8 Softwares to Automate your Marketing Strategy in 2019

There’s nothing better than seeing your strategy turn heads and get people to notice your client’s great product or services. 

But—it’s tedious work and time-consuming.

Hours spent on menial tasks burn you out and drain your passion for the job.

Why?

Because you know your time is better spent on problem-solving and utilizing your magical creative thinking skills.

Worse, most marketing activities torpedo your productivity levels.

The good news?

There are ways to bypass most activities through automation.

In this post, you’ll get up to speed on the latest software shortcuts for marketers that will help automate mundane processes.

1. Monitor and track customer relationships

You manage campaigns for tons of different clients. Your goal is to raise awareness of the product, service, or company.

But first—

You have to reach out to potential customers and strike a relationship. And voila, sales start to come in.

You did it, right?

Wrong.

The marketing funnel doesn’t end with a sale. Your team has to keep existing customers engaged. Why? Because it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. Well, this engagement can be automated, if done properly.

Most marketers use some form of a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It’s your one-stop-shop for capturing leads, storing contacts, and segmenting them. Having a proper CRM will let you know where your marketing efforts are missing the mark.

And it’s all done automatically.

It’s a good start.

Now, take a look at your sales pipeline:

It’s a mess. There’s no thought into it. Think about your marketing strategy. Do you reach out via phone or email? Then start by customizing the most useful information.

Let’s say you are building a social media campaign to target the top influencers in the gardening industry. You don’t need to spend the time finding their phone number. Instead, find out what all their social media handles are and specify this as part of your team’s checklist of deliverables.

2. Use email marketing software to build relationships

What is the cheapest and most widely used channel available for every marketer?

Email, of course.

You might have millions of fans or a handful but you’ll need to keep building those relationships. And you can’t personalize every message you send.

The solution? Email automation.

It’s as easy as a follow-up email when someone new subscribes to your blog. There are tons of email marketing software choices out there. One of my favorites is MailChimp.

There are a ton of hacks automation can do—all while getting other things done. Check out a few of them here.

• Builds your brand. Date-based automation, RSS-to-email
• Boosts your sales. Product retargets, order notifications, recommendations, abandoned cart emails
• Brands loyal customers. Product follow-up, customer re-engagement, first purchase

It’s 2019—if you’re missing out on any of these hacks, set it up now and see conversion rates 10x.

3. Streamline your processes

Marketing campaigns have a multiple step process. Your task is to manage each one to be effective.

But—

You can automate things.

Start by creating a standard operating procedure to guide your process. You can create conditional logic and required steps to ensure the team will stay on track.

The best part?

You don’t have to do it from scratch.

Pipefy offers a wide variety of free process templates.

• Sales
• Agile software development
• Sprint
• Growth hacking experiments
• Team task management
• Design thinking

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:


Streamlining your process is one thing. Knowing why a process isn’t working is another. This software helps find and understand the root causes that make processes snail-like slow. Imagine a one-stop shop that lets you see exactly what people are working on.

The best part is you can automate manual work with autofill—connections, forms, email templates, and escalations. In marketing, time is worth its weight in gold and this simple tool will save you hours and hours of work.

4. Let automation analyze your process

A powerful analytics tool lies at the heart of every marketing technology ecosystem.

It’s how you see if your campaigns are producing a positive ROI—your biggest challenge as a marketer.

So—how do you track your marketing efforts?

If you’re not using automated analysis software, you’re doing it all wrong. You’re not just wasting precious time—you’re missing out on tons of data that can slingshot conversion rates.

Move to an analysis software like Crazyegg. It’ll help answer the following questions with ease:

• Who’s visiting your website?
• How do they interact with it?
• What do they pay attention to?

But—

How do you do it? And is it easy to understand? Absolutely. Here’s their heatmap tool in action.

The visual guide reveals the user’s habits through a variety of colors. And the software gives pointers on what to improve.

There’s more delicious stuff:

User session recordings, CTA analysis, and tracking pop-up forms.

What’s great about Crazyegg is the ability to do simple A/B testing. The software lets you gather quantifiable data on the types of messages resonating with your users.

If you execute the test correctly—with the automated software—it’ll bring findings your way to improve other areas of marketing.

5. Personalize on a larger scale

No one wants to feel like a number—especially when it’s their favorite brand. You’d love to write a personalized message to each customer, but there’s no way you have the time or power to do so.

But—81 percent of consumers expect brands to know them and approach them at the right time.

The good news?

Automation can offer a life-line.

Find the best software to help you personalize your outreach to a larger audience. Autopilot is great at helping you create strong customer profiles and segment them into highly targeted audiences.

You’ll know the right message gets to the right person, on the right channel, at the right time.

How does it work?

By tracking the behavior of visitors to your website, it guides them all the way to purchase with automated, personalized messages across different channels. The plus side—you can integrate this behavior across a boatload of social media channels (e.g., Facebook, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Trello, Slack).

6. Seamless content management

You monitor user behavior. You ran some A/B tests. You know what works. You want to apply some content changes to your call-to-action button—and need to do it ASAP.

But—

You put in a request to the IT team and it’s marked low-priority.
They have a ton of projects to work on.

So, the content change takes ages because they don’t have the time to change a snippet of text.

Solution?

It’s the reason why so many are saying marketers should learn to code.

Why?

Because you need to know the back end of a website to publish and edit content in real-time.

But—coding know-how isn’t needed. You have tools available to help you build websites and post content to the internet in minutes without any prior coding knowledge.

Drupal for Marketing is a great option.

Imagine not having to go to the IT team to change one snippet of text. It’s easy to use and lets you make changes based on users’ requests.

Don’t waste the time learning three different coding languages when you have the tool available to use now.

7. Listen to your social spheres

What’s the common theme with all of these tips for marketers in 2019? It’s all about what people say.

How do you track all of these mentions to ensure you respond to them effectively?

Social listening tools are where it’s at. Find the software that compiles all your mentions in one place. Mention does precisely this.

Mention also helps you search for content related to your business and see what the web turns up. Sounds like Google, right?

Wrong.

It’s about knowing who is saying what—especially in the realm of social media monitoring. You want to know what the top influencers are saying so your outreach strategy works.

Mention does precisely this. It allows identifying influencers and points brands to their most valuable supporters. Be done with the simple Googling and let Mention take care of the process automatically.

Final thoughts

Being a top-notch marketer in 2019 might feel like climbing Mountain Everest, blindfolded.

You’re competing with the best and you have to edge out your competition in any way possible. A quick glance through different examples of marketing resumes shows tons of marketers who have basic coding and other technical skills.

You don’t want to lag behind the competition.

So—free yourself from the mundane tasks. With these simple tips, you’ll be one step closer to saving hundreds of hours per month.

Work smart—not just hard—and you’ll see those conversion rates rise from their ashes.

Roger is a Career Writer at ResumeLab who focuses on the intersection of marketing, tech, and the workplace. He’s a world-renowned taco enthusiast. Most times, you can catch him nose-deep in good ol’ Americana literature.