Stephanie Donelson

Marketing automation. We love it but there are some things we hate about it too.

Or at least there are some things I hate about it!

Such as if you miss one step of setting up a marketing program the whole thing fails to capture leads appropriately or if the platform you use has an outage you might miss an important social media post or email going out on time. I’ve also been able to start running a marketing report, leave and go make lunch, eat it, and come back to my desk and the report is still a work in progress.

But, even with those flaws and problems, marketing automation does make a world of difference. So, let’s take a closer look at marketing tactics that should be automated!

1. Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the easiest tactics to automate, especially if your database and lead scoring is done in the same automation tool.

You can automate welcome emails when people sign up or subscribe to something, you can automate confirmation emails or event reminders, follow-up emails to people that attended or did not attend webinars, abandoned cart triggers, and so much more.

Lead nurture email series can also be automated to help out your sales team. If you have a trigger or schedule for your emails, you can automate them.

2. Social media marketing

For the most part, social media automation still takes a bit of manual work but less-so than manually doing all of your social media marketing. You can use social media scheduling tools, like Sprout Social, to queue up your content and then post at optimal times. You can also use reposting features to show some love to your older content without manually going through your older blog posts.

Another way to automate social media is through automated direct message responses, like a chatbot. Automated responses can help customers self-serve in solving their issue, but it also allows a human representative to step in if needed.

A lot of brands are also automating comment responses on channels like Twitter and Instagram. While this can be a great way to drive up engagement and put the “social” back in social media, it can also quickly backfire. Automated response systems work by identifying keywords in people’s posts but it doesn’t understand the sentiment. So, someone could use the right keyword but their post is angry or annoyed and the automated system replies with a happy message and smiley emoji.

Yikes.

I’d recommend caution on automated comment responses, unless you know you’re using it to share contact info for customer support to help those annoyed or angry customers who are commenting on social media posts to get your brand’s attention.

3. SMS marketing

Like email marketing, you can automate SMS marketing to reach prospects or customers on their phone with a quick message. Automated SMS marketing is great for event or appointment reminders, notifications about subscription renewals, or even sharing special offers. The great thing with SMS is that it’s easy to add to a workflow and complements other digital channels perfectly.

4. Direct mail marketing

I’m much more inclined to be happy getting a postcard from a company I don’t know than an email. I hate when brands sneak into my inbox and clog up my already overflowing promotions tab in my Gmail. I truly hate it.

But, if I were to get the same offer from an unknown brand in my physical mailbox, I’m okay with that. And that’s where direct mail marketing can be added to your toolkit – and it’s easy to automate.

Just like with email marketing, you can set certain triggers based on customer actions (or inaction, such as not opening an email from your team in three months) that signal it’s time for this piece of direct mail in this workflow or campaign to be sent out.

You can sync your direct mail system to your CRM to better track results based on customer activity or you can always use UTMs in the URLs shared on the piece of direct mail.

5. Content marketing

Finally, we need to look at automating what powers it all: content!

I prefer to look at automating content marketing by automating the final stages of it or its publication. Many CMS tools allow you to schedule out content for a future publish date and then can even push your new content to social channels or RSS feeds so you can set up the workflow and then move onto other tasks instead of manually pushing the content live on the campaign launch date. You can automate publishing of blog content, webinar or event registration pages, core webpages, eBooks, and so on.

I even automate podcast publishing where I upload the episode in advance and then just let it do its thing.

Another common area of looking at automating content marketing is via AI copywriting tools.

Seeing as I’m a content marketer by day and a writer at night, I’m not loving AI writing bots. I love the process of writing! But, I do see how they are beneficial for those that hate writing or if English is a second language. Not to say it doesn’t sometimes read that English is the second language of an AI program. Have you seen the keyword density on some of those AI-written articles? It’s atrocious.

But I digress. I do see the value of AI writing tools for certain people, teams, or companies. These tools can help draft outlines for work, create tons of subject lines for A/B testing, or at least create a starting point so someone who doesn’t love writing isn’t staring at a blank page.

I will say brands should be wary of some of the AI content and still use a human editor as you’re writing for people, not other bots to read your bot-written content. Does AI have its place in content? Sure, but I don’t think it’s at the level of replicating a human writer yet.

Did I miss any marketing tactics that should be automated? Sound off in the comments below!