Dominique Daly
Let’s face the facts: the marketing industry is moving fast.
56% of marketers worldwide think their marketing approaches cannot keep up with the ongoing evolution of marketing technology. Advancing technology should, theoretically, mean a more manageable workload, but in reality, many in-house marketers are still struggling to be jacks-of-all-trades.
With every new channel, MarTech tool, or marketing tactic, you’re expected to study up, do your work, and see results immediately. When, in reality, some marketing strategies need specialists.
Take marketing automation, for example. In the long term, implementing marketing automation can vastly enhance your marketing strategy and processes. However, getting started, strategizing, creating content, and launching automation campaigns can be laborious, requiring planning and advanced understanding – this is where marketing automation freelancers come in.
In this article, we will show you exactly why you should include marketing automation freelancers in your marketing approaches. But first, a little bit of background.
Note: if you’re looking to hire marketing freelancers to update and skyrocket your marketing approaches, Twine has all the talent you need.
What is Marketing Automation?
As a practice, marketing automation is defined as utilizing digital software to determine various rules or logic that allow marketers to automate tasks. With marketing automation, the entire customer journey can be streamlined and made consistent to ensure every customer receives the highest quality service possible.
Automation has taken industries by storm. It can be seen all over different sectors in the business world. Examples could be automated real estate listing platforms, food processing automation, all the way to workflow automation. But, this innovation has reached an industry where it is needed the most – the marketing field.
Campaign Monitor has outlined three areas that are most important to a successful marketing automation campaign: data (automation triggers, e.g. a new customer sign-up), rules (automation process, e.g. send the new customer a welcome email after 1 hour), and content (automation delivery, e.g. include welcome video in email).
Some of the major processes that can be automated include:
- Data integration – unifying data from multiple disparate sources to create a unified view and/or enable disconnected applications to work in tandem.
- Market segmentation – grouping and dividing audience data into sub-groups based on shared characteristics to allow for more personalized communication.
- Campaign management – repetitive marketing tasks and day-to-day operational needs, for example, social media scheduling, email marketing workflows, push notifications drip-campaigns, etc.
The Benefits of Marketing Automation in Your Marketing Approaches
1. Saves time
Automation removes the need for repetitive manual tasks by replacing them with automated flows. It also enables faster data analysis from automated reporting and analytics, which is essential in the increasingly data-driven marketing field.
88% of marketers said automation helps them reduce time spent preparing reports and analysis, allowing them to spend more time on strategic planning and research.
2. Reduces errors
Some of the best tasks to automate are the ones that you may think are simple to carry out. But, unfortunately, these simple, repetitive tasks can also cause the most accidental errors due to complacency.
Beyond making your business appear unprofessional, under GDPR, human error in data handling can cost you £17.5 million or 4% of annual global turnover – whichever is greater. Automating your data handling processes can ensure you stay compliant and avoid a fine.
3. Improves customer experience (CX)
Customer experience is the total impact your marketing has on a customer’s view of your brand; it’s a 360-degree concept encompassing marketing, sales, customer service, brand loyalty, and more.
Automating marketing processes such as email or social media marketing can enable your brand to be a constant presence and source of information to your customers 24-7. Automated emails, chatbots, social media messengers, and comments can all be automated and optimized to improve CX.
It may sound like a bit of a throw-away term, but it’s now reported that 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for good CX, so don’t underestimate its power!
What type of freelancer is best for your marketing automation strategy?
1. The ‘big picture’ automation strategist
Visualizing marketing automation can be a bit of a minefield; in order to automate marketing processes, you need a high-level, step-by-step plan for every touchpoint that your customers will come across.
A freelance automation strategist can be a great asset to your marketing department. They can act as a fresh pair of eyes to identify the areas within your marketing approaches that can be automated and prioritise automation tasks that will see the highest ROI for your business.
Ideally, your automation strategist should be a keen customer experience (CX) expert with the ability to design streamlined workflows personalised to your audience segments.
2. The email sequence copywriter
Writing emails, you can do that with your eyes closed, right? But it takes a special kind of copywriter to ensure you don’t lose your human side when it comes to automated emails.
When writing and designing emails for automation, there are two critical factors to keep in mind:
- The desired action for that email, e.g. click CTA, watch a video, reply, etc.
- The overall goal of the email sequence, e.g. book a demo, purchase a product, etc.
Hiring a freelance email sequence copywriter can ensure that your automated emails are conversion-focused and speak to your customers in a personalised manner without sounding robotic.
3. The social media marketer
According to Buffer, a business should be posting 14 times a day on Twitter alone, meaning that if you were to use the full character length of 280, you would roughly need to write 770 words per day.
It’s also likely that your business uses other channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or even TikTok – all of which require more than just text-based content to feed the algorithms that bring organic reach.
Writing posts, styling and shooting photos, recording videos or podcasts, creating interactive groups, polls or stories, all drain the time and energy of in-house marketers who, in some cases, do not have the capacity or skill set to cope.
Hiring a freelancer to automate your social media marketing strategy can be a real-time-saver. Plus, depending on your social media goals, you can hire a freelancer who specializes in social trends, videography, photography, community management, etc., to make your content stand out from the crowd.
To put any marketing automation strategy into place, you will need to invest in multiple SaaS tools (e.g., SaaS reporting tools) that enable you to create workflows and generate analytics reports.
Hiring a marketing automation freelancer is a potentially priceless investment, as many freelancers will already know the best automation tools, trends, and practices on the market. In addition, freelance marketers have the creativity, time, and skillsets to supercharge your marketing automation approaches and ensure that you reach your full potential as a business.
Ready to hire? Our marketplace of over 410,000 freelancers have the skills and expertise needed to skyrocket your business to the next level. From marketers to designers, copywriters to SEO experts – browse the talented bunch here!
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