Marketing automation is a term being tossed around by digital marketers. While you certainly want to have a qualified professional supercharge your marketing, there are some things you can do to get things rolling and streamline the process to make it easier to hit the ground running.
Marketing automation sounds robotic, but it's really great way to keep your name in front of your prospects and customers so you stay at the front of their mind when they have a problem you can solve (or a product they want or need). It sounds robotic, but there are ways you can keep the tone more human-like.
A lot of companies try to take shortcuts in list-building by purchasing a set of leads. The problem with this is twofold. First, they aren't qualified leads and you have no idea how old the information might be. Second, these lists are often riddled with spamtraps. These spamtrap addresses prevent purchased lists from being imported into reputable email marketing delivery services such as Mailchimp. Make sure the email addresses you're subscribing are people you have spoken with and are genuinely interested in your product or service.
Email marketing services allow you to segment your list of prospects in many ways, but don't get carried away. Identify a few important stages that you know separate your prospects and start there. You can always build on these segments by adding more or further modifying the criteria. Doing everything at once could easily force you to waste time on something that's minimally effective.
With social media, there are many, many (many, ... you get the idea) ways to reach out to your customers. Make sure your automation makes it to the social networks where your customers are. Both WordPress and Joomla have plugins and extensions to their content management system which allows automated posting to social media. If you're selling products or visual services, make sure you get to Instagram and Pinterest. If you're primarily a B2B company, you should be pushing some of your automation to LinkedIn. Consumer-facing businesses do well on Facebook and Google+.
If you're looking for more great tips, check out Hubspot's marketing blog, 10 Tips on Making Your Marketing Automation Less Robotic. We touched on few of their best tips in this article, but there's plenty more information out there. If you're looking for assistance with your automated marketing efforts, let us know and we'll get you moving in the right direction.