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2,833 viewsIf your schedule has become so packed that you actually feel as though you are getting less done, the solution may be software. Automation platforms have become more and more valuable to organizations due to the need to do more with less. Fewer team members, less budget and less time.
This isn’t due to organizations not growing in today’s economy – quite the opposite. Today’s market is chalk full of booming company growth, but due to the digital economy, there are more and more channels creating tasks for teams.
Marketing automation, task automation, sales automation and more. Automate important tasks and you will have more time in your day for those that require your attention.
5 Automation Tools for Better Productivity
While there are all kinds of productivity tools on the market today, the five below were designed to handle time-consuming work no company can do without.
1. Campaign Monitor
More than 2 million people depend on Campaign Monitor to automate their email campaigns so they are free to focus on other tasks. Campaign Monitor focuses on servicing marketing professionals looking to send personalized and automated emails to customers on a 1:1 basis. The platform comes “out of the box” with award-winning customer support 24/7, mobile ready email templates and integrations with business tools like Shopify eCommerce and Salesforce CRM.
Companies like Resy, Mercedes Benz and Rip Curl use the Campaign Monitor platform to send customers personalized emails based on their interests and behaviors. For example, travel company Virgin used customer data to send personalized email offers for moms to get away for Mother’s Day. The Virgin Experience Days saw a 29% increase in open rates once they personalized subject lines along with using AB testing.
2. Bizible
Bizible is an automation tool designed specifically for B2B companies. If you find yourself running out of time every day because you spend so much of it trying to generate leads, Bizible is going to turn your approach upside and free you up in the process.
Bizible has become a mainstay for sales and marketing teams from around the world looking to properly attribute sales revenue to tasks and marketing activities. Many sales and marketing teams start lead generation and marketing campaigns that end with results less than what they expected. This is due to the difficulty in revenue attribution across many different channels. For example, a website visitor may come from a social media post originally and then leaves the website only to return again from an article they found in Google and converts to a lead. What marketing strategy would you attribute that lead to? Most analytics and sales tools would attribute that to the referred traffic from the article even though they originally found the website in social media.
The software was developed with pipeline marketing in mind, which means spending fewer resources on collecting large amounts of leads and more of it on turning those leads into customers. Success is judged solely by revenue – not the number of leads at the top of the funnel. Bizible gives businesses the ability to see what’s working and what isn’t so additional resources can be allocated to win more business. With customers ranging from Microsoft and Verizon to Dyson and Expedia, it’s obvious why this is the leading revenue attribution automation platform on the market.
3. Buffer
If social media is part of your company’s marketing efforts – and it definitely should be – then Buffer is one of the top platforms on the market to automate posting.
One of the biggest challenges associated with social media marketing is that it takes up so much time. It is hard to remain productive in other areas of your business when you constantly need to post content and review past efforts.
With Buffer, you can sit down and schedule your posts out for the next month so that you know your presence will be felt from all your followers. Not all content should be shared in the same way on every social media platform. Some need to be image heavy while others should focus on piggybacking on top trending hashtags. Buffer allows you to post individual messages to each social channel so your content is tailored to make the biggest impact no matter if that’s on Twitter or Instagram.
Once you’ve automated your social media posting schedule, sit back and watch the engagement happen. You can use the Buffer analytics dashboard to further optimize future posts based on the message, image or time of day it was posted.
4. Workfront
Managing a project requires monitoring the actual work being done and keeping tabs on the people doing it. You have to ensure deadlines are met and often facilitate communication across different teams or even departments. In steps enterprise project management platform Workfront.
We all spend countless hours sifting through emails, downloading attachments and prioritizing tasks with team members. Workfront allows organizations to create business rules that prioritize and route tasks automatically based on those rules. This saves enormous amounts of time normally spend on tedious creativity killing tasks.
Do you manage huge spreadsheets to try and keep track of resource allocation, time spent and statuses? There’s a better way. With Workfront you can easily assign individual employees, cross-functional teams and departments easily to stay agile in an ever-changing environment.
Workfront was designed to bring this chaos under control. It gives you a central hub for managing every aspect of your project. Best of all, you can customize this platform’s dashboards so you’re never far from the exact data you need.
5. Sniply
Another way you can improve your lead generation without killing your productivity elsewhere is with Sniply. The great thing about this tool is that it does not interrupt your current business processes. Assuming you are already publishing content to your social media channels, Sniply is an extremely easy way to increase its ROI without adding more to your plate.
Sniply is one of the coolest ways to automated traffic generation from the social media sharing you already do. Essentially, Sniply is a tool that adds a custom call-to-action popup to any page you share using their URL shortener.
For example, you may find a great article on Inc.com about boosting your social media following on Instagram that would be perfect for your social media audience. You can plug that URL into Sniply and get back a shortened URL that you can share. When someone clicks on that link they will be shown the Inc.com article with a custom call-to-action at the bottom of the page that you create.
All you have to do is create some simple CTAs. These will then pop up at the bottom of your visitors’ browsers anytime they click a link on one of your pages.
So keep publishing content like you normally would, but enjoy greater conversions in the process.
Leverage Automation to Remain Productive
Automation has given businesses a huge leg up compared to competitors who choose not to take advantage. Your teams will increase productivity and efficiency that leads to them having the time to take on even more work. With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, there’s no telling where tools like the ones listed above can take automation technology.
Start today by utilizing one of the above tools and you will soon find that you can keep your productivity high without spreading yourself too thin. Best of all, these tools will also improve your results wherever they are applied in your business.
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