This month, freedom is on all our minds. While Independence Day may be more about securing our freedom from England back in the day, as PR and communication professionals, we can also celebrate strategies to free up our time so that we can focus on running our campaigns smoothly.
Here are a few ways you can regain your freedom when it comes to certain marketing tasks.
Get Smarter with Your Emails
If you’re like most folks, you spend about three hours a day checking and responding to emails. That number might be even higher if you’re the one sending the marketing, sales or customer service emails. But there’s a better way: automating everything from your marketing email funnel to the templates you send for certain customer service inquiries can seriously free up your time.
For marketing emails: Use a tool to create a series of emails that will automatically be sent whenever a certain action occurs, such as someone subscribing to your list or making a purchase.
For customer service: Consider the questions you answer again and again via email and create templates you can cut and paste to respond. These could include questions about tracking a product, shipping costs and returns.
Beef Up Your Social Media Activity
While checking into your social profiles in real time is necessary, certain automation secrets can keep your stream active and engaging. Start by using a scheduling tool to instantly publish your new blog posts to your social profiles. Check that off your list, and then set up a list of evergreen tweets that will publish without any effort from you.
Finally, use the WordPress plugin Revive Old Post to automatically share older content and drive traffic to your blog from social media sites.
Automate Workflows
Think of the myriad tasks you do in a given day. I’m willing to bet that some of them could be automated through a tool like Zapier. Let’s say that every time you get a new customer, you have to manually add that person’s contact details to your CRM and email marketing software. With Zapier’s automated workflow, you could set up a rule that says that whenever you get a new customer’s information, it automatically gets sent to, say, iContact or Insightly. Bam. You just saved five minutes. You’re welcome.
While we seem to continue to get busier and busier, the good news is that there are more tools available to automate much of our marketing work, and for those, we can be grateful for the freedom they provide.
Images via Pixabay: 1, 2