If you’re a time starved entrepreneur struggling to keep up with the demands of social media and online marketing, this post is for you. Of course, there are many ways to optimise the time you have as an entrepreneur to focus on key business tasks, yet it’s all too easy for us to get caught up in the day to day management of online marketing, particularly in terms of social media.
Digital marketing is vital to your business yet when it comes to social marketing, a lot of us find ourselves inundated with notifications to the point we are living our lives in reaction to email and facebook notifications. Similar to how Pavlov’s Dogs would jump to attention, we are always jumping to attention upon hearing a notification. Surely, there has to be a better way?
The digitally connected world we live in, can be incredibly harmful to our mental health and social lives. One of the best ways to ensure a more balanced life is to automate your digital marketing – meaning create a network of an 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 – without you having to always be in an alert state of digital reaction. Essentially, it will allow you the time you need to be calm, focused, and responsive rather than reactive.
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 marketing tasks the majority of business owners contend with; things such as being inundated by emails, following up on sales leads, and managing our social media presence.
Email Marketing
If your aim is to become less inundated with having to reactively respond to emails you’ll want to consider using a service like mailchimp.com to automate this process. Specifically, you’ll want to create a series of autoresponders that automatically send out a specific personalised email; as a result of being triggered by a customer action such as enquiring, or purchasing a product.
The majority of business owners already have something like this in place as there are many affordable small business crm systems to choose from, but there are some time-starved entrepreneurs still frantically sending emails to customers that would be very simple to automate.
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 are several ways to automate social media, and there are several free apps such as hootsuite and buffer that can help you automate this task.
Marketing Funnels
Your marketing funnel is made up of several stages through which users (that will hopefully go on to be customers) move from first awareness of your brand or website through to being a customer then onward to recommending your business and becoming a raving fan. A marketing funnel is essentially the process of converting a visitor or browser into a paying customer.
In consideration of the fact we’re talking about digital marketing, then this process is already likely to be automated – but often this is with a number of tools that you can lose track of, and often the sheer number of different applications required can cause integration issues (let alone burn a hole in your wallet each month). This is where tools such as Clickfunnels come into play, as they offer an all-in-one solution to manage each phase of your customer’s journey throughout the funnel.
Blog Posts
Scheduling blog posts to feature at a specific time is one of the most basic yet imperative forms of automation for your digital marketing strategy – as life can often get in the way, and if you’re unable to get to a computer at the “right time” this lack of consistency could start to be detrimental toward your brand.
Similarly, you can post different posts to different audiences in different time zones – which is vitally important on the basis you’ll want to ensure each asset you publish is sent out at the optimum time for user engagement.
In summary, if you’re a time-starved entrepreneur running any type of business with an online presence, it’s time to start investing in tools that can help you automate your marketing so that you have more time to run your company rather than react to the insatiable demands of social media.