Small teams often can outperform big ones by working smarter, not harder. We work with teams who tap into nimble freelance experts to address specific needs and leverage technology to maximize their limited resources. Consider using some of these tools or revisiting them to maximize their most valuable features.
- EMail Automation – process emails are a great way to be responsive while limiting low-value tasks. Ensure your team is automating process emails such as New Customer Welcome messaging. These emails are triggered by certain actions – such as downloading content, subscribing, or abandoning a shopping cart. eMail automation can help you maximize the ROI of your lead-generation efforts which are often labour intensive.
- Paid Advertising Automation – Most paid ad channels now let you optimize for maximum success. Google’s “Smart, Responsive Display Campaigns” are an excellent way for a non-expert to optimize paid search advertising efforts. Smart Display campaigns automate your bidding, targeting and ad creation (headlines, descriptions, logos, images, etc.) and ensure your ads responsively fit into almost all appropriate ad spaces across the display network. In minutes you enter the basics – and then Google quickly optimizes your bids while providing budget controls. It will also demonstrate which of your headlines, descriptions, images etc. perform best and automatically optimize within days. Similarly, Facebook’s responsive ads also use machine learning to test and identify the best-performing combinations of ad headlines and keywords.
- Content Optimization – For some teams constantly churning out new content is key, but small marketing teams don’t always have the luxury of spending huge amounts of time on content creation. What they do well is optimize the pre-existing content to make it work harder for you. When they write content that doesn’t become outdated, they use automation tools (see list below) to schedule back into rotation at appropriate intervals. They are also keen to do a quick re-fresh on older posts to update and re-use. Consider adding new information that wasn’t originally available, updating targeted keywords, adding backlinks to more recent / high-performing posts or optimizing content to leverage a Google featured snippet.
- Tool Optimization – If your team has invested in a platform that allows you to automate marketing tasks – ensure your team takes advantage of the free training and tutorials to get the most out of the system. If you are just starting to search for a tool, popular platforms include Marketo, Eloquoa, Customer.io, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, HubSpot, SEMRush, HootSuite, Sprout Social, Buffer or Sendible.
Even if your marketing team is a team of one, you can still reach your goals like a larger department – you just need the right combination of strategies and tools to help you stay competitive. We can help you choose the best marketing automation tools for your business.
You may also be interested in one of our popular Blog posts – The Best Free Apps