I spent last week in Melbourne for Xerocon South and artificial intelligence and automation featured in pretty much every speech and breakout session.

Clearly machines will be doing more and more of the mundane work we used to do manually. But what about marketing – can that be automated?

To a point.

I’ll write more about this in a separate post but in short, if your marketing strategy is a pile of crap then there’s no point automating it. You’ll just be really efficient at building a bigger pile of crap.

Have no strategy at all? Then what are you even automating?

Let’s assume you have a good strategy. You’ve worked out who your ideal prospect is, where they hang out and the right messaging to engage them. To put your plan into action, there’s a lot of manual work to be done. Whether that’s by you or you can afford to hire marketing professionals there are many marketing tasks that robots just can’t do yet.

But there’s definitely a whole bunch of stuff you can automate. Here are three ways you can use technology to do marketing for you.

Publishing, distributing and amplifying content

Getting your content seen in multiple places is important. A blog post, Tweet or video on Facebook might not convert a prospect into a client but it has been proven time and again that people buy from brands they recognise.

It’s why billboards still exist – good old brand recognition works.

Manually posting the same content on your website, social media sites and through email is dull and time consuming. It’s a great example of where automation is appropriate.

The most popular feature of Bizink websites is our “One Minute Marketing” system. Spend one minute posting a blog (pre-written for you) to your site and it auto-posts to your social media sites and your email newsletter. You can even schedule posts for weeks in advance making it super fast and easy to have fresh content on your website, social sites and email communications. Here’s a quick video on how it works.

One Minute Marketing

Meet Edgar – put your social media on autopilot

Even if you have hundreds of followers on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, when you post, only a tiny fraction of them will read it. This isn’t because your posts suck but because your followers are also following hundreds of other people, all of whom are posting too. Your content gets lost in a sea of political rants, cat videos and shameless self promotion.

The trick is to repeatedly post your most important content so a much bigger chunk of your audience actually sees it. For example, do you have a really cool piece of content like an ebook you’d like clients and prospects to see? That type of “evergreen” content is exactly what you should be posting to social media several times a week. Only then will it get in front of your entire audience. Even if people see it multiple times, that’s good too – it often takes several “touches” before people act.

While you could do this yourself, you’d be mad to when Meet Edgar can do it for you.

 

Meet Edgar

 

With Edgar, you create a content queue, add your social sites, decide on a posting schedule and leave it to do its thing. There’s a bit of setup involved but once that’s done, you’ll only need to review it occasionally to add new content and remove older posts.

While other tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to post to several social sites at once, nobody has mastered repeat posting quite like Edgar.

The cost is $49 per month and you can find out more on their website.

Automated content

I’ve been working with accountants and bookkeepers since 2010 and I’ve noticed a few common traits. A big slice of you guys:

  • Don’t enjoy writing (numbers people?)
  • Don’t have much/any time to do marketing

Why do work you don’t enjoy, aren’t good at and takes up precious time?

Would you advise your clients to do their own books?

If writing marketing content makes you feel like this why not put your content creation in the hands of professionals. At Bizink, we give clients a bunch of content ranging from blog posts, business resources to partner content from the like of Xero, Receipt Bank and Spotlight Reporting.

Blog Posts

An active blog is a key ingredient of a successful website but finding the time to blog is not easy. Bizink has a team a content writers and it’s still a challenge for us.

We give all our website clients access to a library of 150+ blogs with new blogs added each month.

You’ll not find any compliance content in there – business owners don’t want to read about tax, they pay you to look after it for them. The topics are what business owners are really interested in – how to start, run and eventually exit their business successfully.

Partner Content

Your software partners are key to your business. It’s great to have their content on your site but again, it takes time to add and keep updated.

Our answer is our Partner Resources, featuring content from many of the major vendors that accountants and bookkeepers work with. They are posted and managed by us. You don’t have to do a thing.

So from Xero, we have a landing page like on Seachange Accountants and also training videos from Xero TV. This means you can own the relationship with your client and keep them on your website.

Amongst others, Bizink offers content from QuickBooks, Sage, MYOB, Receipt Bank and Spotlight Reporting.

Mockup

Business Resources

The reason we know what business owners are interested in is our content team has been writing for them since the late 1990s. Our sister company, The Small Business Company, is a global leader in small business content and current and past clients include software giants like Microsoft, Intuit, Sage and MYOB and financial institutions including Bank of America, Lloyds TSB, Royal Bank of Canada, National Australia Bank and ANZ Bank

We give website clients a mix of evergreen content ranging from static content like articles and templates to interactive content like our business plan health check which you can see below. This is the US version but all content is regionalised (or regionalized!) depending on where you are based.

Business Plan Health Check

 

Interactive content like this gets website visitors thinking about their businesses and sparks conversations.


Want to automate your marketing?

Book some time with one of our website specialists and they’ll show you how to get started with Bizink marketing automation in your firm.