4 marketing automation tools to make your life simpler

As inbound marketers, marketing automation tools make our lives a hell of a lot easier. In fact, all of us at Six & Flow believe that they rule the way we interact with prospects and customers.

According to growth hacking influencer Ehsan Jahandarpour, 78% of marketers say automation increases revenue, and 75% of brands using automation see a positive return on investment in under 12 months. Pretty impressive figures, right?

Being a platinum tier HubSpot partner gives us the ability to use every marketing automation tool that HubSpot has to offer. We definitely use this to our advantage, using all our different areas of expertise. By automating repetitive marketing tasks such as email notifications and social media posting, our team has more time to focus on other tasks. Even better, HubSpot collects a range of data on these automated activities, so we can analyse what works best for individual clients.

As an inbound marketing executive at Six & Flow, the following marketing automation tools have become part of my day to day life...

HubSpot Scheduling

I know many brands see social media simply as an opportunity to speak to potential leads and turn them into customers. However, brand awareness is also important, because social media allows you to show your brand off to the world.

Looking at the best branded social accounts out there, they all tend to share one thing in common. They are consistent. This means they are posting the same amount of posts per day, at around the same time, the same tone of voice is used throughout and retweets don’t overpower the direct posts. All these factors are crucial to achieving brand consistency.

While no one wants to see their social media looking automated, the HubSpot scheduling tool can be used to plan posts in a natural-looking manner, and save our team around 6 hours per week. This is where HubSpot bulk schedule (my favourite marketing automation tool in the world) comes in handy. By planning and scheduling 'evergreen' posts a full month in advance, you have more time to write spontaneous posts about the latest news or company developments as and when they happen. It also gives you time to reach out to potential leads if you jump in on their conversations, which is easily done through this next marketing automation tool...

HubSpot Social Monitoring

HubSpot’s social monitoring tool gives you more of an idea about what your target audience, competitors and customers feel about you. This marketing automation tool gives you deep insight and valuable market research just for the cost of your time. While it can take time to set up, once that part is out of the way, it actually saves you time every day.

Rather than you searching manually on Twitter for relevant keywords or accounts, HubSpot’s monitoring tool automatically gathers this information according to preset monitoring streams. These streams can track a combination of hashtags, account names, keywords, Twitter lists and HubSpot contact lists. 

Want to find out if your customers are talking about cats? Great, set up a HubSpot monitoring stream showing any tweets from a HubSpot list of all customers that contain #cats. Voila, it's all in front of you.

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HubSpot Inbox

As we all know, with social media you are sometimes likely to get people ‘trolling’ you, posting negative comments and trying to catch you out. As a brand owner, your priority is to get rid of these comments or respond to them in a polite manner as soon as possible. When focusing on social monitoring, you can reply to negative comments quickly, whether that means deleting them or showing a strong level of customer service.

HubSpot inbox collects any interactions with your social accounts, whether new followers, likes, shares or comments. The 'conversations' tab is particularly useful, as this collates any comments made across all your social media platforms, as well as mentions of your account name across the whole of Twitter, and allows you to write back directly through the Hubspot tool.

Rather than having to log into each invididual account, you can manage all conversations in one place. This can be particularly useful if your brand has a number of accounts to keep track of. For instance, each team member at Six & Flow has a personal Twitter account. If they're on holiday, I can respond to comments on their behalf!

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Google Alerts

I can imagine Google alerts is extremely popular as a marketing automation tool across the marketing industry and even the wider business world. They can keep you up to date with conversations and topics of interest to you and your brand. To never miss another important conversation again… I’d say get your Google Alerts set up.

For me, Google Alerts come in handy once the monthly social plan has been scheduled, because this is where I get the majority of current news pieces. Like the HubSpot monitoring tool, this takes time to set up, but once it's rolling this can save you a lot of time when it comes to finding timely content.

At Six & Flow, I’d say we’re geeks when it comes to marketing automation tools. If you need any help with implementing any for yourselves, we’d love to give you a hand.