6 Ways to Set Your WordPress Site’s Marketing to Autopilot

Combining your WordPress site with marketing automation can lead to powerful results. It’s pretty much like magic, where you end up with more leads, more traffic, and more cash every month with little to no effort.

And as marketers, we could always use that extra time. That’s why we owe it to ourselves and our businesses to find ways to achieve more while doing less.

If you’re using WordPress as your CMS (content management system) of choice, then you may be aware of the plethora of options you have when it comes to plugins.

They all range from free extensions to paid tools that help you get the most out of your website, whether it’s through elegant contact forms, more reliable cyber security, or marketing automation.

What’s Marketing Automation?

Any form of marketing that’s being executed through a platform that effectively performs multiple and repetitive tasks is called marketing automation.

It simplifies everything you have to do that would normally take a lot of daily time and effort and lets you use them on other more important things.

Examples of marketing tasks that can be automated:

• SMS messages
• Emails
• Social media posts
• Online advertising

So, now that you have a better idea of what it’s about, we can move on to the exciting part: setting it up for your WordPress site.

Five Ways You Can Add Marketing Automation to Your WordPress

WordPress is home to tens of thousands of different plugins, both free and paid. And a lot of them are geared to making you a more effective modern marketer.

Also, these third-party extensions are designed to be easy to use. So, you don’t need any advanced technical knowledge to find your way around.

Below, I’m sharing with you five ways you can automate your own marketing tasks that produce the most results while requiring less from you:

1. Use MailChimp for Emails

   Instead of beating around the bush and telling you to use a powerful email automation platform, I’m just going right down and telling you to use MailChimp.

   Why? Because it’s one of the absolute best platforms you can use for sending out emails, and it’s packed with powerful features designed to make your life easier.

   To set it up for your WordPress site, simply go to your dashboard, click on “Plugins”, then click “Add New”. Search for “MailChimp”, and when it comes up, simply click on the “Install” button. Next, follow any necessary prompts that appear on screen, then click on “Return to Plugin Installer”.

   
   If you’d like more information on connecting the MailChimp account, make sure to read this guide.

2. Get the Editorial Calendar Extension

   Simplify how you schedule and manage your blog posts with a user-friendly Editorial Calendar plugin that lets you manage multiple authors, edit titles, and publish posts with ease.

   

   Also, it gives an at-a-glance view of your entire blogging progress and see when every post is scheduled for. Take about convenient!

   Other features you get with the plugin:

   • Easy drag-and-drop scheduling
   • More organized drafts with their new drafts drawer

3. Use a Lead Generation Software

   One of the biggest keys to a successful online business is the generation of new leads. And while there are many ways to grow your email list, one of the favorite tools being used online marketers today is OptinMonster.

   

   Through well-designed and functional optin forms, you’re making it easier for site visitors to engage with your brand by letting them sign up to newsletters.

   Also, if you’re using MailChimp, you can integrate it with OptinMonster. It easily migrates your email list so can start working on your email marketing campaign.

4. Get a Spam Filtering Service

   Once your site starts getting a few thousand visitors, you’ll also notice an increasing number of spam coming up in your comment section.

   This is why you need an advanced anti-spam filtering service that blocks these kinds of activity and protects your site from search engine penalties.

   Akismet is a popular plugin that comes to mind when it comes to spam fighting. It reviews comments, looking for ones with misleading links, and stops them from ever appearing on your site.

   

   Although far from perfect, it’s still one of the best and most popular plugins for spam filtering that you can get for your WordPress site. Other good choices are Antispam Bee and WP-SpamShield.

5. Install a Social Media Management Tool

   One repetitive task that we all know you would love to automate is social media sharing. It’s a tedious, time-consuming process that just eats up a lot of your time and energy.

   The simple solution is to install a tool that manages all your social media profiles from one platform. And the best plugins for that right now are HYPESocial and Blog2Social.

   

   You can choose from either their paid versions or their upgraded plans, depending on how much control you want over your social media postings.

   Some of the common features in social media management tools:

   • Multi-channel publishing capability
   • Custom scheduling for each posts
   • Built-in URL shortener option
   • Personal messages, formats, and hashtags

6. Install the call-back widget 

   
   CallPage allows you to track phone calls directly from your website and use this information to follow up with interested prospects. It’s a great way to generate leads in real-time — and at a fraction of the cost of cold calling or hiring an expensive sales team. 

   Some of the common features in social media management tools:

   • Call-me-later function
   • Widget customization
   • Click to call
   • Lead generation
   • Analytics dashboard
   • CRM Integration

   This tool encourages an immediate conversation and connects a potential client with a consultant in 28 seconds, which has a direct, positive influence on conversion rates and sales results.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of marketing automation tools on WordPress that can save you precious time, and they only take a few minutes to set up. Just be careful that you don’t sacrifice your page loading time by adding in too many third-party extensions.

However, if you do experience some latency, consider optimizing your site images or getting a content delivery network to help increase its speed.

Marketing automation is the future, and If you haven’t automated started on it yet, it’s about time you do. Find out exactly what tasks you’d like to automate and see if one of the WordPress plugins we shared above can do that for you.

The longer you wait to to use automated marketing, the more you’re falling behind competing business that are already using it.