[0:00]Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining our webinar today to learn about five easy ways to automate your marketing. My name is Janine and I'm a marketing specialist here at Acton and I'll be your moderator for today's webinar. Before we get started, I'd like to go over a few items so you know how to participate in today's event. We've taken a screenshot of an example of the attendee interface. You should see something that looks like this in the upper right hand corner of your screen. You're listening in using your computer's speaker system by default. If you would prefer to join over the phone, just select telephone in the audio pane and the dial-in information will be displayed. You'll have the opportunity to submit text questions to today's presenter by typing your questions into the questions pane of the control panel. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation. We will collect these and address them during the Q&A session at the end of today's presentation. I'd now like to introduce our speaker, Adam Mertz. Adam is a senior product marketing manager at Act-On and is a veteran of the software industry. He has spent over 10 years helping companies of all sizes, implement and optimize their marketing and sales technology investments. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. Hey Janine, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Today, we're going to be talking about a few really easy things that you can do to take advantage of marketing automation. And the key here is easy because marketing automation is such a broad topic and it can really feel overwhelming. There's a lot of things to do. There's a lot of really great things to do and there's a lot of really sophisticated things to do. But a lot of those sophisticated things, you don't really have to start with them right out of the gate. What we're going to talk about today are the type of things that you can do to really get started very quickly and start seeing the results very quickly. So that's our agenda. Let's go ahead and dive in. So the first tip that we're going to talk about today is automating your blog or your RSS feed. Now, for some of you that are listening, you may already be doing this. You may be automating your blog or your RSS feed. But for those of you who aren't, this is a really great way to stay in touch with your audience and to stay in touch with prospects who are interested in the topics that you're talking about in your blog and in your RSS feed. So the key here is that it's all about content and getting the content that you're creating out to your audience and keeping your audience engaged. What we find is that a lot of marketers are spending an incredible amount of time creating blog posts and creating content. And it's really easy to just set up an automated email to distribute that content out to your audience. So with Acton, it's very easy to do that. You just use our RSS content block and you just drag and drop that content block right into an email. And what that does is it pulls directly from your blog or from your RSS feed and it automatically populates that email. So you can choose to send it out on a daily basis, a weekly basis, or a monthly basis. It's completely up to you based on your publishing frequency. And it's just a really great way to make sure that people are staying in touch with the content that you're creating. The next thing we're going to talk about is creating automated welcome email programs. Now this sounds really simple and it sounds like something that everybody should be doing. But what we find is that a lot of people aren't. A lot of people are still relying on their content management systems to send out these welcome emails. And the challenge with that is that the content management systems are great at sending out a very simple, basic email. But with marketing automation, you can do so much more. You can include things like links to social media, links to your blog, links to other content that might be relevant to your audience. You can also include things like dynamic content. So based on what you know about the person, you can customize that welcome email to them. And the key here is that if somebody has signed up for your newsletter, if somebody has filled out a form, if somebody has indicated interest in your company, that's really the highest point of engagement you're going to get from them right out of the gate. And you want to make sure that you're taking advantage of that and you're providing them with as much content as possible. And that includes things like asking them to subscribe to your social media channels, connecting with you on LinkedIn, following you on Twitter, liking you on Facebook. You'll also want to ask them to, you know, whitelist your email address. That's a great way to make sure that you're getting through their spam filters. And it's just a great way to stay engaged with your prospects and your customers. So tip number three is identifying your most engaged prospects. Now with marketing automation, you can actually create what's called a hot prospect list. And what that does is it monitors behavior and it monitors activity on your website and in your emails. So if somebody is opening up your emails, if somebody is clicking on links in your emails, if somebody is visiting your pricing page, if somebody is watching a video, if somebody is filling out a form, you can assign scores to those activities. And once somebody reaches a certain score, you can automatically send them to a hot prospect list. Now what that does is it makes sure that you're always identifying your most engaged prospects and getting them over to your sales team. So what we find is that a lot of marketers are doing a great job of identifying these hot prospects. But they're sending them over to the sales team and then the sales team doesn't really have a lot of context as to why they're a hot prospect. So with marketing automation, you can actually set up an alert to go out to your sales team as soon as somebody hits that hot prospect threshold. And in that alert, you can include information like what pages they visited, what emails they've opened, what forms they've filled out, and that provides your sales team with a lot of really great information to have a more intelligent conversation with your prospects. So the fourth tip is automating your social media. Now, for some of you who are listening, you may already be doing this. You may be automating your social media. But for those of you who aren't, this is a really great way to make sure that you're staying engaged with your audience on social media. So with Acton, you can actually create a social media publishing calendar. And what that does is it allows you to schedule out your social media posts in advance. So you can schedule them out for the entire week, for the entire month, for the entire quarter. And it's just a great way to make sure that you're always staying engaged with your audience on social media and you're always providing them with fresh content. You can also include things like links to your blog, links to your website, links to your landing pages. And it's just a great way to make sure that you're always driving traffic back to your website. And the fifth and final tip is automating your reporting. Now, for some of you who are listening, you may already be doing this. You may be automating your reporting. But for those of you who aren't, this is a really great way to make sure that you're always staying on top of your marketing efforts. So with Acton, you can actually create custom reports. And what that does is it allows you to choose exactly what metrics you want to see in your report. So you can choose to see things like email opens, email clicks, website visits, form submissions, and you can choose to have those reports sent out to you on a daily basis, a weekly basis, or a monthly basis. It's completely up to you based on your reporting needs. And it's just a really great way to make sure that you're always staying on top of your marketing efforts and you're always making data-driven decisions. So those are the five easy ways to automate your marketing. I hope you found this helpful. And I hope you're able to take advantage of these tips and start automating your marketing today. Thank you so much, Adam, for that insightful presentation. We're now going to begin the Q&A session. Please submit your questions through the questions pane in your control panel. Adam, we have a question here from Sarah. She asks, "What's the biggest mistake marketers make when they're first starting out with marketing automation?" That's a great question, Janine. I think the biggest mistake marketers make is trying to do too much too soon. Marketing automation is a very powerful tool, but it can be overwhelming if you try to implement everything all at once. I always recommend starting small, picking a few key areas to automate, and then gradually expanding your efforts as you get more comfortable. That makes a lot of sense. We have another question from John. He's asking, "How long does it typically take to see results from marketing automation?" That's another excellent question. The time to see results can vary depending on what you're automating and your specific goals. However, for the easy tips we discussed today, like automating your blog or welcome emails, you can often see initial results within weeks, if not days. More complex automation strategies might take a few months to fully optimize and see their full impact. Great to hear. It sounds like there's a quick win potential there. One last question for you, Adam, from Lisa. She wants to know, "Is marketing automation only for large companies, or can small businesses benefit from it too?" Absolutely not. Marketing automation is incredibly beneficial for businesses of all sizes, including small businesses. In fact, small businesses often have limited resources, and automation can help them do more with less, freeing up valuable time for other tasks. The key is to choose a platform and strategy that aligns with your budget and needs, and as we've shown today, there are many easy ways to get started. Thank you, Adam, for answering those questions and for sharing your expertise with us today. And thank you to our audience for attending today's webinar. We hope you found it informative. You will receive a follow-up email within 24 to 48 hours with a link to view a recording of today's webinar. On behalf of Acton and our presenter, thank you for joining us, and have a great rest of your day.