Why Automating Your Digital Marketing is The Way Forward

Digital marketing is vital to your business, but do you ever find yourself living your life in reaction to social media notifications or emails?

The digitally connected world we live in, can be incredibly harmful to living a balanced and successful life; particularly in terms of our emotional wellbeing and social lives. One of the best ways to ensure a more balanced life, is to automate your digital marketing by creating a network of automated process, systems, and apps to automatically take care of marketing tasks such as following up on emails, posting to facebook, and so on.

This will not only free up physical time, it will give you peace of mind, and a sense of certainty that things are being taken care of. Essentially, it will allow you the time you need to be calm, focused, and responsive rather than reactive; contributing to a more stress free working environment.

Tim Ferris in his New York Times Bestselling Book, The Four Hour Workweek talks about the importance of automation in our work lives so that we can focus on managing our business in the sense of working ‘on’ the business rather than working ‘in’ the business. Whilst Tim, along with several other millennial productivity experts urge us to go one step further and outsource our tasks to a virtual assistant; ideally someone living in India or Asia on the basis of cost – this article looks at automation as it relates to technological systems.

In this article we’re going to look at automating a number of the most time consuming digital tasks the majority of business owners contend with; things such as being inundated by emails, following up on sales leads, keeping our files organised, and managing our social media presence.

1. EMAIL MARKETING

There are plenty of time-starved business owners frantically sending out an email to a customer thanking them for their order and letting them know when it will be shipped. The key point with automation is that it frees your time to be working ‘on’ the business at a strategic level rather than ‘in’ the business where you are wasting your time doing the same job as a low-level employee. You could use something like mailchimp in order to start automating your emails at very low cost.

2. FILE TRANSFER

If you’ve ever accidentally spilled a glass of water on your laptop, lost your phone, or had the despair of hard drive failure you’ll have most likely heard the words “did you back-up your files” and if you didn’t, this is the point where you begin to feel overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and kicking yourself. That said, keeping on track of backing up your files can be time consuming, which is why automating your file transfer can make your life a lot easier and offer a sense of security and certainty that allows you to relax.

3. MARKETING FUNNELS

Your marketing funnel is made up of several stages through which browsers (who will hopefully go on to become customers) move from first awareness of your brand or website through to making a purchase. A marketing funnel is essentially the process of converting a visitor or browser into a paying customer, and sites such as Clickfunnels can automate this process in a very efficient and visually engaging way.

4. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Managing your social media marketing campaigns can be extremely time consuming. Many business owners consider hiring a virtual assistant in order to manage this time consuming task though there there are several free apps such as hootsuite and buffer that can help you automate this task.