Do This, Not That When Automating Blog Posts, Social Media and Email Marketing

/2 Comments/in , , , /by

One of the great digital marketing debates is on whether or not you should use automation.  It has been debated ad nauseam and I am going to add my voice and opinion to the mix.  As long as digital marketing strategies exist, this debate will continue to exist.  I believe that to be true because a part of the advances in technology, have been to make life easier in some way.  Automating tasks related to digital marketing strategies makes life easier.

I believe automation to be a great asset when used properly.  The problem is that a lot of people do not use it properly and take a set it and forget it approach.

Automating Blog Postings

Why it’s Great:  You can write at times when it is more convenient for you and schedule the blogs to post at times when it is more convenient for your audience.  If you are the sole author of your blog or the content editor, scheduling blogs to posts allows you to go on vacation without missing a beat with your blog.

When it’s Bad:  If the content you have previously scheduled to post becomes irrelevant prior to its post date, that would be bad.  If you write tips on Google’s algorithm, set it to post 2 months in the future and Google releases an update a month prior; you will be disseminating bad information and risk looking like a non-authority on the topic.

Automating Social Media Postings

Why it’s Great:  It’s a lot of work to find, read and share great content with your audience.  Add to that the time it takes to monitor campaigns, respond to commenters and participate in discussions.  It’s a lot of work and we have limited time.  It’s the one thing we cannot create more of; we can only free some of it up by maximizing our productivity.  Scheduling allows you to use time that might not be ideal to post, to find and craft your messages.  You can then schedule them to go out when it is convenient for your audience.

When it’s Bad:  Just like with blog postings, it is bad if you schedule more than you can remember, content wise.  It is also bad if you only schedule and you are not monitoring and engaging with your audience.  Periodically check to see what you have scheduled and review it.  Not only will it help you remember what you have scheduled to go out, but it will also ensure that future postings are still relevant.

Automating Email Marketing

Why it’s Great:  Many of the email marketing providers have ways that you can aggregate RSS feeds into your email campaigns.  Do you post daily deals to your site?  Use an RSS feed to trigger an email to go out with the information to your list.  Using RSS feeds and scheduling emails to go out similar to what you do with blog postings can save you a ton of time.

When it’s Bad:  Again, it’s just like blog postings and social media postings in that you do not want to set it and forget it.  You need to review your reports to make sure that what you’re sending is something that your list wants to receive, open and read.  If you are getting a lot of unsubscribes for a particular campaign, you need to review it.  It does not make sense to keep auto-generating something that no one wants.

Did you notice a theme with when it’s bad?  Setting it and forgetting about it.  Use automation to plan ahead, increase your productivity and ease the strain of doing everything in real time.  However, stay present and on top of what is going out.  If you cannot keep up with and remember what you scheduled to go out 2 months ago, then you should not schedule that far out.  You want to be able to engage with people through your digital channels.  You can end up spending more time trying to remember or re-read something that is being commented on by your audience if you schedule too far out.

automating-blog-posts-social-media-email-marketing

All Aboard the Email Train

/0 Comments/in , /by

Recently I have been inundated with emails. They are from retailers that I have made purchases from in the past and present; sites that I signed up to and sites that I have no recollection of ever giving my email address to, but that are reputable. It is absolutely driving me crazy and feels a bit desperate. I am an avid online shopper. I feel I find the best deals for home and business on the web, but if I get one more “we noticed you looked at product X, can we interest you in this too,” email; I am going to scream. As a business owner, I understand the logic behind these types of transactional emails and as a marketer, I understand why so many brands are turning to email for their marketing purposes. I suppose this will be the marketing trend for 2014.

Social media marketing has gone from being “free,” to market and engage your customer to more of a “pay to play” environment. Granted, it was never entirely free to begin with if you factor in the cost of the time, effort and thought that goes into a successful campaign. Outside of that, the cost was free to minimal. Now these social networks are looking for ways to effectively monetize the audience and in a sense, power that they own. You want to put yourself in front of a large or targeted audience on social media networks? You now have to pay to do so. Facebook in particular has admitted that it’s algorithm works against you, but if you pay to promote, you can be in front of millions. Wink, wink.

For the past few months, marketers have been experimenting with some of the smaller and lesser known social media networks in an effort to migrate away from Facebook. It makes business sense from a budget perspective to not pay for something that was once free before, if you can get the same results elsewhere for free.

Social media networks have to look out for themselves and their shareholders (if they have them). At the end of the day, although we may enjoy using them and sharing on them, they are a business and they have to eat to make money. They are going to make changes that will benefit them and possibly not you and we have no control over that. Because of this, brands are looking to real estate, data and leverage that they do have control over. Websites and…ah, email lists… It’s very smart thinking. Brands that may have slacked off on email marketing before, are now dusting off and reviving those lists and their emails are filling my inbox.

This migration towards capitalizing on real estate that you own for marketing efforts, probably means that we will start seeing articles and posts about social media marketing being dead. We will see. I wrote a post a few months ago about whether email marketing was dead and then Facebook changed its algorithm (again), so it may die, but it also may be resurrected again. I do predict that if you aren’t already seeing an increase in marketing emails flooding your inbox, you will soon. It’s the next new trend. 🙂

Random Musing:: Email Marketing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The effectiveness and relevancy of email marketing in todays technical landscape is a topic that I see pop in and out of marketing debates.  There is a school of thought that sees email marketing as a dead tactic and not relevant.  I think this thought is primarily because it’s no longer the cool trendy marketing item that everyone is buzzing about.  Email marketing was born during the email boom; during the age of AOL, Hotmail and the emergence of Yahoo.  By the way, as a side note; if you still have an AOL email address that you actively use, get rid of it.  It dates you.

I feel that as long as email inboxes exist and email is used as a way to communicate with people, email marketing will continue to exist.  I also believe that it is still a relevant tactic.  I feel the relevancy is lost in the way the tactic is used.  The way it was first used is similar to the way junk mail is used in “snail mail.”  I think direct mail marketing is a relevant and useful tactic, but most businesses use it in a way that is not very effective or relevant to what people want today.

That is the same problem with email marketing.  Most businesses are still approaching it in the same way it was approached during its inception.  Times have changed and people have changed.  I use the term consumer interchangeably with the word “people,” because consumers are people.  Like with snail mail, when junk mail (direct mail advertisements) first appeared in their mailboxes, they were new, interesting and gave them a reason to look at them.  Now, they are in most cases, instantly trashed and discarded.  A business today, has to send out twice if not triple the amount of mailers to receive the same type of results and response that would have been gotten many years ago.

Why, because people became desensitized to them.  They were bombarded with them and it made checking the mail a negative experience if all you often found were bills and advertisements for things you did not want nor need.  The same thing has happened with email.  At first, you loved to check your email to see if someone sent you anything; a note, a message, a poem, a chain letter…  Now, email accounts are quickly abandoned due to malicious hackers, viruses, spammers and unsolicited advertisements.

Rules were put in place just like with junk snail mail to try to cut down on unsolicited emails and subscriptions to lists.  You are supposed to be able to unsubscribe easily and technically you have to commit some action in order to be subscribed to a list.  The lines are often blurred when it comes to the action that is committed (I handed you my business card at a networking event) and not everyone uses an email service to send their emails (being cc’d with 500 other people on an email that you can’t unsubscribe from).

People have become desensitized to email marketing in the same way.  Businesses that buy email mailing lists like direct mail marketers do, will not see the same effectiveness that they would have from a list with subscribers who willingly signed up.  They will also see less unsubscribers if they also provide value in some way to those that have signed up.  What constitutes value is different for each business.  For one business, the value may be in coupons, exclusive offers and secret sales.  For another, it could be just an inside look into that brand’s corporate culture.

The key to it all is the people.  The consumer.  The one’s that you are actually trying to market and advertise to.  If businesses place a high priority on learning whom their consumers are as people and what those people want from them, they can actually be very successful with a marketing campaign.  The campaign that works for them might not actually be a direct line to a sale or purchase, but an indirect one.  Something else to keep in mind is that email marketing can work as a complementary tactic in an overall marketing strategy or campaign.

Email marketing is not irrelevant or dead.  It just has to be used and approached differently from how it was done at its birth.