5 Ways to Automate Your Digital Marketing - Credo

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If you’re a business owner, chances are you have a lot on your mind, far too many tasks to complete, and could benefit greatly from a strategy to automate your digital marketing.

What else is on your mind as an entrepreneur? You’re likely concerned about your cash flow to make sure you can make payroll, those repairs that your brick-and-mortar business location (or website needs), hiring that you know would add value to your company, and so much more.

So why worry about your marketing? Why worry about finding the time to do it, when you know that the best marketing takes a lot of time? You know you need to nail down:

So how do you automate as much of your marketing as possible so that you have time to do other things?

If you’re not a professional marketer, why take your needed skills away from your business to become a professional marketer? The easiest way to automate your marketing is to outsource it to a professional.

You’ll still be involved, as you will be responsible for (some) execution of the plan. That includes introducing your brand to the agency, any data related to your marketing strategy, audience, or channels, and more.

But often, a top-tier digital agency is the surest way to accomplish your marketing goals and KPIs.

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Chances are that your business has social media profiles. If it does not, you should identify why and consider testing channels where you think you can reach your target audience.

But updating them with useful information consistently is hard and takes time – to do it right.

The first challenge is finding the right content to share, the second is setting it up so that the management is super easy.

The second part can easily be solved via Buffer.

At Credo, our marketing team uses Buffer for content scheduling. They see content they want to share and can easily add it to the Credo queue from within Buffer. And the smartphone app is extremely user-friendly!

In as little as 30 minutes a week, we curate and share relevant content queued up to be shared at preset times when we know the audience will be online. Connect with your audience, save time… that’s a win-win!

Everyone wants great press about their company, and that often starts with the founder being seen as an expert in their field. But getting press is a challenge in the ever-more crowded digital space.

To give yourself the best shot of success, focus on different aggregators where journalists put out calls for sources to interview. This way, you do not have to go create content, vet the journalists you are pitching, and go through the whole process of pitching and waiting for something to go live.

Instead, you get to use your already-built subject matter expertise to respond to journalists who you know are expressly seeking your knowledge.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is the most well-known, and it’s free. When you sign up, you tell HARO which topics you would like to receive pitches about. They send you a daily email with all of the pitches and you can respond directly to the journalists who are asking for sources/quotes.

PrLeads, is a paid tool which means that it’s not free like HARO, but consequently the leads and publications are going to be higher quality. If you have the budget, try it out for a short period of time to see if the expense has a positive ROI & ROAS for your company.

A great way to get consistent and quality content on your website or blog is to accept guest authors. There are a few ways to get guest authors:

Having guest authors isn’t completely automated of course.

You should still maintain editorial control over the ideas and the content that is written to be published. However, this strategy removes a large chunk of the time-consuming work and is a great way to get backlinks if they also share and publish content on their own website or channels.

Have a service that needs emails sent automatically to new prospects or when someone does something on your site?

Mailchimp (among others) is known for making email newsletters simple, painless, and pretty. They have integrations with many different platforms, so it’s easy to build your email list.

But many people do not know that they also offer Email Automation, which costs as little as $10 per month and scales up from there depending on how many emails you send.

We’ve used Mailchimp here at Credo for years, and have also tested and used Drip. Both have their merits.

We highly recommend using the ESP (email service provider) of your choice, test them and see what works best for your business, to automate your email marketing as much as possible.

Want help automating your digital marketing strategy? Check out these specialized agencies that are ready to help.