Digital marketing automation strategies

Any type of AI automation or marketing automation can feel overwhelming. The possibilities, the tools, where to start and what to automate.

My advice: start automating tedious tasks within your company or within your current marketing activities.

Aim to save time first.

Example: We spend a lot of time writing blog posts every week and then re-writing our top insights on LinkedIn. Now our LinkedIn draft posts are automatically created with AI in a scheduling tool which we can review and post.

"We're saving around 3-5 hours every week in organic LinkedIn marketing."

A slide from our marketing deck

Our custom GPT is invaluable as we've fed it context, rules & parameters of what we want & don't want. It avoids all the typical AI language and formatting which allows for even quicker post editing within our scheduling tool.

Anything involving multiple tools or tedious manual processes is a great candidate for automation.

Marketing automation examples

Here's a few examples of marketing automations for the busy marketing manager or leader:

1. An automated spell checker

   This automation scrapes your entire website and then emails your webmaster a PDF once a month of the website pages with the spelling errors and the corrections.

2. A social listening analysis report

   This automation is a social listening functionality that collects all your online customer reviews & conversations. AI then analyses the findings and a PDF report is sent to the head of marketing every month. (we're currently developing this)

3. A junior BDR (business development representative)

   This can go beyond the scope of marketing automation and into the realm of sales enablement. You can create an automation where draft emails are created after AI has analysed if there's a service match for all inbound leads.

4. Email sequences

   Think in terms of 'if then'. If someone does X, what needs to happen then? Example: someone abandons a shopping cart, send them an email reminder with their shopping basket.

5. Customer on-boarding sequence

   You could trigger a custom onboarding experience once a custom has been marked as closed won in your CRM. Example: create a slack channel for your team, send a welcome pack to your client, create a ClickUp tasks for your team.

6. Share your customer stage data with your Google Ads account

   You can create a workflow with Zapier in order to share your customer stage data (MQL, SQL, Closed Won) with your account. You'll then be able to map out your paid media results according to each stage. This is a very valuable automation for b2b businesses.

Use custom AI agents to supercharge your marketing automation

AI can be placed into almost any automation process and if you're building your own custom GPT (sounds harder than it is) then you could really get the full benefit AI has to offer.

AI in combination with other marketing tools or software is the real game changer as you're giving it more information to work from and increasing the quality of your input.

Increasing the quality of your input is the #1 way to get better results from AI.

Which marketing automations should you avoid?

I would say end to end content creation would be an automation I would highly advise against. The reason being - if your website user can get the same answer from ChatGPT or Gemini, what individual value is your website or brand really adding?

Content produced purely by AI is a summary of information that already exists and it still needs to be fact checked.

It is a different matter altogether if you give AI your customer survey data and competitor research and then automate the findings. That would be a much better use case.

Which marketing automation platforms should I use?

The three primary options I would consider are Zapier, N8N, and Gumloop. Each of these tools extends beyond marketing automation, serving as comprehensive workflow automation solutions. You might even find yourself utilizing a combination of them.

Then if you're looking at purely marketing automation specifically for e-mail sequences I'd consider tools such as Hubspot or Klaviyo.

The platform is not nearly as important as the task, process or workflow you want to automate.