Everything you can do (and won’t have to do) with social media marketing automation
The most immediate benefit of marketing and social media automation is saving time. After all, the ability to schedule posts to different social platforms, reply to online mentions, and otherwise manage a social presence from one consolidated application can free up a lot of hours.
Version control is another savior. What about easy communication? For everything social media automation helps you do (and not do), read on.
Marketing automation frees up more time for:
Content creation – This includes photo editing (especially if editing capabilities are built right into the marketing automation software itself). If you’re not tied up with the minutiae of simply getting content—any content—posted to each platform your brand participates in, you can focus more on creating quality content that resonates with your audience.
User engagement – You will be able to take more time to compose responses to requests, questions, customer service issues, @replies, and other comments. After all, keeping up with all the responses to your posts can seem overwhelming without some kind of software to organize it.
Campaign messaging – You’ll have the extra bandwidth to make sure everything posted is 100% on target and performing according to projections. Plus, quickly viewing everything in a single platform helps you monitor multi-channel branding efforts.
A/B or split testing – (Or any other sort of testing and analysis that suits your needs.) Being able to directly test what type of messages and content work the best and support your hypotheses with real data is essential for determining what actually performs on social media.
Reporting and analysis – It’s the key to any successful marketing project, but it is unfortunately often the first aspect to fall by the wayside when budgets and therefore hours get cut. Being able to automate and structure the data collection and set up regular reports give you and your team more time to decipher the story that the numbers are telling and see what effect your efforts have had on your digital presence—and how and where you can improve in the future.
Marketing automation increases your ability to:
Perform valuable keyword research – By automatically generating lists of keywords or phrases that appear in your content, content posted by your followers, and anyone who engages with your brand on social media, you’ll uncover helpful trends and ideas for creating content for social media as well as other web copy where user intent and SEO matter.
Capture where your content is mentioned or linked – Then you can share it, use it for future content creation ideas, reply when necessary, and more.
Make quick adjustments, edits, and changes – This is especially useful when changes are needed across platforms and campaigns. Since social media moves at the speed of light, your marketing team needs to be just as nimble as your audience. If something’s not how it needs to be, you can adjust the campaign all in one place. Lifesaver!
Build lists – These can be comprised of key influencers, competitors, customers, potential customers, target demographics, and any other groups or categories of users.
Extend the reach of social media – By collecting names and emails of your fans and followers, you’ll be able to use them for future targeting and remarketing purposes.
Determine the most effective days and times – Each social network and user segment has its optimal engagement times, so you’ll want to schedule content to go live accordingly. You can spot these opportunities in SMM reporting and tackle them with SMM scheduling.
Consolidate conversations and comments – With all your mentions in one place on an app or platform, they’ll be easy to review, report on, respond to, and analyze.
Marketing automation creates a reduced need for…
Internal documentation and associated activities – When approvals, collaboration, and any other necessary sharing occurs quickly and easily in the app or software platform itself, you and your team won’t need to spend time outside of the platform in unproductive inboxes.
Version control – If edits can be made directly in the software platform, there’ll be minimal disruption or confusion to the overall process. Plus, your team will be less likely to be confused about which is the correct version to post, lowering the chance of errors and retractions—both of which can be pretty damaging.
Time-intensive reporting – All the time associated with laying out and designing complex reports? Buh-bye. Instead, you’ll gain more time for analysis and planning for the future with next steps since your software can collect the data and generate graphs and charts for you, allowing you to focus on what’s really important—learning about your audience and creating insightful content that makes an impact.
Altogether now? Clear branding and happy audiences.
