We could talk in detail about Marketing Automation, but in this specific article we will not talk about what Marketing Automation is or is, but we will give you 5 keys to automate your work before going on vacation.

As the marketing manager of your company, I am sure that before you go on vacation you asked yourself, "what will happen to all the marketing tasks that I usually do during the year, on vacation will I have to stop them?"

And the answer is no, just automate them.

1. Why automate tasks?

During the year, you will surely perform many tasks periodically to carry out your marketing strategy. Being able to automate them will provide you with three main advantages:

A - You will save time

Time is money, as they say. If you can reduce the time allocated to a task, you can dedicate it to another that is interesting to you, with which your time will be profitable. By automating the tasks you will be able to dedicate yourself to others while the ones you have automated are carried out without you having to intervene or invest more time.

B - You will ensure its correct resolution

If you get used to automating a task, it will always be done in the same way and in the same sequence, so you will have no doubts about how to do it, since you will have the basis on which to work on it.

C - You will keep communication active

Even if you are not there, you will ensure that your usual and essential tasks continue to be carried out and your buyer persona will feel that you are still there, so that communication with them will continue to be active.

2. How do I automate marketing tasks?

Automating marketing tasks is simple, but you need a tool that allows it, such as Hubspot.

Hubspot is a CMS with which you can automate your online marketing tasks in a relatively simple way.

With Hubspot you can automate content marketing tasks, lead nurturing tasks (individualized sending of emails based on the behavior and profile of the contact) and even Hubspot also allows us automation related to contact and list management, transactional emails, notifications internal and the transfer of contacts between tools, among many other actions, generally through Workflows, which are automated actions that can be activated based on certain behaviors or events that we can choose.

However, in this article we will only focus on the automation of Content Marketing, leaving the rest of automation possibilities for other articles. We therefore review the automation of blogs, social networks or email marketing that does not depend on user behavior, as we will see below.

3. What tasks can I easily automate?

With Hubspot you can easily automate some of the most common tasks that are done in marketing strategies.

Let's take the example of a content marketing campaign. Imagine that every week you create new content that you want to publish on your blog, an email where you notify your contact list regarding this content and publish the new content on your social networks.

With Hubspot you can automate all these processes to prepare everything before going on vacation and rest those weeks with the peace of mind of knowing that your content marketing campaign is still active.

Let's take a closer look at each step:

Articles

With Hubspot you can create the article within your blog and schedule it to be published on the day and time that you prefer. In this way, it is easy to prepare, for example, an article every week and that it is published on Monday of the same week, with which you can ensure the periodicity and that the publication of articles continues normally, despite the fact that you are from holidays.

To do this, you only have to create your post from Marketing> Website> Blog, create a new Blog publication and when you have it well written and configured you can go to the "Schedule" tab and choose the date and time in which you I would like to publish your blog article.

Email Marketing

Likewise, you can prepare in advance the mailing to send to your contacts, taking into account only the link that the article will have once published if you incorporate a CTA (Call to Action) button that leads to the corresponding article.

It is important that you take this point into account and that you make the link taking into account the url of the article, Hubspot allows you to directly link the article if it is already published, but in the event that it is not, you will have to use its specific link, which You will find within your article in the Settings tab. For example, if you have an article with url "automate-tasks-for-vacations" you have to make sure that the final url of the article is entered in the CTA, so that when it is published and sent a couple of days later, the mail to contact list the button is directed correctly to the article.

Finally, scheduling mail delivery is very simple. You have to go to the "Send or schedule" tab, choose the list of contacts to which you want to send the email and choose the day and time for the subsequent sending of the email.

Social networks

In the case of programming on social networks, you can still do it, but including the url of the article, since, again, you cannot program a publication on your social networks directly from the article if it is not published.

Programming a publication is very simple, if your post is not yet published you have to go to Marketing> Social Networks and choose the social network that interests you, as you would generally do. You only have to choose the “When” and choose the day and time to schedule the publication.

However, you have an option to preview how the posts on your social networks would look, directly in the publication tab of the blog article. In this way, you can ensure that both the title and the image that is displayed are seen correctly and just as you are interested.

4. Pros of automating tasks before the holidays

Automating content marketing tasks has essentially the following pros:

You can prepare a planning.

By preparing your publications in advance, you can make a detailed planning of all the content you want to treat while you are on vacation, so that when you return you know where you are and you have not missed any opportunity to incorporate valuable content.

You will ensure that you continue to communicate with your followers.

By not having to stop your publications by not being able to publish them just when they should be published, you ensure that you continue to add value even if you are not present and the communication is still active, through any of the 3 channels, blog, social networks or mailing.

5. Cons of automating tasks before the holidays

Of course, not everything is positive. There are a few issues to keep in mind:

You will not be able to act on current issues

Imagine that you are on vacation, you have scheduled a post that talks about the wonders of taking advantage of the summer to go to the beach and it turns out that just without any logic those days there are several stormy days that suppose that it does not make much sense for your post. In that case, you will not be able to act quickly in this unexpected situation, because you will have already scheduled the publication and it will be done unless you manually stopped it.

You will have to do a more exhaustive job before going on vacation

Logically, if you want to program various contents, you will have to have them prepared before preparing their programming, so that the days before you go on vacation you will have to prepare everything and do a more comprehensive job than in other months, having to do everything preventive the same week, and not spaced between the different weeks of the month.

In summary, from DigitalMakers we know that automating your content marketing tasks is very useful to avoid having to stop in communication with your clients or followers, but it is an important task of planning and work to have it all. well prepared and up and running.