Marketing automation sounds rather complex. Basically, it is simply tools and software you use to do things for your business without having to manually do them. For example, you probably have heard of an autoresponder. That is a basic form of marketing automation and one every business should have, even if they are a standard brick and mortar business. Collecting emails and building a list the right way is crucial to any business.

An autoresponder allows you to collect emails from people who opt in and want to be on your list. You can then separate the list based on interest, or which optin form they used. You can set up emails to drip feed automatically to the list. You can send to some or all of the list as needed. This kind of automation frees you up to work on other projects and allows your customers to get what they opted in for, or products they buy immediately without having to wait for you do to something.

There are other tools for marketing automation as well. For example, there are several tools that allow you to set up posts for social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, reddit, and others, to post for you at specific times. Use these sparingly and wisely because people do not appreciate not hearing directly from you. Especially in Facebook groups, you may find yourself banned if you keep posting only automated posts to the group. Remember that a big part of social media is about being social and communicating directly. However, if you use automated posts correctly, they can help you brand yourself and have more of a voice on the sites.

Another type of marketing automation is used with blogs. Word Press has this built in, plus there are many free and low cost plug-ins for Word Press that can add more features to the marketing automation for your blog. The basic one that Word Press has built in, is the ability to drip feed your blog posts. For example if you know that next week you will not have time to post on your blog, you can spend the weekend writing the posts ahead of time and set it up to drip feed the content on your regular posting schedule. A lot of marketers do this on a regular basis.

These are just a few of the examples of marketing automation out there that can help your business. Whatever methods you end up using, be sure to remember that automation is just a tool, and not a magic pill, to running your business.