The holiday season is here. For most, this means lots of family time, food and festivities.
It’s an exciting time but can bring forth additional stress if you are also a marketer.
That’s why I believe in the power of automation. By definition, marketing automation allows you to effectively target customers with automated marketing messages across channels including email, website, social media and text messages to generate leads.
Marketing automation is something that I thrive on–and will absolutely need as we take steps deeper into the Holiday season.
Instead of logging tons of hours behind your laptop this month, and missing precious time with your loved ones, I’m going to highlight three things that you should automate this holiday season and beyond.
Let’s jump in!
1. Email Marketing
If you are a business owner with a product or service, it may feel backwards to “sign off” and let your business stop.
That’s where the beauty of automation comes in. Marketing automation will allow you to not only plan your content ahead of time, but you can schedule it. This isn’t just unique to the actual “email” either. You can also pre-build your landing pages (and leave them hidden), segment your audience (so you are only sending relevant content to relevant people) and more.
One of my clients and I were in complete alignment about doing this for her email marketing. Why? Because her list is gold! We garnered a lot of sales during Black Friday but it required a lot of work. This time around, her team and I will be traveling so we hit the pavement hard and scheduled a bunch of her emails.
Now we can relax (a little) until it’s time for the next campaign.
2. Social media
What good is a business without a social presence? It’s doable but almost impossible for a small business owner who wants to grow and further their brand.
Luckily for us, we can take the same approach above and plan ahead. One of my favorite tools to use for scheduling my clients Instagram posts is Planoly.
Planoly has so many benefits. You can:
- Schedule content
- Organize hashtags by interest
- Analyze your content and follower metrics (i.e. top liked and commented posts)
- Auto-post (i.e. no extra work for you. Your post will automatically post after you schedule it. They also offer a manual function should you want to review beforehand)
I usually follow a 7 step process that helps me do this efficiently for myself and my clients.
3. Customer support
Are you a customer-facing business? In other words, do you heavily rely on chat functions (like Chatbots, Facebook Messenger or DMs) to answer immediate questions related to your business?
If so, use the common questions you receive and set up prompts! These prompts can either relate to the common keywords people use to submit questions/requests to your business. Or, they can be used to signal when you are available. For example, if someone has questions related to your holiday shipping policy, instead of jumping up at every alert, you can set up an auto-reply that provides them with a link of where to find the information (again, this requires some pre-work but it’s worth it).
This also works for your business email as well. In fact, i’ve already connected with clients and shared the days that I will be working. On the other days, they can expect to receive an auto-reply that lets them know when I will be available. If you receive new business opportunities on the regular (which is a blessing!), be sure to include some language that thanks them for reaching out and ensuring them that they will hear from you soon.
What do you think about marketing automation? Is it something you plan to implement?
Joshlyn Ross 