail merge. That’s because, with all the smartphones and tablets on the market, tools now have access to a substantial pot of data about their customers. Data that can then be put to good use helping grow your business and customer base with more targeted campaigns in the future.
Other than data collection, here are just some of other benefits you could reap from an automated digital marketing tool:
Time-Saving:
Rather than wasting time trying to post a social media update at exactly 8pm on a Tuesday, when your customer-base is most likely to be scrolling through the likes of Facebook or Twitter, tools can be used to schedule posts and campaigns weeks in advance. Similar tools can also be used to send emails and create a generic reply to enquires.
Multi-Channel Management:
As well as using a tool to schedule posts at a certain day or time, tools like Hootsuite or Hubspot can be used across multiple platforms at once. This means you can use the same tool for Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn at the same time, and even tweak your posts specifically for a certain platform, such as a Twitter character limit.
Unified Brand Voice:
By having all your social media posts or marketing emails in one scheduling tool, it’s very easy for businesses with multiple employees to keep to the same tone of voice. Content creators will see what others have been posting, allowing for language and style to be kept similar. It’s also possible to submit a post for editing before it’s posted, perfect for training purposes.
With all the benefits that an automatic digital marketing tool brings to a business, it’s little wonder that businesses – both large and small – are now researching for tools that could help improve their business marketing. It might feel like hassle in the beginning, but once your tool is up and running, you’ll wonder why you didn’t get it sooner.