Automation is Your Best Friend

The antique shop on the corner is really neat. You go through the door, and on your left there’s a 1910 Victrola, beautifully preserved. Overhead are some ladies’ hats and clothing from local merchants, proudly handmade. Everything in the store calls you back to a simpler time when craftsmanship counted and automated machines weren’t stamping out cheap, shoddy products by the millions.

While the stroll back through time might be fun, don’t let that yearning for yesteryear fool you into thinking automation and quality can’t go hand in hand. Automation frees up time, money and resources so you can concentrate on your business. It means one less hat you have to wear during the course of a busy day.

Here are just a few of the tools you can use:

Content Sharing. You know you need great content, but let’s face it— much of the content we see online is recycled. How do you find useful content to share without scouring the Internet? Scoop.it might just be a solution. Pick a topic, and the program will find you relevant updates about the topics you follow, giving you plenty of interesting articles to pass on to your audience.

Automated social sharing. You want to have updated content available for your audience at a time when it’s convenient for them to view it. You can’t be online 24 hours a day though. With a tool like Buffer, you don’t have to be. Buffer works with all the big players in social media, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. If you want to share something, all you have to do is pick a time zone and then schedule it. You can even add posts to a queue, and they’ll be sent out at an appointed time. Check out Missinglettr for automated, timed blog post sharing on social media too.

Monitoring. If you had the time and resources you could monitor the Internet for every mention of your brand. That way you’d be on hand to quickly respond to any questions or complaints and maybe even enjoy a compliment or two. Tools like Mention, Awario and others allow you to do just that. These programs will send you alerts when your brand is mentioned, plus many of them will break down where the mention was found and who it came from.

Email campaigns. If you’re planning any type of email based marketing, such as creating newsletters or building a subscriber list, behavior-based automation is a must. With automated services, you can manage your subscriber lists, set up automated emails and then monitor the results to optimize future campaigns.

Automation is a great way to kick your marketing campaign into high gear without it dominating your schedule and your life. So let the programs do the work for you, and save the ‘vintage’ for the antique shop.