Does social media ever feel a little overwhelming? Between all the different social networks, the various types of content each one requires, and actually spending time and engaging with people on each… All of that content creation, engaging, and analysis can take a lot of time.
But the good news is you don’t have to do it all yourself. Much of social media can be automated, saving you time and maybe even helping you understand your audience even more. From engagement to attracting followers to scheduling to analytics and more, we’ve put together five of the best marketing automation tools for social media to save you time and help you convert sales.
5 Best Marketing Automation Tools & Platforms 2024 (With Reviews)
All-in-One Marketing Automation Tools
1. Kicksta #1 Marketing Automation Tool
The best way to find and attract more real, organic followers on Instagram is to spend time engaging with your ideal followers. The problem with that though is time. Finding and leaving likes or comments on profiles can take a while, and one wrong click and you could be pulled down the rabbit hole for hours, watching food videos, and looking at pictures of dogs in costumes.
Kicksta helps you get rid of this temptation and save you time by doing this engagement for you. You provide target accounts whose followers you want to follow you back.
They should be your competitors, complementary brands, and influencers in your niche. Once you’ve provided these accounts, they get to work engaging with them. Your ideal followers can then go check out your profile, and decide whether or not they’d like to follow you. As long as you’re creating high-quality content, you’ll have guaranteed success.
Kicksta has helped over 10,000 brands and influencers increase their followers with real people who later convert to customers. Your follower count will grow 24/7 without needing constant hands-on effort. Kicksta also allows you to target your ideal audience by demographics or by using hashtags.
With Kicksta, you can know that you’re attracting real followers organically. From there you’ll have the social proof you need to attract partnerships, the follower base to convert into customers, or the community to engage with and influence.
2. Buffer
Buffer has three different products you can choose from to help you convert sales on Instagram. ‘Publish’ helps you plan and publish eye-catching content. ‘Reply’ helps you manage your responses and social conversations in one centralized spot. ‘Analyze’ offers you insights into your performance.
Depending on your needs, each of these can help you save time while continuing to show up on Instagram consistently. By setting aside a bit of time to batch and schedule your content, you can save time from having to remember to actively go into the app and post everyday.
Since you’ll be scheduling content in advance, you can make sure you’re posting at the best time for your audience, even if it’s inconvenient for you. Did you know that one of the best times to post on Friday is 5 am? Chances are you don’t want to have to remember to log in and hit publish first thing Friday. Scheduling with Buffer helps you make sure you never miss a beat.
But their scheduling options are just getting started with feed posts. You can also create a comment that will automatically publish with your post, so you can keep your hashtags outside of your caption automatically. Scrolling through a long caption with lots of space between the end of the content and the hashtags can be annoying for users. Publishing your hashtags in the first comment keeps your posts clean and neat.
You can also schedule Instagram stories with Buffer. Now, they won’t automatically publish for you, but you will get a notification when it’s time to post, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting. This can be a great way to make sure you remember to post key messages in your stories. You can always fill in with other lifestyle posts throughout the day.
Buffer also has a function called ‘Shop Grid’. With this feature, the link in your bio sends followers to a landing page that looks just like your Instagram feed, but each image is easily shoppable. By directing followers to the link in your bio, you’re sending them directly to the shopping portion of your funnel. This is a simple and seamless way to convert your followers into customers on Instagram.
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3. Buzzsumo
When is the last time you sat at your computer, staring at the blinking cursor, wondering what content you could share with your audience that would resonate with them? Buzzsumo is here to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They provide trending topics and sources that you can use to share with your audience.
Buzzsumo also helps with influencer marketing, giving you a platform to easily search for and find the best influencers to partner with your brand. Influencer marketing can be a great way to get your brand and products in front of new people. Influencers tend to have a strong following that takes their advice, so an endorsement from a key influencer can make a big impact to your brand. Once Buzzsumo’s platform helps you find the influencers, you can begin to build a relationship with them so you can create a partnership plan that benefits both you and the influencer.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re just a little behind the times with trending topics, Buzzsumo can help you overcome that. Not only can you see real-time results with fresh content, but you can even view topics by their trending score. You might end up ahead of the curve with your content – how would that feel? Their content idea generator is a great way to mix up your content topics if you feel like you’re writing about the same ideas over and over with different words.
Buzzsumo provides in-depth research and data to inform your marketing strategy with real information, rather than guesses or assumptions. They provide up to five years of data to help you pinpoint trends in your industry so you can be on top of trends the moment they start.
Buzzsumo can also help you get inside the minds of your customers. They’ll search through forums and question sites like Quora, Reddit, and Amazon to see what your audience is asking. From there, you’ll have all the information you need to create content that connects.
4. Tailwind
Tailwind is a scheduling tool that helps you grow your following on both Instagram and Pinterest. You can batch your content ahead of time, view your grid in advance, and then set-it-and-forget-it with Tailwind’s auto-post feature. With a batch uploading tool, you can easily import all the pictures you want to schedule either straight from your camera or from your favorite editing tool.
They’ll even suggest hashtags for you if you’re having trouble coming up with the perfect set for your post. Tailwind automatically suggests hashtags based on your post.
You can certainly add to it with any particular tags you like to use (bonus points if you save them within Tailwind) or any that you’ve researched for this post, but it’s also a good idea to take their suggestions. They have a key to show whether a specific hashtag is Niche, Good, Best or Competitive.
With Tailwind’s SmartSchedule technology, they’ll suggest the best time for you to post for your specific audience. You can even optimize your schedule automatically so you don’t have to think about it. The more you post with Tailwind, the more they’ll be able to make intelligent timing suggestions for your posts.
And you won’t have to worry about running out of content. Tailwind lets you re-post your best posts quickly, so your audience will always have something to see. While we certainly recommend creating new content, this is a great feature for when you find yourself stuck! If you’re working with a team, no worries. Tailwind lets you add additional users to manage your account (or multiple accounts if you’d like).
5. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a platform that offers many different types of tools in one to help grow your business on Instagram. They provide scheduling and publishing services so you can reduce the amount of time you spend posting the content you create. Sprout offers an intuitive calendar layout to help you plan your content on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Within Sprout, you can keep your posts organized by creating tags on the backend based on what your post is about. Creating tags like “News Coverage” or “Promotion” can help you keep track of similar posts when you’re analyzing what worked well and what needs to be changed.
Beyond that, Sprout Social will help your brand stay consistent. For your posts, you have access to an Asset Library and editing tools. These can help you stay on-brand when creating new content.
Sprout Social also helps you stay consistent when it comes to engaging with and serving your followers and customers. They offer a customer relationship management (CRM) system that you and your team can share access to and communicate in to ensure all of your followers are getting top-tier engagement.
They also measure your performance and deliver analytics, that are easy to understand and ready to show how well your followers have been engaging. These analytics can help you make comparisons and understand what’s working best for your business. Sort your posts by the tags you created earlier to see how well your audience responds to certain types of posts. Sprout analytics also lets you analyze your Instagram stories and what content is resonating with your audience there.
The Sprout analytics suite compares paid and organic content and how they impact your growth. The reports Sprout generates are easy-to-understand and provide context, not just data, so you can understand and explain what worked and more importantly why it worked. Beyond this, you can even compare your posts’ performance to posts of your competitors. See how your content compares or see which hashtags are working for them.
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Traps to Avoid In Marketing Automation
Unfortunately, not all automation is good for your brand or your Instagram account. First of all, it’s important to remember that you will still need to engage with your followers. Spend time in your DMs, respond to their comments, and engage with them using Stories or an Instagram Live video. At the end of the day, this is still a social platform, and it needs you to be present and social.
1. Don’t buy followers.
If you see any service saying they can guarantee you a certain number of followers, run away. These will likely be fake accounts or bots who won’t engage with your posts. Best case scenario, they don’t engage and your engagement rate goes down. Worst case scenario, Instagram could see what’s happening and take action against you. Just don’t do it.
2. Don’t post and run.
Engage as much as you can on your posts. It looks bad to your followers and to Instagram if you constantly post, but never respond to people who leave you comments. If you’re able to be online when a post goes live, that’s best, because you can be actively engaging in real-time. If that’s not possible, don’t worry. Just come back as soon as you can and be active with your followers.
3. Don’t automate your DMs.
Direct messages are one of the best places audiences can interact with brands they love. Don’t have auto-responders set or use canned messages for everyone who messages you. If you know you get the same question over and over (especially during a launch or after an announcement), prep a response but make sure you personalize it for each person.
Over To you : List of 5 Best Marketing Automation Tools 2024
And there you have it. These are five of the best marketing automation tools that can help you automate your marketing and Instagram strategy to convert sales for you. Did we miss your favorite tool? Leave us a comment and let us know!
