Marketing automation is essential for every business. It’s not just a nice thing that adds to your productivity; it’s absolutely necessary and there’s one simple reason for that – It takes over routine menial tasks for you so that you can focus your time and energy on more important things.
Saving Time for “Thinking Work”
As a business owner, what should you be spending your time doing on a day-to-day basis? Your primary role is to study your market, and plan and execute business strategies and tactics. In other words, it’s “thinking” work.
However, when you’re bogged down with simple routine tasks that anyone (or any machine) could do for you, you’re losing that precious thinking and organizing time. The hours you could be devoting to really careful consideration of your brand image or mind mapping your overall marketing strategy, or analyzing the competitive landscape are wasted away on busy work.
Get Routine Tasks off Your Desk
In addition to planning and organizing, another important part of improving your business is building relationships. You need to be actively engaged and interacting with the members of your target market, whether on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or through face-to-face offline events or online webinars. You have an entire cast of other employees, financial, legal, marketing and sales people to work with, in addition to your customers.
Relationship building, like planning and organizing, takes time. Also, relationship building tasks cannot be done by a software program, an outsourced worker across the planet, or a nifty gadget. This is work that you and only you can do.
If you can successfully automate routine tasks and get them off your to-do list, you can spend more time interacting with members of your target market, and the benefits to this are priceless.
Automated Tools Are Sometimes Better Than You
The main reason you need to automate is that it gets rid of simple tasks and frees up your time. However, there is another good reason to automate your marketing. Sometimes, automated programs can do things better than you do. For example, an automated analytics program can take in a great deal of data and deliver relevant metrics to you. If you were to analyze this data yourself, it would not only take a great deal of time, but it wouldn’t be as precise as the analysis a formula or algorithm can do.
In fact, there are some tasks that you can’t do on your own. You can’t do them at all without automation. An example here would be email marketing. You simply can’t build, maintain and market to an email list all by yourself through your usual email address. You need an automated program to carry out email marketing.
Your website can become a full-time job if you are not careful. Updating, adjusting, backing-up, analyzing and keeping everything current and up-to-date takes time. Time which you should not be spending when automation can do for you.
Getting Started with Automation
If you’ve shied away from automation until now because of the technological barriers, don’t. It’s very easy to get started. Start by automating one task at a time, and then once you’re comfortable and seeing results, move on to the next. Soon, you’ll see how automation saves you time for more important things and makes a huge impact on your business growth.
During this series of posts this week, I will be sharing my thoughts and recommendations on several ways to automate your marketing, which tools to consider for various tasks, and lay out the costs that you should expect to accomplish these goals. I should point out that the entire 9+ years I have been writing here at Fill the Funnel, I have been sharing tools, tips, training and technology to do this.
The end of the year is rapidly approaching. Wouldn’t it be great to go into the new year with a plan to automate your business by doing what I have been telling my readers and audiences for years:
“TECH THE TEDIOUS AND AUTOMATE THE REPETITIVE”
Important Note
I want to be clear about my focus with this post and the rest of this five-part series. I will be sharing ideas and strategies for small businesses and even individuals. You will learn what is capable today, with the explosion of tools, technology and cloud services. If you run a medium or large organization, you have a budget for the massively expensive marketing automation platforms like Pardot, Oracle, Marketo or Act-on. You will benefit from from some fresh thinking on the subject but the scale and budget you require is beyond the scope of this series.
