By Mary Hanula, Senior Director of Marketing, Eulerity

From the outside looking in, it’s easy to assume that digital marketing is just throwing together a couple of Facebook posts or typing a few emails. However, once you know what actually goes into a digital marketing strategy and the efforts your team must make on a daily basis, you realize it includes:

• Researching market trends
• Optimizing content for search engines
• Investigating the best timelines for content productions
• Understanding numerous marketing avenues, including different social media channels, in-person marketing efforts, banner ads, and more
• Establishing omnichannel marketing strategies
• Planning marketing calendars
• Creating enticing messages, images, and videos

…and so much more.

With limited hours daily, it’s not surprising that it can take 8-12 weeks to develop a marketing strategy. Implementing that strategy can take even longer. For example, 40% of content marketers spend 1-5 hours each week creating social media content. When you consider social media as just one small aspect of content marketing, it becomes easy to see why many marketing teams struggle with their marketing bandwidth. If you’re a marketing leader, you want the best and most effective strategy for your brand. This is where marketing automation enters the chat.

Marketing automation allows teams to make the mundane aspects of marketing happen automatically so team members can focus on the creative elements that need a human touch. Marketers can increase their bandwidth and create a more compelling marketing strategy by automating specific tasks.

Examples of Marketing Automation

The goals of marketing automation are saving time and freeing your marketing team up to complete more complex marketing tasks. 

One example of this is creating an automated email series. These emails, programmed to send when customers perform specific actions like signing up to be on your email list or making a purchase, require no attention once you write the email. Setting an email sequence up ahead of time allows you to create a series once, forget about it, and move on to other marketing efforts. 

Another example is social media automation. Scheduling posts ahead of time in a scheduler allows you to increase posting consistency without being on social media daily. By having captions and hashtags planned out, you have a better chance of posting something that gains more engagement and visibility.

Machine learning is one of the biggest components of marketing automation. These days, technology has the ability to compile statistics about your users, analyze data, and help your marketing team understand where best to focus future marketing efforts. 

Making Automation Part of Your Marketing Strategy 

Changing the way your marketing team operates can be a challenge. The key to implementing marketing automation is to get your team on board before making any significant changes. 

Host a team meeting and go over brand guidelines and current challenges. Evaluate which marketing activities take your team the most time. Then, determine how to save time through the use of automation. 

For example, if your team mentions that budget shifting takes time they could better use on marketing efforts, you might look into a tool like Eulerity, or other marketing automation platforms that are designed to help automate this process. On the other hand, if lead generation is a challenge, you might look into using automation to analyze metrics and track sales. 

Make the Most of Your Team’s Marketing Efforts with Automation

Your marketing team wants to succeed. Providing automation tools frees up the time they need to be creative and innovative. As a result, the success of this strategy compounds. Automation increases the amount of work you can produce daily, while the time freed up by automation allows your team to create higher-quality content. 

Mary Hanula is Eulerity’s Senior Director of Marketing. Eulerity is the world’s most efficient local marketing platform. Using machine learning and automation, Eulerity’s state-of-the-art technology simplifies the complex world of developing and executing digital marketing programs—all for a flat and transparent fee. Their technology-based SaaS model is a fraction of the cost of traditional vendors. For more information on how Eulerity can amplify your online advertising through marketing automation, visit https://eulerity.com.