Brainstorming and executing a digital marketing strategy is unfamiliar territory for many small business owners. Even those who are knowledgeable about social media content strategy and creation might not have the time to dedicate to it. They need time-saving social media tips that they can use every day to increase engagement and see success on their social media profiles.
Don’t worry — we’re here to help you tackle your content strategy head on with the time-saving social media tips you need that you can squeeze into your busy schedule!
The first time-saving tip for your social media strategy is to plan your content at the beginning of each month. Take a look at a calendar for the month and think about what you’ll post each week. The calendar doesn’t have to be precise, but it should serve as a tool that holds you accountable. Paper calendars and digital calendars are both very effective — it’s just important to take a look at it every day and make sure you’re on track. If you plan it, you can post it!
When creating your content calendar, think about what your audience would engage with and what will keep them coming back to your pages and in your door.
Related: How to create a content calendar, then post great content
Think about the holidays, seasons and important dates coming up for your business. Then, make sure you have a strategy in place to post content on those days.
In the weeks and months where there aren’t special holidays or events to celebrate, it’s still important to keep posting engaging content.
Remind your followers why they love your business by posting about your products, services and team. Even if you run a seasonal business, posting consistent content throughout the year is still key. For example, if you’re a hotel by the beach, post a beautiful photo of the ocean that says, “Wish you were here!”
Keeping up with your audience is important to stay top-of-mind the next time they want to book with you or buy.
Another time-saving social media tip is using scheduling apps like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. These kinds of apps make it easy for you to schedule content when you have time.
On Twitter, plan to share content from:
Here are some examples:
On Facebook, you can utilize the scheduling function within the posts themselves. Instead of hitting “Share Now” you can hit the drop down and choose “Schedule Post.” Scheduling posts for the week will give you peace of mind. You can be sure that you’re all set for the week giving your followers content they’ll love.
Often, the most time-consuming element about creating content is writing captions. You want to be creative, witty and meaningful all at once, but when you’re ready to post, the words just don’t come easily. Use this time-saving social media tip.
Break out a Google Doc, spreadsheet, Word Document or whatever format you feel most comfortable with. When you have a free moment, use that document and write down some captions so you don’t feel rushed to come up with copy when it’s time to post.
This is also a great way to prevent your content from getting stale. All of your previous captions will be in one document so you won’t repeat yourself and push yourself to come up with fresh ideas.
Let’s say you run an auto repair shop and you want to post about your excellent customer service on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
You have this photo, and you just need the right captions for each platform. Open a new document and start typing them out.
Facebook: What does customer service mean to us? Our knowledgeable team puts your car’s needs first. (Here you can add a link to your website or special you’re running.)
Twitter: Our team wants to hear from you! Your feedback keeps us driving forward. (Here you can add a link to your Yelp or Facebook page) #customerservice #cars #automotive
Instagram: Genuine care. Genuine repair. #customerservice #automotive #local
You’ll want compelling photos to go along with all of these great captions you’re writing. And, you want to be able to find them quickly. One time-saving social media strategy is to create an easily-accessible, up-to-date photo bank so you can always post a great photo on any given day.
Professional photography is ideal for social media, but any camera or smartphone is fine as long as you’re taking good photos. Once you take them, add the best ones to a folder (and have your colleagues add to the folder, too!) Then, you can pull from that folder when you’re in a pinch and need an engaging photo to go with your post. After all, visual posts are more engaging than text-only posts. And, social media posts are more likely to get likes, comments and shares if they have a photo accompanying the text.
Learn more about GoDaddy Social and the professional photo shoot we offer our customers.
Schedule a reminder on a regular basis that will alert you that it’s time to check your notifications, reviews and comments. You can do this through your digital calendar or email platform. Make sure it pops up on your desktop or phone so you don’t miss a beat!
While you’re monitoring your customer service requests, reviews and questions, it’s a good time to respond to your customers as well. When customers reach out to businesses on social media, they’re expecting a quick response. Get to them fast so they don’t feel ignored and choose your competition instead.
Here’s a great review response on Facebook from Morey’s Music Store Inc. in Lakewood, CA:
You can see John (the reviewer) checked back in to see the response, and thanked the business for answering his feedback.
Related: 5 ways to wow with customer service on social media
Being responsive and approachable is a part of managing and protecting your online reputation. People are leaving you comments, writing reviews and asking questions, all anxiously awaiting your response. Think of these interactions as great opportunities to extend your customer service online. You can take these opportunities and really show your audience how much you care about your customers.
Here’s Coffee Times Coffee House in Lexington, KY answering their customer’s question about the ingredients in one of their drinks that they posted on Instagram:
Their caption says, “It is HOT. Cool down with a peach pear apricot smoothie! A perfect refreshing treat.”
User @bmartha asks, “Ingredients?” Coffee Times responds with “@bmartha we use a peach, pear and apricot smoothie base, cut with water and blended with ice!”
Then, you can see how grateful @bmartha was for the response.
Set up a time (i.e. 2 P.M. on Wednesdays) when you do a quick audit of all your platforms and get back to all those who reached out to you.
Bonus: This is also a great time to gather any user-generated content. See what customers are posting about you and grab that content to share on your own channels!
Don’t have any notifications or reviews? Then, use this window of time to follow new people on Twitter and Instagram. Following people is an effective way to get new eyes on your brand and business. When you follow other users, it’s a friendly gesture that says, “I enjoy what you’re sharing, and I hope you follow me back so you can see what I’m sharing too.”
You should also take the time to comment on tweets and Instagram posts from other users. Interact with people in your local area, comment on posts from other businesses you love and engage with any other content that might be relevant to your business.
Anyone who follows the account you interacted with will see your comment. And, they might just give you a follow, too! If you do this on schedule, you will save yourself time in the long run.
We hope you use these time-saving social media tips to stay on schedule and engage new customers.
Engage your customers like never before with GoDaddy Social. We help businesses elevate their online presence on the platforms that matter most. Get started with us here.
The post Time-saving social media tips for business owners appeared first on GoDaddy Blog.
As a web pro or marketer, you’re being pulled in a thousand different directions every day. Between running your business, networking, managing projects and the million other things on your to-do list, marketing can fall down the list of priorities. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Marketing automation is here to help you do everything from keeping your social accounts updated to converting leads into sales for yourself or your clients.
And, it works: four in five users increased their leads by using marketing automation software, and almost as many (77%) saw an increase in conversions.
In this post, we’ll explain what marketing automation is and how it can help you run your business more efficiently. Then we’ll guide you through the steps of setting up your own marketing automation system.
Here are the topics we’ll cover:
Let’s take an in-depth look at how to get started with marketing automation.
Have you ever hopped online to discover your competition seems to be publishing content like clockwork, keeping their social media channels full of rich content and refreshing their landing pages with their newest product?
You can bet they’re using marketing automation to keep in touch with their prospects and relieve some of the workload.
Techopedia defines marketing automation as “the use of software and web-based services to execute, manage and automate marketing tasks and processes. It replaces manual and repetitive marketing processes with purpose-built software and applications geared toward performance.”
If you’re looking for a marketing automation system for your own business or are taking on the task of finding a solution for a client, here some things today’s leading marketing automation programs can help you do:
Each of these functions translates into demonstrable value that makes it worth your time and revenue to invest in implementing a marketing automation system.
Marketing is about building relationships with potential buyers, warm leads and current customers. Each of these groups requires different messaging on different timelines.
Marketers need to segment and target their marketing accordingly, or risk turning off their audiences with irrelevant, badly timed content.
Marketing automation, according to Hubspot, “allows you to nurture your leads through the entire buying process, delivering highly targeted, personalized messages that address their specific barriers to purchase.”
A web design agency might design an automated email workflow that guides a lead through these steps (we based ours on HubSpot’s example):
Step 1: Send an email to a targeted list of contacts, inviting them to download your eBook on search engine optimization (SEO).
Step 2: They immediately receive their eBook, with a note thanking them for downloading your offer.
Step 3: A couple of days later, the people who downloaded your eBook receive an email asking them if they’d like to see a case study of how you were able to significantly increase a client’s ranking — and revenue.
Step 4: You make your case study a downloadable, both so the reader can view it offline and so your salespeople receive a notification about who to follow up with. You’ve now begun to establish your authority on this topic and added a warm lead to your list.
The statistics on marketing automation don’t lie:
Related: What is hypertargeting and how can you use it to grow your business?
When you’ve grown an established customer base and have leads arriving via social media, your website, sales staff and other channels, it can be hard to keep track of everything, effectively monitor your activities and find out which are bringing in the highest ROI (return on investment) for your business.
It might be time to consider marketing automation software if you’re seeing the following signs:
That’s no way to run a business.
But by automating your marketing, you can create and deliver the right message to the right audience when they need it — and in less time, with less stress, than you’re spending now.
When you’re better able to personalize your marketing, respond to leads faster and achieve a higher conversion rate, your profits will rise.
Related: Upselling and cross-selling techniques for online stores
There are a few steps involved and factors to consider before you start to automate your marketing. After all, marketing automation is supposed to save you time and frustration, but using the wrong platform or trying to automate the wrong activities will leave you over budget and scratching your head.
To prevent that, make these considerations before you invest and onboard in any system:
Traditionally, marketing automation has been associated with email marketing and social media marketing.
But with marketing technology moving at a pace faster than anyone could have predicted a decade ago, the scope of activities these platforms handle is astounding.
While more content is being created and published than ever before for exceedingly jaded audiences, the need to ensure our marketing is data-driven, targeted and efficient has never been greater.
Luckily, we have a diverse set of tools in our arsenal to help us automate a wide range of marketing activities, including:
The activities you’ll automate will depend on your (or your client’s) business and services, your team’s goals and other factors unique to you.
The results you achieve with any marketing automation system (or the campaigns you’ll build with it) will only be as good as the goals you define going in.
Before signing up for any system, set SMART marketing goals (Specific, Measurable, Aspirational, Realistic and Time-bound) that are in line with your overall business objectives.
Your business’s goals might be to:
As for how to map those goals to marketing priorities, the top five most important strategic goals of a marketing automation strategy for those polled by Invesp are as follows:
These are general goals — ideas you might want to consider for your own efforts.
Of course, as Salesforce Pardot mentions, it’s critical to talk to your own sales teams to identify their needs, requirements and metrics, and discover where the gaps are in your current marketing.
You need an audience that’s paying attention to what you’re sending out, then engaging with your content. You need to know who your best customers are.
Don’t forget to research how your competitors and others in your industry are using marketing automation to achieve their own goals. You’ll also want to set long-term goals; you need a flexible marketing automation platform that you can adapt to your business as it grows or changes.
Related: 25 ways freelancers can generate an abundance of qualified leads
There’s a lot of information out there about marketing automation. Ensure you’re working with the most current facts about leading platforms since features and pricing can sometimes change.
You might want to start by doing a search for “small business marketing automation,” restricting your results to the last year to reveal current reviews, roundups, etc.
Here are some criteria to consider when shopping for a platform, courtesy of TechFunnel and Marketing Automation Insider:
The cost of marketing software can vary greatly in price, from basic plans provided by small vendors to a full suite of solutions from software giants. Consider upfront implementation, training and ongoing costs, as well as fees for any features you may need later.
There’s a lot of diversity among marketing automation software — one program might be best for email marketing, but another may handle social media marketing exceptionally well.
While some marketing automation platforms are targeted to freelancers and micro-businesses, others are more enterprise-friendly.
Maybe you only want to automate certain processes, so an all-in-one suite wouldn’t make sense for you.
Whether you want to grow your lead database, nurture leads or build relationships with contacts, it’s important to know your business and marketing goals so you can find the right system for you.
Which software solutions do you already have? Chances are, you’ll want at least some of them to play nice with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or CMS (Content Management System).
Bonus: Taking inventory of your current programs will help you avoid paying for redundant solutions (e.g. if your new marketing automation tool provides built-in analytics and reporting, you can get rid of any that offer this function exclusively).
Marketing Automation Insider lists other factors that might impact your decision, including:
Related: 10 email automation tools for online business success
The importance of your CRM list can’t be overstated. Without one, you don’t have any leads or customers to engage.
Leading marketing automation systems either have their own CRMs or provide integrations with dedicated CRM tools like Salesforce.
Established freelancers, marketers and web pros use a CRM to put an expected, predictable return on your sales activities, or growth with current customers. This way, you keep track of your prospects, followers and potential customers via software instead of on social media, through email, or worse, in your head.
Without a CRM, you don’t have a way to reach customers in your own space (corporate entities own social media platforms and can change their terms and conditions any time they want), so the integrity of your system and data is critical. As this article on FinancesOnline (a Saas/B2B software reviews platform) explains, modern CRMs help you understand your customer, get important insights from customer data, discover new sales opportunities, generate reports quickly, and more.
Your database might hold in-depth information about your valuable contacts, including:
Related: 5 best practices for customer data management
After you’ve spent some time learning about marketing automation and the various platforms available, you’ll discover that setup can seem daunting at first, but there are many similarities regardless of the option you choose. Though they may have unique configuration paths, there are some core components you’ll want to pay attention to:
Not all leads are equal in terms of quality, because not everyone in your database is ready to buy today. While some are customers, others are warm leads, lost opportunities or considering their options.
When we score leads, we apply “a numerical value to a prospective consumer based on who they are and how they interact with your brand.”
Scoring (or rating) your leads helps you determine who needs more nurturing and who can be referred to your sales staff.
Leads can be scored by two parameters: demographics and interactions.
You can make a reasonable guess at how ready someone is to convert by finding out which pages they’ve viewed on your website, and how often.
For example, someone who’s looked at a pricing page or case study would be closer to buying than someone who read a blog post. You’re more likely to be a serious contender for visitors who have returned to your site multiple times over a few weeks than for those who have only visited sporadically over the last six months.
You can also segment your contact list based on people’s characteristics such as job title or location, so you can create and send relevant messages to specific types of people.
For example, maybe you only want to target founders or executives of startups within a certain state or city.
Using both basic and advanced lead scoring techniques will help you identify and spend your time on your most qualified leads. No more wasting time on unqualified or unsuitable prospects!
Related: Using customer segments to build lasting relationships
Tracking codes let you find out how well your email campaigns and website are working together. By using tracking codes with Google Analytics, you can see not only how many contacts clicked a link to visit your website, but also find out:
To get started, set up your Google Analytics ID, tracking codes and property number and paste them in the appropriate areas of your site.
Now that you’ve found your marketing automation system, learned about lead scoring and set up your tracking codes, it’s time to create a form. In this example, we’ll use a newsletter subscription form that will later be included in our workflow.
You may want to set the form as not required, given some people might not be comfortable sharing personal information.
The same will be to be true for company name and Twitter handle, but we’ll still want to match up those items in our system, so we’ll include them here as well.
To help encourage full submissions, you can choose to include a quick description noting, “To qualify for premium content, please complete all fields.”
Save the newly created form in HTML so you can eventually wire it into your website’s forms.
With any marketing automation field, forms are built in. Some important forms include email templates, welcome notes and confirmation forms.
Gravity Forms is a helpful form-assist tool for WordPress that collects data up front and passes it to the marketing automation software. This can be helpful if the service were to go down for any reason while someone was trying to subscribe.
Related: Qualifying leads with WordPress forms
Triggers and actions are two cornerstones of a comprehensive marketing automation workflow. You’ll hear these terms a lot when it comes time to set up your system.
A trigger is an action a customer takes (like filling out a form, subscribing or unsubscribing to a list, clicking a link, visiting a page, etc.) that launches subsequent actions in your marketing or sales workflow. They enter your automation and proceed through your process.
Imagine if you didn’t have to remember to send an email to that website visitor who needed a quote, or shift a customer who’s downloaded your case study into your list of warm leads.
This article by digital marketing agency Adviso identifies three types of triggers, including time-based, action-based and behavior-based:
Time-based triggers
Also sometimes called Events, these are date or time-specific, important instances that are unique to each customer and can be used to connect with your customer.
For example, maybe one of your regular customers celebrates a birthday, anniversary or special day (your customer would have provided you with this information). This is a time-based trigger and you might use it to send them an email or text message with a discount on their next purchase.
Action-based triggers
These are based directly on an action taken by a visitor or user, like submitting a form, visiting a specific web page, clicking on a link in an email, or adding an item to their cart on your eCommerce site.
Depending on the buyer journey you lay out for this visitor, you can create automations designed to convert them into a customer, nurture the lead, engage them, retain them as a customer, or have your sales team follow up.
Behavior-based triggers
These are more complex than action-based triggers in that they’re based on a series of actions (or non-actions).
For example, if a customer changes a value in a personalized field, enters their birthday in another tool that’s integrated with your platform, or a tag is added to their contact profile, they’ve set off a behavior-based trigger.
There’s a science to identifying the right triggers to send your visitor along the buyer’s journey so they convert successfully. Get them right and you can develop a solid relationship with your contact, and ensure your marketing is personalized to their interests.
Actions are the tasks you do daily to execute your marketing strategy.
This helps you save time that you can dedicate to activities that create more value for you and your customers.
Actions might include sending an email, lead scoring on targeted contacts, tagging contacts, moving them from one list to another, copying them to a different list, assigning or removing custom fields on contact profiles, or defining a specified amount of time to wait (e.g. two days) before taking an action like sending an email.
Workflows are the foundation of marketing automation because they let you convert those contacts — the people sitting in your database — into customers.
Before your leads make that all-important decision to buy from you, they need to be engaged and nurtured through the stages of your marketing and sales funnel.
To do that, you need to map out your communication with the user and send them the information they need, when they need it, in the context that makes the most sense.
Related: How to nurture your leads with email marketing
Your workflows will unfold based on the triggers you set up earlier.
You can have workflows to welcome subscribers, re-engage inactive contacts, retain customers, and even nurture buyers who hold specific roles (e.g. decision maker, influencer) so you can differentiate your messaging based on audience.
One of the pervasive myths about marketing automation is that it’s impersonal. On the contrary, you can use the insights you glean from a customer’s behavior and submitted profile data to create a sequence of emails tailored to their needs.
Uberflip and Drip have some great examples of workflows to get you started.
Here are some steps you might take to build a solid workflow, courtesy of Campaign Creators, Synectics Media and Moz:
What actions do you want your audience to take? Do you want them to read a blog post? Purchase an item? Sign up for a free trial? A successful workflow guides them to this destination.
Think about the details of your interactions. How do visitors become part of your workflow — by visiting a page? Subscribing to a list? Filling in a form? Downloading a resource?
This is one of the most important steps, since it’s where you’ll plan the buyer’s journey your customer takes, from their first interaction with your site to reaching your goal and converting them.
Step up to your whiteboard (or use your favorite mind mapping software). Starting with your first trigger, plan your email branches (it’s common to change your mind a lot throughout the planning process, so buckle in).
Synectics Media suggests a default naming convention of Email #1 – Working Topic Name. You can then branch from there, sending the person Email #2 – Working Topic Name if they take your desired action. If they do not take action, send them Email #1a – Different Topic Name.
Include direction and key marketing objectives, and make it easy enough for your team to understand. Include details like how much time should pass between your first and second emails.
Related: 6 tips for moving your customer through the sales funnel
Use lead scoring techniques and segment your lists according to your goals and priorities. Who do you want to reach first? What message will motivate them?
These include forms, lists, landing pages, etc. Ensure they’re connected to one another and track them so you can measure their success. You might want to hire an experienced copywriter for this step.
How you set up your workflow will depend on which marketing automation software you choose. However, most modern platforms have comprehensive documentation, tutorials, how-to videos, blog posts, etc. and offer support if you get stuck.
A word of caution: Be patient and prepare to make some minor tweaks. Your workflow, campaign assets and content may not end up in your software exactly as planned, or you may discover you need to add or delete a few triggers or pieces of content.
You’ve worked hard to choose a platform and build your workflow. Now it’s time to rigorously test it to ensure your links, tags and content are in working order and troubleshoot any hiccups. The testing phase includes a few steps:
Pro tip: Best practice is to set plenty of time aside to figure out exactly what’s going on with your marketing automation workflow and system.
Mission critical: Create a new email address for testing purposes, since using yours or a team member’s could jeopardize this phase if the address has been used in other parts of the process, advises Synectics Media.
Easy solution: Create a Gmail account (i.e. email+testing@gmail.com) and enroll this into your workflow, setting all the delays to a few minutes instead of days or weeks.
You don’t have to guess how your campaign will look in a recipient’s email client. You can test it and review your content, links and buttons from your subscribers’ perspective. You can also send your test to your team members to find out how your email looks on different devices, in different email clients.
Each marketing automation system is different, but there should be an option to enter your test email address under Settings within your platform. Add it and click Send Test.
It’s important that your campaign looks perfect on both desktop and mobile.
Fortunately, your system should easily let you preview your email in both desktop and mobile, using both HTML and plain text. Some systems such as ActiveCampaign offer Inbox Preview, which shows you how your email will appear across popular email clients such as Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook and more.
Create a copy of your campaign and send it to a test list. Try team members willing to review it with a critical eye to catch any errors or omissions you may have missed.
It’s useful to test with popular email clients such as the ones above here.
It allows you to test everything, including tags, content and links, and capture contact actions within the reporting function in your marketing automation system.
If your workflow doesn’t unfold as expected during the testing phase, fix any problems and try again.
This is where all your hard work comes to fruition. It’s time to launch and start welcoming visitors, subscribers and customers!
Don’t just set it and forget it. Analyze how users are engaging with your workflow, then edit and refine as needed. What’s working well? Are you achieving the goals you identified in Step No. 1? Where are people getting lost? User data can reveal invaluable insights to act on.
If you’re a marketer just getting started with marketing automation for you or your clients, you’ll likely need a user-friendly, budget-friendly solution you can implement with minimal hassle. We believe these fit the bill. Bonus: All of these integrate with WordPress.
Editor’s note: Any costs mentioned below were accurate at the time of writing; visit each site for the most up-to-date pricing information.
For B2B marketing automation, we highly recommend ActiveCampaign, as it integrates exceptionally well with WordPress. Bringing email marketing, marketing automation, a sales CRM and messaging into one cohesive and easily usable platform, this robust tool offers solutions for everyone from bloggers to enterprise-level customers. Plans range from $9 to $229 per month, starting at 500 contacts.
Whether you want to create a landing page in a few clicks, organize leads, get insights on your marketing, create invoices or automate emails, Infusionsoft has it all. Plans range from $200 a month for 2,500 contacts to $400 a month for 10,000 contacts.
Pardot is often considered a gold standard in B2B marketing automation for manufacturing, education, healthcare, IT and other industries. With a rich feature set and user-friendly interface, the platform offers email marketing, lead management, sales alignment, lead generation and ROI reporting features to build well-crafted marketing campaigns and workflows.
Pardot is geared to Salesforce users (as it integrates seamlessly). The price will be a drawback for many small businesses, with plans ranging from $1,250 to $4,000 per month for 10,000 contacts.
Ideal for small- to medium-sized businesses, Agile CRM is an all-in-one solution that lets you automate your marketing, sales and services on one platform. Loved by users for its clean UI and affordability, it’s a young system — not as established as some others but still has a lot to offer. Plans range from free (for 1,000 contacts and companies) to enterprise level as low as $47.99 per user per month.
GoDaddy’s email marketing software is a great option for beginners just getting started in marketing automation and who want to focus on email. Its integrations with your GoDaddy website are a huge bonus. Features and functionality are easy to set up, and support is there every step of the way to help with any issues. Plans range from $9.99 per month for up to 500 subscribers to $29.99 per month for up to 5,000.
There’s much to learn when it comes to successfully planning, setting up and launching your new marketing automation system. By identifying your requirements, your customers’ needs, doing your research and taking time to properly implement, you can add an essential tool to your marketing arsenal.
Let’s recap what we covered in this guide:
Don’t forget that automation doesn’t have to stop at marketing and lead acquisition — you can also leverage automation to create a remarkable experience for your new clients.
Happy automating!
This article includes content originally published on the GoDaddy blog by Christopher S. Penn.
The post Marketing automation — Guide to getting started with a marketing automation system appeared first on GoDaddy Blog.
