Marketing automation is essential for anyone marketing their business online. It’s not just a nice thing that adds to your productivity; it’s absolutely necessary and there’s one simple reason for that – It takes over routine menial tasks for you so that you can focus your time and energy on more important things.
Saving Time for “Thinking Work”
As a business person wanting to market your services online, what should you be spending your time doing on a day-to-day basis? Your true role when marketing is to study your market, and plan and execute marketing strategies. In other words, it’s “thinking” work, and strategic planning.
However, when you’re bogged down with simple routine tasks that anyone (or any machine) could do for you, you’re losing that precious thinking and organising time. The hours you could be devoting to really careful consideration of your brand image or mind mapping your overall marketing strategy are wasted away on busy work.
Get Routine Tasks off Your Desk
In addition to planning and organising, another important part of marketing is building relationships. You need to be actively engaged and interacting with the members of your target market, whether on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or through face-to-face offline events or online webinars.
Relationship building, like planning and organizing, takes time. Also, relationship building tasks cannot be done by a software program, an outsourced worker across the planet, or a nifty gadget. This is work that you and only you can do.
If you can successfully automate routine tasks and get them off your to-do list, you can spend more time interacting with members of your target market, and the benefits to this are priceless.
[tweetthis]Automate routine tasks and get them off your to-do list. Free up time to engage your target market[/tweetthis]
Automated Tools Are Sometimes Better Than You
The main reason you need to automate is that it gets rid of simple tasks and that frees up your time. However, there is another good reason to automate your marketing. Sometimes, automated programs can do things better than you do. For example, an automated analytics program can take in a great deal of data and deliver relevant metrics to you. If you were to analyse this data yourself, it would not only take a great deal of time, but it wouldn’t be as precise as the analysis a formula or algorithm can do.
In fact, there are some tasks that you can’t do on your own. You can’t do them at all without automation. An example here would be email marketing. You simply can’t build, maintain and market to an email list all by yourself through your usual, bog standard email account. You need an automated program to carry out email marketing properly.
Getting Started with Automation
If you’ve shied away from automation until now because of the technological barriers, don’t. It’s very easy to get started. Start by automating one task at a time, and then once you’re comfortable and seeing results, move on to the next. Soon, you’ll see how automation saves you time for more important things and makes a huge impact on your business growth.
Download our free “21 Ways to Automate your Marketing” report. This professional report will help you to start automating your business and free up time.