Whether you’re a business owner, manager, marketer, or any other type of professional looking to market yourself or your brand online, it’s essential to realize that the race can be fierce! 

And, modern marketing requires a steady, consistent effort if you want to make the most of your online presence. 

Fortunately, marketing automation makes it easier than ever for businesses and brand owners to monitor, manage, and maintain their online presence without doing all of the work manually. 

Below, we’re looking at five simple steps to creating an effective automated marketing campaign. 

Knowing Your Audience

Since you’re looking to automate your marketing processes, you’ll need to start by learning as much as you can about your target audience. 

Your target audience members, also known as your ideal customers, are the people that are the most likely to interact with your brand. 

Therefore, these are the people that you’ll want to target with your marketing and branding efforts. 

Creating buyer personas is a great trick for learning about your target audience members as much as you can. 

Buyer personas refer to fictionalized character representations of your ideal customers and include information, such as their average age range, pain points, hobbies and interests, gender, geographic location, and more. 

Essentially, the more you know about your target audience, the better you’ll craft automated marketing campaigns that will be more likely to connect effectively with your audience. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best, most personalized ways to do it when it comes to staying in contact with your prospective and existing customers. 

By using email marketing tools, such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, or Zoho, you can easily automate the process of sending out greeting emails, subscriber signup emails or thank you emails to your contacts. 

These tools will also allow you to collect and aggregate lead email addresses, manage your contacts, segment your email list, and more! 

Social Media Marketing

When keeping your business or brand active on social media, it can be easier said than done. 

Fortunately, you can use platforms like Buffer or Hootsuite to monitor, manage, and automate your social media activity. 

Using these tools, you’ll be able to gain valuable analytics and insight about your social media audience, which you can use to plan and schedule social media content days and weeks in advance. 

SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of setting up your website so that it is visible to search engines. 

In turn, this process is often able to drive tons of free, organic traffic to your landing pages and blog posts. 

However, SEO is somewhat complicated because it relies on tweaking a wide range of website elements, such as your URL, your page meta descriptions, meta tags, alt text attributes, and more. 

That said, as you learn about SEO or gradually build and optimize your website, you’ll be able to generate a steady stream of free, organic traffic to your pages. 

Customer Service

In today’s digital landscape, consumers are finickier than ever before. 

Therefore, modern brands must have helpful and responsive customer service available at all times or risk losing favour with their customers whenever they have an issue. 

However, for smaller businesses or businesses with limited resources, having 24/7 customer support is simply out of the question. 

Fortunately, chatbots and automated response features on platforms like Facebook Messenger make it easier than ever for brands to maintain helpful customer support, even when nobody is in the office to help! 

Marketing Automation 2021

Whether you’re looking to promote a product or service, automated marketing makes maintaining your online presence as stress-free and straightforward as possible. 

By knowing your audience and using tools like MailChimp, Buffer, and Facebook Messenger, any brand can easily monitor and manage customer communications and make the most of its online presence at all times!