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Trends: Make Your Life Easier with Marketing Automation

[caption id="attachment_2621" align="alignleft" width="141"]Chris Martin, Atlas Marketing Chris Martin, Atlas Marketing[/caption]

In 2017, it’s no secret that many jobs that require mostly on-site work are being automated.

From retail to manufacturing to even accounting, jobs are moving online and/or becoming increasingly autonomous. Marketing is no exception. New media channels are making it easier to market to massive groups of people through digital platforms. As time goes on and the amount of people constantly online grows, it will continue to trend that way. Not only has how we market to people changed, strategies are now analyzed and measured autonomously.

In its most simple form, marketing is persuading customers to buy something, use something or take action. While digital media have taken the field by storm, they haven’t changed that basic principle. Autonomous marketing through email simply has made it easier to persuade large groups of customers quickly and cost-efficiently. And evaluating your strategies has also become easier with web analytics reporting every move that someone makes on your website. These tools have overhauled how we market, but they haven’t changed the goal. They simply make the goal easier.

When you hear “email,” your first thought may be dreading that annoying little red bubble telling you how many emails you’re putting off (and hopefully you’re not as bad as our intern, with 33,000 unread emails). It has long been used simply as a way to communicate personally and professionally. Now, it can be seen as an integral part of marketing to large audiences. Sites like BuzzFeed will send emails with a catchy subject line to catch your attention. Or, companies like Uber send 50-percent-off coupons or tips on how to make your ride with them more efficient. Email affords these brands the ability to promote directly to customers’ inboxes without having to do it individually. In short, companies are using email to communicate efficiently with their clients and potential clients.

Not only does the future of marketing lie in the hands of online media, but it also lies in the way we analyze its impact. Web analytics are becoming significantly easier thanks to tools such as Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics and Bitly. Analytics websites allow you to find out all the information about who is visiting your website and how they’re visiting it in one place by providing information such as page clicks, active users and even keywords (telling you how people found your website). Bitly takes it a step farther and shortens your links for you, making your site easier to find, and it then tracks how many clicks that link is getting and where they’re coming from. It’s a great tool for social and digital companies.

Analytics aren’t just nice to have — they’re necessary. This automation tool gives you all the information needed about your website to tweak its look or content to attract more viewers/customers. Web analytics are essentially a playbook of how to tailor your company’s online presence.

New media channels such as social media are possibly the biggest way to automate your marketing strategy, especially visual platforms such as Instagram and Vimeo. Instagram, a photo-sharing platform, allows you to share simple photo ads or videos for your business to large audiences, while Vimeo allows you to share videos across a professional platform without the download hassle of the large file size. Services like these hold the same importance as Facebook or Twitter, but they also hold the distinction of being visual platforms in a world where an image is worth a thousand likes. Think of them almost like a cheaper and easier way to distribute your message. You can schedule your post with an ad or video you created, then sit back and watch the website do its magic while you continue to strategize or refine your messaging. Other platforms such as Hootsuite allow you to put all of your social media platforms onto one dashboard and schedule your posts — truly automating your efforts.

Essentially, automation improves the efficiency of marketing by doing the tedious work for you. There are a variety of tools that are designed to make your marketing life easier, but they can’t do all the work. Without the time and effort it takes to develop a solid strategy and messaging, these tools are useless. You can add all the features you want that make driving a car smoother and easier, but you still need someone to do the driving (well… for now).

By Chris Martin, Atlas Marketing