Some robots aren’t so scary. Some of them can be valuable parts of your digital marketing operations.
When it comes to marketing, there is an endless number of tasks that you can do to get better, and small businesses should always be striving to get better at marketing. This makes marketing a tall task that can become overwhelming, but that’s where the robots come in.
Automated marketing is the term that describes what we’re talking about today and simply put, it’s the idea of using technology (robots) to complete marketing tasks for us so that we don’t have to take the time doing them ourselves. If one of your competitor’s marketing blows you out of the water and you cannot figure out how they have the tie to manage it all, they are likely using automated marketing as their secret weapon.
Check out the ways that you can put robots and automation to work for you in your small business digital marketing efforts.
Newsletters & Email Correspondence
Following up with every customer to encourage additional sales is always a great tactic, but who has the time to personally reach out to everyone on their customer list? Robots, that’s who.
Make it a priority to collect information from your customer when you can – at the very least, their names, emails, and bonus point for their birthday (tell them you’re collecting it to offer them an annual birthday gift – more times than not, people will get excited about this). If they opt in, add these customers to an email nurture program wherein you check in with them regularly to inform them of business news, industry news, and special offers that only those subscribed to the mailing list receive.
A wide-variety of programs to assist you with your email-based customer relations management (CRM) operations, and the good news is that many of them are free for very small businesses and startups with smaller mailing lists.
Do the work to set up one of these programs to automatically send occasional emails (including “Happy Birthday” emails to customers you gathered birthdates from), and the robots will do the rest.
Social Media
If you’re like most of the world, you already spend too much time on social media in your personal life, so the last thing you want is to spend time every day managing it for your business. Like email and newsletter automation, there are many options available to help you automate your social media activities.
These programs can help you schedule posts in advance, post across multiple platforms with one click, and with the help of emerging artificial intelligence tools, even can generate the posts for you.
Further, they can provide valuable analytics information on how your posts are performing, how you can improve, and which hashtags and keywords you should use to increase your reach.
Working with programs like HootSuite and Sprinklr will allow you to unleash robots to manage social media on behalf of your business, so you can enjoy social media in your personal life by posting memes and arguing with old high school friends like you want to (Beware: Never mix the two).
Search Engine Optimization
In the digital age, your website should be one of your most powerful marketing tools, and search engine optimization (SEO) is an integrally important part of ensuring that people can find it. Therefore, it is in the best interest of you and your business to devote time to get SEO right, but to get it right, SEO requires a lot of time and work that many small businesses do not have. Again, it’s time to summon the robots.
In this case, robots can crawl your website to ensure the site is performing well and that you are receiving valuable information on how to improve. Some of these robots come from search engines like Google, and to ensure you’re getting the most out of them, you must sign up for tools like Google Search Central.
Other robots can run constant audits on your site’s content and performance to provide recommendations on which keywords you should focus on, and how to improve your overall content to better position your business in front of your target audience. These robots can be found through sizes like Moz and SEMrush and they will save you a lot of time when it comes to improving your overall website, and ensuring that you rank high up in the search results your customers are looking at.
Copywriting
Want to churn out regular content on your website but don’t have the time to write all of it? That’s right, the robots have your back on this too. While in the past there was reason to be skeptical of the abilities of artificial intelligence when it came to writing, these days AI pumps out text that reads identically to what you would expect from a human…plus, it obviously saves you a ton of time.
These new AI copywriting services offer you more than just blog posts and web page content, they can also write emails, social media posts, and press / public relations releases with ease. Further, if you tell the tools which keywords you would like to have included heavily throughout the text, they can do that as well. Copywriting bots even have options to change the tone of the copy produced and make it more businesslike, technical, or friendly if you want it.
Overall, if you have the money to afford it (and in many cases, it can be very affordable), copywriting AI can be a big timesaver.
Data & Analytics
Making data-driven decisions is important to growing your business in a tactical and strategic way, but knowing what data to gather, and then gathering, organizing, and distilling the data so you can act on it can be a huge undertaking.
These days, tools to collect and analyze data are built into most programs allowing you convenient means to analyze things like your social media activities, website traffic, customer relationship management tasks. These tools can take a little while to learn, but if you understand how to work with them, they can save you a ton of time and provide you valuable insight on future strategy. Here’s a tip when it comes to data and analytics: If you have marketing software or are advertising on a platform (like a social media network), look around for analytics tools and make sure you understand them. To start, make sure you understand Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc analytic systems for your social media, and Google Analytics for your website data. All are free, and all are very helpful.
While many people may still believe that robots are a thing of the future, digital marketers who are well-versed in automation know that the robots are, indeed, already here….and they’re pretty darn helpful! Utilizing web-based bots can improve your operations, help you to analyze your activities in data-driven ways, and can even help create content for you. If you spend a little time researching how bots can help your business, you’ll see a lot of benefit (and as mentioned before, you’ll have more time to share memes and enjoy the web in your personal time).
Enjoy more small business marketing content during Marketing MANIA!
What are your thoughts on marketing automation for small businesses? Are you using any robots to complete marketing activities for your company? Leave your stories, questions, and suggestions in the comments section below to get the conversation started with your fellow LenovoPRO Community members!