4 Tools for Efficient Marketing Automation

Too much automation can hinder customer experience. When making a call about a problem, we’d rather talk to real humans rather than listening to distorted voices tell us which buttons to press over and over without success.

But in marketing, automation can help streamline business for an overall better service. Many automation programs are heavy in their abilities and hurtful on the wallet. But the tools below will help keep social media profiles happy, without making you wince at the price.

1. Quuu

Quuu supplies “high quality” and “hand picked” content articles written in your industry, to be posted on social media profiles. Currently, they only schedule posts through Buffer.

You select categories related to your industry, choose how many articles you want Quuu to publish in a day, and go to Buffer to create a schedule Quuu will automatically follow.

There are dozens of categories to choose from. But some have more articles than others. For example, their “content marketing” category has a few hundred articles prepared. While “Adwords” only has 20 articles. So if Quuu is posting 6 articles a day from the “Adwords” category, you’d only have enough content to last three days before repeats.

Not great.

But you can also choose them to email which articles they’ve selected for the queue ahead of time. If you don’t like one, remove it. But Quuu won’t replace it until the next day. For example, if you have selected Quuu to post 7 articles, but dislike one (leaving 6 available), a seventh one will not be selected for that batch.

Quuu has also launched a new program called “Promote” where you pay them to promote your articles across social media channels. Many users are excited about it — it might be worth a shot for increased engagement.

2. IFTTT

This site helps you automate…virtually everything.

IFTTT (If This Then That) takes one thing and makes it do whatever it is you choose, automatically. Say your content marketing engagement plan focusses on using lots of gifs. You can select a site that monitors gif popularity and have a list emailed to you daily.

Of if you’ve written a new post for your blog, you can have IFTTT post the link directly to your social media profiles.

This is managed by what they call “recipes”. There are thousands to choose from, to mix and match, and utilize for effective automation. It makes tasks incredibly easy and it’s very customizable based on your needs.

3. Buffer or Hootsuite

Which one to use? It depends on your marketing needs, and whether you’ll be using a free or paid plan.

Both tools allow you to schedule posts and monitor responses and engagement to create a stronger social media marketing campaign.

Buffer’s free plan for individuals only allows 1 profile per social media platforms. So if you run two different Facebook accounts, you’ll only be able to sync one to Buffer.

However, their paid (Awesome) plan — $10 a month — allows for 10 social media profiles. This is usually a better option for social media managers. More importantly, paid plans allow for deeper analysis of audience type, reach, and specific engagement numbers from your posts.

Plus if you’re using Quuu, you’ll need Buffer to schedule and publish their content. Clearly, this collaboration could make your decision to pick Buffer easier.

On the other hand…

Hootsuite’s free plan allows for 3 social media profiles to be synced to their platform. But their Pro plan — $10 a month — allows for 50 social media profiles and access to premium apps. Hootsuite’s interface is also unique but can make or break your decision to stick with them.

If you want to make a fully informed decision based on your automation needs, check them both out. An alternative service to try is Friends+Me!

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