As an SME owner, your time is valuable. Every hour spent on repetitive, manual tasks is an hour less to grow your business, innovate, or simply take a step back. Fortunately, digital marketing now offers powerful tools to automate many time-consuming tasks.
Stop exhausting yourself by manually doing what technology can do for you! Here are 5 common marketing tasks you should automate today to gain efficiency and focus on growing your business.
1. Sending Newsletters and Email Sequences
How much time do you spend each week manually writing, scheduling, and sending your newsletters? Not to mention welcome emails for new subscribers or follow-up sequences after a contact request.
Automation allows you to:
- Schedule your newsletters in advance for optimal days and times.
- Create automated email sequences that trigger when a lead subscribes to your list, downloads a guide, or performs another action on your site. These sequences can educate your leads, present your offers, and guide them towards conversion, all without you having to lift a finger after the initial setup.
- Personalize your emails using your contacts’ information (name, company, etc.).
Estimated time savings: Several hours per week, depending on the frequency of your communications.
2. Social Media Posting
Managing an active presence on multiple social media platforms can quickly become a full-time job. Between content creation, posting, and interacting with your audience, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Automation allows you to:
- Plan and schedule your posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and other platforms using dedicated tools. You can prepare your content for the entire week (or even month!) in a single session.
- Automatically republish high-performing content at regular intervals.
- Track the performance of your posts and identify optimal times to engage your audience.
Estimated time savings: 1 to 3 hours per week, or even more if you are very active on multiple platforms.
3. Lead Nurturing and Reminders
Forgetting to follow up with an interested lead is a missed sales opportunity. However, with the multitude of tasks to accomplish, it’s easy to let opportunities slip away.
Automation allows you to:
- Set up automatic reminders in your CRM so you never forget to contact a lead at the opportune moment.
- Create automated follow-up tasks that trigger based on your leads’ actions (e.g., sending a follow-up email if a lead has downloaded your pricing guide).
- Use marketing automation tools to send personalized follow-up emails based on your leads’ behavior on your website.
Estimated time savings: 30 minutes to 1 hour per week, with a direct impact on your sales.
4. Performance Data Collection and Analysis
Spending time manually compiling data from Google Analytics, your social networks, or your advertising campaigns is a tedious and unproductive task.
Automation allows you to:
- Set up automated reports that are sent to you at regular intervals (weekly, monthly) with the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to your business.
- Use real-time dashboards that aggregate data from different sources to give you a clear overview of your marketing performance.
- Set up automatic alerts to be informed of significant changes in your data (e.g., a significant drop in web traffic or an increase in cost per acquisition).
Estimated time savings: 1 to 2 hours per week, with a better understanding of your performance.
5. Responding to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Answering the same questions repeatedly by email or phone is a considerable waste of time for you and your team.
Automation allows you to:
- Implement a comprehensive and easily accessible FAQ section on your website.
- Integrate an AI conversational agent (chatbot) that can instantly answer common visitor questions, 24/7. These tools can be programmed with answers to the most frequent questions, thus freeing up your time for more complex and higher-value interactions.
Estimated time savings: Variable, but can represent several hours per week depending on the volume of requests.
Conclusion: Reinvest your Time in Growth
Automating marketing tasks is not about replacing humans with machines, but rather about freeing up your time and energy for activities that require your expertise and creativity. By automating these 5 tasks today, you will increase your efficiency, reduce your costs, and position yourself for sustainable growth.
