Justin Hatfield
Marketing & Industry Awareness Committee Member
HECO - All Systems Go
Kalamazoo, Michigan
Do you ever wonder to yourself, "How do all of these people have this much time to be on social media?"
So many businesses, even in our industry, post content weekly, daily or hourly. In addition to this, they send out regular email blasts, have a blog or purchase advertisements online.
How do they have the time to get it all done? Do they have a team of marketing people doing all of this for them?
Likely not.
For the vast majority of people in our industry involved in online marketing, the answer isn't a large marketing staff, but a tool called marketing automation.
Finding the Right Tool
A quick Google search for marketing automation will show you several products. Tools such as Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, Hootsuite and Mailchimp help make it appear that you have a huge marketing team. In reality, you (or a team member) are using the software to promote your company in addition to your current functions.
Many of these programs have features to streamline business development efforts. Some of these functions include automatically contacting customers when they visit your website or following up on completed jobs with surveys. While some of the programming may become complex, marketing automation can be quite simple.
How to Use Marketing Automation
As an EASAn, we have lots of "cool" things that we can show our customers (and future customers). Pushing engaging content out on social media doesn't have to take a lot of time.
For instance, let’s say you spend some time one week walking around your service center taking pictures of jobs you are working on. You then write brief descriptions of what those images show to create a repository of social media posts. In just a couple of hours, you will have lots of social media content. With a marketing automation tool, you could schedule five or even 100 different posts to be released over a given period of time. Three weeks later, you could be working on a different job, and your marketing automation tool is posting the content you already created to LinkedIn or Facebook for you.
Every platform has different features and solutions that could make sense for you and your service center. Maybe you aren't fond of social media. You could take the same approach from above and share what's going on in the service center from a marketing automation platform in the form of an e-newsletter. This method helps keep your name in front of your clients, so they remember you if they have a motor issue in the future.
No matter which method you choose (social media, email, etc.), use marketing automation so you can easily appear to be a marketing guru!
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