Modern marketing contains so many pieces – digital ads, print, radio, social media, SEO, email campaigns, and more. Your business might not use every one of these channels, but chances are you use a mix of several. Keeping track of each arm of your marketing strategy is key to understanding the success of your efforts and in helping you shape additional strategies.

Marketing automation helps businesses and marketing leaders manage their campaigns. From planning and publishing content to analyzing performance, automation enables businesses to make smarter decisions and more effectively launch and manage branding building activities.

In fact, 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software, and 77% had an increase in conversions.

Ultimately, marketing automation can help you run your marketing more efficiently while saving your business time and money. Here’s how:

1. More effective: Small businesses, in particular, are often strapped for resources, and so the ability to get more done, reach more customers, and quickly fix issues is a huge benefit.

1. Less repetition: Marketing automation means that some of your marketing can run on autopilot. Instead of using man-hours to manually upload social media posts or send out emails to every customer for particular actions, you can batch on the front end and let things run and you can set up email campaigns to go out automatically when a customer makes a purchase, signs up for your newsletter, requests a quote, and more. This gives you more time to be creative and conduct customer research that helps you build the best content possible.

1. Better reporting: Marketing automation can give you a better handle on understanding all the different parts of your marketing campaigns and gives you better insight into how your customers are reacting to each of the different facets across channels.

What are the best marketing automation tools for small businesses?

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‘A child has a deep longing to discover that the World is based on Truth. Respect that longing.  In our attempt to help children grow into Inspired Adults, we wish them to carry the Youthfulness of their Souls, and the Wonders of Childhood into their old age.'

Conscious Parenting FREE to download this weekend! Explore the Mindfulness Exercises designed for the family and do let us know what you think! We would love to read your review!

https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Parenting-Mindful-Mindfulness-Training-ebook/dp/B00U8V75SQ

Last week I was asked to lead a Circle of Life Workshop with a group of people who regularly meditate and this is what happened...

http://artof4elements.com/entry/193/mindfulness-exercise-circle-of-life

A few weeks ago I read a book by this author about freelance writing.  Since I found the information in that book so helpful,  when I saw that she was offering this for free for a few days, I immediately scooped it up.  It is full of free resources and websites that will help you out along the way, plus free classes.  What I liked about this book, compared to other books of this type that I've looked at, is that she gave you specific information on each one instead of just listing a bunch of things.  This saves time - you already know what each link provides so you're not going there blind.  Very well done and very helpful.

Trying something new