Could your company use a boost to its productivity?
If so, the solution is probably a lot easier than you think.
Automation tools can handle important tasks without requiring personal attention, yet you won’t have to sacrifice the quality of your results.
10 Automation Tools You Should Start Using Right Away
Confused about where to start? Here are the 10 best automation tools you should begin using in 2017 to increase your productivity right away:
#1. Campaign Monitor
The heart of any good email campaign is solid automation. There is simply no way you can respond to every person who opts in. With Campaign Monitor, you can create stunning, professional-looking emails once and then set up criteria so they are sent out based on a subscriber’s behavior.
Travel brand Virgin uses Campaign Monitor’s integration with their shopping cart to automate email offers based on transactional history.
For example, once a Virgin customer purchases a travel experience, they receive a discount offer on their next purchase. This incentivizes them to use Virgin for their next travel experience.
By using behavior based automated emails, Virgin saw a 120% increase in email marketing growth.
#2. Workfront
If your company is dealing with bottlenecks in its workflow, Workfront is the solution.
Workfront is an enterprise project management platform that allows teams to do all their work in one place. By managing the entire process from inception to launch, teams using Workfront can go to market faster.
The platform allows for teams to manage everything from the ideation of new initiatives to approval process with customized workflows. Collaborate instantly across your organization on over 150 different file types, including web pages and video, to decrease approval times for digital assets.
As Eric Cuevas, Senior Program Manager of Leapfrog puts it, “Since deploying Workfront, we have fewer unexpected project issues and I personally have experienced huge time savings; 90 percent reductions sometimes in the amount of time I’m spending now compared to the time I previously spent on the same task.”
#3. Bizible
Bizible is a great tool for automating many of the tasks required for a successful sales funnel. This includes automating custom reports about popular platforms like AdWords. It also provides detailed lead histories, which makes it easy to examine every opportunity.
One of the best features of Bizible is the ability to track data across multiple traffic channels-digital and non-digital.
Bizible closes the loop between these sources and allows you to see how leads are being generated and track which data sources are most successful.
#4. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar may be one of the most unique social marketing tools available.
While it allows you to schedule your posts like so many others, the thing that separates MeetEdgar is that it will automatically repost them for you, too. This increases the ROI for each piece of content you create.
Anyone who has ever poured through their Facebook analytics in order to pull the most popular posts for resharing knows what a time consuming and burdensome task that can be!
MeetEdgar saves companies both time and money by allowing you to build a library of successful posts that can be scheduled and reused as you see fit.
#5. Buffer
Buffer is one of the most popular social media marketing tools. Aside from its scheduling features, Buffer also lets you track the performance of each post, which includes metrics even the social media platforms cannot give you.
One of the best features in Buffer is the Instagram integration. You can schedule posts in Buffer and will receive a push notification to your phone when it is time to post. The caption is already copied to your clipboard so all you need to do is paste and post. It doesn’t get much easier than that!
#6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite and Buffer are very similar tools. The two platforms have been compared countless times and the general consensus is that Buffer is the leaner tool with more automation. However, Hootsuite integrates with a greater number of platforms, which can really increase your opportunity to automate important tasks.
Hootsuite lately has taken away the ability to preview Facebook links within groups and also some of it’s Linkedin Group features. It’s ability to follow multiple streams is helpful for reposting articles to social media though.
#7. Sniply
Don’t just link to sources in your content. Use Sniply so that those links include CTAs for one of your offers. Furthermore, Sniply will also monitor your results so you can see which types of content work best for increasing your CTR.
If you’re already sharing content through your social channels on a daily basis (which you should be!), you can use Sniply to attach a message to the page you’re linking to with a backlink to your website or even include a text entry box to encourage users to sign up for your latest promotions and newsletter.
#8. Tailwind
Tailwind is a fantastic automation tool if your company uses Instagram and/or Pinterest. The software allows you to schedule posts, monitor your CTR, and increase overall exposure. If you are constantly running out of ideas for posts, you will love Tailwind, as it makes it easy to find new content ideas that are already popular.
Tailwinds visual schedule is a great way to see all your scheduled posts along with the images attached to them. The ability to bulk schedule and pin to multiple boards together can also be a huge timesaver. The pricing structure is a little confusing but most smaller businesses should stay within the $9.99/mo range.
#9. Searchmetrics
SEO is essential to attracting potential customers, but it can also be extremely time-consuming. Searchmetrics automates vital tasks like backlink analysis, crawling your competition, content optimization, rank tracking, and much more.
Searchmetrics covers every aspect of your digital-marketing campaigns from content, search, social and PPC and allows enterprises to analyze, measure, predict and report on them. Quicker identification of errors through deep-crawl capabilities.
The desktop and mobile crawling-agents are impressive to say the least! The deep crawl capabilities allow for fast identification of errors and also help improve performance and prioritize any issues. Crawling through millions of URLs to identify any hard to find critical issues not only helps improve user experiences but also avoids issues that can cause search penalties and jeopardize campaigns.
#10. CoSchedule
CoSchedule does a lot of really handy things. As the name suggests, it’s great for keeping your team on the same editorial calendar.
It will also keep track of your most popular social media posts. Then using ReQueue, shares them whenever there is a gap in your posting schedule. This can help increase increase exposure and saves time.
The editorial calendar is an amazing tool for any company that publishes on a WordPress platform. CoSchedule easily integrates with WordPress to manage editorial calendars. Rather than switching between multiple tabs and trying to double check against spreadsheets everything is right there in your CoSchedule calendar. Changes and revisions are automatically updated without changing calendars and sending multiple emails.
Leverage Automation or Fall Behind Competitors
We are long past the point where automation should be seen as a luxury.
You either automate important tasks that don’t need personal attention, or you will lose to competitors who do.
Fortunately, as you just saw, you have plenty of user-friendly options for doing so. Delegation is now as easy as picking the right automation tools for your enterprise. No matter where you could use the help, a tool is available to increase your company’s productivity.
Do you have any automation tools that help you accelerate your productivity?
