Marketing Automation: The Many-Headed Beast that Saves You Time

You may have heard of the Hydra, a mythological beast with multiple heads. There was, of course, still only one body. It’s the same with marketing automation. You can use multiple automated marketing tactics to do more in less time and with a smaller team – but it should all work together under the same strategy. 

Image by Andrew Jian

Here are just a few of the tactics you can use in a successful strategy:

• Email Marketing – MailChimp and Constant Contact allow you to quickly build and send eblasts to a large number of recipients. You can set up a series of eblasts to send automatically, and use analytics to track the success of your campaign. 

• Programmatic Bidding – Companies like Rocket Fuel and Simpli.fi use special algorithms to analyze big data that helps them target the most receptive audiences in real time, bidding on ad space around the web more accurately, more quickly.

• Social Media Tools – Hootsuite and similar services allow you to program an entire month’s worth of social media posts in advance. This gives you more time to focus on analytics of the posts and know when to drop in time-relevant content without over-posting. 

We’ll go into more depth about these tactics in the coming week. But remember, while these services are great, you can’t just set them and forget them. Automation can help trim down your to-do list, but you’ll still need to optimize constantly to achieve next-level results in your campaign.

What are some other ways you use marketing automation? Is there any service that you think is the best out there?

Blog Author: Eric Shulman, Former B teamer