Marketing automation is essential for online marketers. It’s not just a nice thing that adds to your productivity; it’s absolutely necessary and there’s one simple reason for that – It handles routine tasks so that you can focus your time and energy on more important things.

Saving Time for “Thinking Work”

What should you be spending your time doing on a day-to-day business? Your true role as a marketer is to study your market, and plan and execute marketing strategies. In other words, it’s “thinking” work.

You also are the one who is working one-on-one or one-to-many with your clients – the work only YOU can do!

However, when you’re bogged down with simple routine tasks that anyone (or any machine) could do for you, you’re losing that precious thinking, organizing and client time. The hours you could be devoting to really careful consideration of your brand image, mind mapping your overall marketing strategy, or working with clients are wasted away on busy work.

Get Routine Tasks Off Your Desk

In addition to planning and organizing, another important part of marketing is building relationships.  You need to be actively engaged and interacting with the members of your target market, whether on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or through face-to-face offline events or online webinars.

Relationship building, like planning and organizing, takes time. Also, relationship building tasks cannot be done by a software program, an outsourced worker across the planet, or a nifty gadget. This is work that you and only you can do.

If you can successfully automate routine tasks and get them off your to-do list, you can spend more time interacting with members of your target market, and the benefits to this are priceless.

Automated Tools Are Sometimes Better Than You

The main reason you need to automate is that it gets rid of simple tasks and frees up your time. However, there is another good reason to automate your marketing. Sometimes, automated programs can do things better than you do. For example, an automated analytics program can take in a great deal of data and deliver relevant metrics to you. If you were to analyze this data yourself, it would not only take a great deal of time, but it wouldn’t be as precise as the analysis a formula or algorithm can do.

In fact, there are some tasks that you can’t do on your own. You can’t do them at all without automation. An example here would be email marketing. You simply can’t build, maintain and market to an email list all by yourself through your usual email address. You need an automated program to carry out email marketing.

Getting Started with Automation

If you’ve shied away from automation until now because of the technological barriers, don’t. It’s very easy to get started. Start by automating one task at a time, and then once you’re comfortable and seeing results, move on to the next. Soon, you’ll see how automation saves you time for more important things and makes a huge impact on your business growth.

What are some things you’re not automating that you should be?  Share with me below!