If you have been thinking of how to make your digital marketing and lead generation efforts more automated and more productive in the long term, you need to get down and nifty with the innovative automation strategies that have already made it possible for thousands of businesses thrive in today’s ultra competitive environment.

Whether you are in the market to generate SEO leads or Web design leads, there’s always room for improvement in terms of automation. The types of automation strategies that will work for your business will depend on your business model, marketing model, and the milestones that you have set for yourself.

1. Workforce collaboration

With everything being driven by data nowadays, there simply is no more room for reliance on just plain email. If you’re still relying solely on email today, you are missing out on the titanic convenience of having a collaboration space working for you.

Software like Slack, Basecamp and Trello have revolutionized how collaboration is happening between massive teams, and offshore processes run by people from other countries is not even a problem when you have a single, unified space for collaboration where files and communication can flow unabated, to be picked up by anyone who needs the information.

It’s like watching a lightning relay of information, and people will have everything they need to operate with no delay and the least amount of friction. If you have been worrying for the longest time about how you can manage a system with so many moving parts, maybe it’s not your leadership skills that is the problem, but the tools that you and the rest of your team are using?

Workforce collaboration solutions address not just the need for seamless and instant communication. When you have just one space to do everything that needs to be done, it also becomes possible to make task management more efficient and as painless as possible for everyone involved. You remove redundancy and other common issues if you have everything in one place.

2. Automating content

We’re going to be upfront about this: no piece of software can ever replace the mind of a good writer. None.

There have been so many attempts to do this in the past, and unfortunately, so many have hoodwinked people to buying “rewriting software” that don’t work. There’s no need to even try, because a machine can’t write good content, period. But how can we help your content writers? How can we make their jobs easier?

One of the more arduous tasks of content writers is finding content good enough to be referenced for individual business websites and blogs. There’s plenty of content out there, but the selection process is difficult. This is where machine learning can come into play.

Headline analysis with a focus on keyword density, demand, and reach all determine the usefulness of a headline or topic for the content writer. By automating the process of research just a little, you can reduce the time needed to generate worthy content for your website.

3. Email marketing

Email is the oldest electronic method of communicating with people and yet it is also one of the most complex to work with, mainly because of the varying responses that people have when receiving email in the first place. This is where automation strategies can come to help you out. For example, you can use drip-feed emails to provide value and promote services and products at intervals that won’t annoy your list.

Subscriber segmentation allows you to distribute content to different kinds of readers based on their line or segment in the marketing funnel. Personalization of emails based on the segment involved is also easier with visually-driven software that is easy to operate by all skill levels.

Then there’s the urgent task of A/B testing or split-testing your emails to see which is more effective. This is especially true for lead generation efforts that offer services directly to possible customers. You can’t know why something is not working unless you test the emails you are sending out now.

And finally, we have email marketing analysis or the general analysis of all your efforts in single or multiple campaigns. All of the data you can derive from all these automated tests will make you a data-driven business person, which is so important in an age when big numbers are continually being crunched to make sense of an ever-changing marketing horizon.

4. Marketing insights

How important is it to get feedback and analyze data from would-be customers, present customers, and future customers? It’s 99% of the struggle.

That’s why you need to employ quiz software and surveys to get feedback from website visitors and you also need to start using social listening systems to complete the omnichannel approach to gathering valuable marketing data. Real-time insights are important when you are doing split-testing and when you are in the middle of an important campaign, nothing says success than actually being able to determine customer behavior.

5. Social media

You need to be on multiple social media platforms because there isn’t a day when people aren’t tinkering with their social networks. The difference now is that people have different experiences across different channels and having multiple channel access to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other networks will give you direct access to people that belong to your niche.

The problem perhaps with initial attempts to work with multiple social media channels is the time needed to get posts up, comment, and respond to people who are messaging through different networks and applications.

This will not be a problem if you are using solutions like Hootsuite that cater to different social networks and allow users to converse instantly with just one, central dashboard. Yes, it might take a bit of learning, but if you already have a team – why not make a space for social media and give it a try? You would likely be surprised by the results.