7 Daily Marketing Tasks You Can Automate
As a general practice, you should take note of those repetitive daily tasks that you face at the start of each day. It pays dividends over the long-term to automate those tasks either through outsourcing or software.
For the purpose of this post, I’m going to stick to marketing tasks, but keep i mind that this manner of thinking could (and should) apply to anything in life!
1. Nurturing new leads into sales
It’s not enough to build a list. Any seasoned marketer knows that new sign ups who enter into the top of the funnel need to be guided towards a sale. In other words, not everyone is ready to buy from day one.
You can use tools like Infusionsoft or Ontraport to automate this process and make sure that your new sign ups aren’t left hanging. For a deeper look at how Infusionsoft works, take a look at this review on TrenchWorthy.
2. Curating Social Media Content
The best way to keep your followers engaged is to keep giving them fantastic content to read that solves their problems or inspires them toward excellence. But it can take a lot of time to find and then schedule these great articles.
Use Buffer daily on your mobile device to find and schedule great content all with a couple of clicks. Buffer does a great job at finding the content and then a real human being actually categorizes the articles into categories like “marketing” or “life hacks”. All you have to do is see if it’s a good fit for your followers and hit “schedule”.
3. Use Canned Responses in Gmail
Do you have an outreach email that you use to contact bloggers or journalists in your niche? Do you find that you are writing the same types of responses to prospects over and over again? Use the canned responses feature in gmail labs (it’s free) to pre-record certain messages that can be added to your message body with the click of a button.
4. Manage Social Media from your mobile device
Apps like HootSuite will let you manage multiple social media profiles all from one place on your mobile device. This makes it easier to participate in conversations related to your business and even discover new conversations.
5. Monitor Your Brand Mentions
The best way to stay engaged with potential prospects is to find out whenever someone is talking about your business. Use a tool like Mention.com to know whenever someone drops your name around the web. You can set up an alert to email you whenever this happens, or to simple email a digest of alerts at the end of the day.
Then you can find the comment, tweet, or article that dropped your name and participate with a helpful response. It beats typing your name into Google every few minutes!
6. Outsource Content Research
If you find yourself spending a lot of time doing research for new blog posts or other content pieces, you can start outsourcing that grunt work for pennies on the dollar. Use a service like eLance or oDesk to find a worker that will gather figures in a spreadsheet, find reference links, etc.
Prices for great workers start at around $2-4/hour and it can save you loads of time. You can also request that the same worker format your blog post when it is complete to save some more time there.
7. Set up Google Analytics Dashboards
If you are tracking key metrics on your site using Google analytics, you can actually create a dashboard that emails you stats on a daily basis. Instead of manually pulling in these reports every day, just make one dashboard and schedule it to send to yours or a client’s email address.
It might take a little time upfront, but having a nice, at-a-glance view of your site’s top metrics is invaluable and will save loads of time in the long-run.