7 Affordable SMM Automation Tools

Alright, Social Media Marketers! Are you struggling every day to get everything done in your online business? Are you unable to create a social media strategy that brings your business? 

Whether you have a home-based online business, or you work in real estate financial services, or virtually any business under the sun these days, you really need an online presence in order to generate leads and sales to grow your business. The better your social networking, the more popular your brand tends to get. 

Let's look at things wisely. As a marketer, there are tons of excellent social media automation tools that allow you to be competent and effective towards your target audience. But keeping up with social media for brands to grow their reach can feel like a great big hamster wheel while juggling up with an ever-growing list of tasks on a daily basis. While there is no lack of networking mediums, finding a social platform that works best for you is the real bull's eye. 

But wait! Does this stop you to rock your social media game?

Not at all!

What stops you from winning is that 40% of social media marketers have no idea what they actually do works for them or not. Hence, in this blog post, we are focusing on 7 cost-effective and affordable social media automation tools that can help build your social media marketing strategy, creating endless opportunities for brands to grow the reach of their social networking site. So, stick around!

Just imagine the traffic on your website or the number of orders that are constantly growing while you enjoy leisure time or work on other important business tasks related to digital marketing. Here we go!

1. Email Autoresponders

Email autoresponders are the go-getter of email marketing. They work behind the scene 24/7 to help automate your business and increase brand awareness. Autoresponders are an online software program that will automatically respond to new email subscribers on your email list. From the first hello to a loyal customer, they send your emails to the right people at the right time. They welcome new users, tell readers about your new blog posts, and continuously reach out to your audience with valuable content and relevant offers.

The autoresponder series helps you to successfully engage with your email list, build relationships, and turn leads into customers and is arguably an online marketer's most powerful tool for making sales. The engaging content of these email autoresponder series is created in advance and set up to send at the appropriate time with the help of your email marketing software. It is also the single most effective way to nurture leads and make more sales. 

There are different autoresponders out there like Hubspot, AWeber, Mailchimp, Convertkit, etc. One of the biggest ones is, AWeber- a great system that you can start at a very affordable price. They automate your email campaigns, regular emails, and also allow you to send broadcasts to all the people in your email lists. Autoresponders are one of those tools that are a must-have social media marketing automation tool for your business. An email autoresponder tool should surely be a part of your social media marketing plan.

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the social channels that allow you to set up social media streams that monitor conversations and keywords. It is an affordable social media automation tool that can help you schedule posts on over 35+ social media platforms. It allows you to listen closely to what the world is saying, tweeting, posting, writing, and sharing about you in the digital world. You can instantly respond to both happy and unhappy customers and manage what folks are saying about your brand every single minute. All in all, it helps you to maintain your social media presence to the T. Let's have a look at what Hootsuite provides:

• Hootsuite analytics removes the "guessing game" that comes along with social media.
• This social media site lets you easily measure the performance of your social media posts.
• It helps you create customizable and responsive social media analytics reports as well as a suitable social media campaign.
• It gets track of industry trends and campaign results thus allowing you to create a strong social media network.
• It has tabs to organize, link, manage, and schedule your post content for all your social profiles in advance, freeing up your time and hence helping your social strategy succeed.

By this time, you must have figured out why Hootsuite is a must-have SMM automation tool. It's because it helps you say goodbye to the hamster wheel of marketing automation, so you can better connect with your audience.

3. IFTTT ‘If This, Then That’

Sounds a little tricky, but IFTTT has no match.

IFTTT is a leading process automation application designed to benefit start-up businesses in social media marketing. It stands for "If this, then that", which is a common command in coding to get the desired end product by assigning triggers. Always keep in mind that, "This" stands for a trigger, and "That" stands for action. IFTTT's interface is quite user-friendly and allows you to automate business processes by connecting it with other applications and services. This experimenting with social media ads can be a good example of this concept. 

IFTTT has a concept of 'applets. These applets are individual tasks that can be automated. When you log in, you'll see over 4,000 results to choose from. Each applet includes the source of what IFTTT is monitoring and then the resulting action. Once you set up your IFTTT applets you can forget about them. An auto social media post will be put up every time there's a new post on your blog. For example, if a blog post is published (This), then tweet this article link on my twitter account (That). So, every time you publish a blog post, IFTTT will automatically tweet it through your account. Business automation has never been so easy, and the credit goes to IFTTT- a must-have tool in 2020 and beyond. This is one of the most fascinating yet simple marketing efforts that companies can invest in. 

4. Video Marketing

It may not be the traditional tool you may be thinking of, but it is really a powerful strategy. Zuckerberg and Facebook believe that videos are going to be a huge part of the internet, a majority in fact in the coming years. Facebook and some others think that YouTube will eventually come very close to supplanting Google as the number one search engine. Why is that? It is because when you shoot a video delivering valuable content to your audience, you duplicate yourself and forward the lead generation process. Because this video will then be available on the internet forever unless you delete it. The visual content will be there constantly delivering your message, delivering the value, and building relationships with viewers who stop by to watch your video. This form of social content is everything that the digital world will want in the coming years. 

This is a critical tool in your content marketing strategy, also critical for your online business. It is what allows you to create a residual lead flow in your business, constantly bringing new people into your organization and business, attracting new prospects and leads while also maintaining the brand loyalty of your previous customers. So, there are more reasons than one for why videos are a must-have automation tool in your business. 

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers a suite of analytics tools through its simply measured platform. Designed to help small businesses use their social media profile more effectively, this tool automates posting. Sprout Social offers affordable tools with exhaustive features, which include scheduling posts, monitoring competition, tracking your keywords, identifying influencers, discovering mentions, and analyzing stats.

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media marketing tool to help managers better control their efforts. It can also help you engage with an audience and monitor the competition. From within a unified dashboard, customers can engage and collaborate with teams to coordinate publishing efforts and track metrics like engagement, impressions, and link clicks. Sprout Social gives you a few different ways to fill up your social media calendar with curated content before time. This means you can sit down for an hour and get months' worth of social media posts scheduled and ready to trickle out as needed. Doing this highly affects the way your social media marketing campaign moves forward. 

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp isn't just a marketing automation platform but it also brings your audience data, marketing channels, and insights together so you can reach your goals faster. With Mailchimp, you as a social media manager can promote your business across email, social, landing pages, postcards, and more - all from a single platform.

What's the good thing about this? You get all these services free for your first 2K subscribers. Hence social media advertising with this tool is nothing but beneficial. 

7. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is Twitter's own dashboard tool, similar to Hootsuite or Sprout Social, but entirely devoted to Twitter. Through TweetDeck, you can monitor and action every aspect of your Twitter presence and what this social media platform has to offer. Unlike other social media management tools, you can track up to 200 Twitter accounts through TweetDeck, all for free. It's an awesome free service for social media listening on Twitter. You can set up custom timelines to track brand names, usernames, hashtags, keywords, and more, you can also manage multiple Twitter accounts from within the dashboard.

Scheduling is one of the most utilized functions of any social media channel, and TweetDeck offers its own tools on this front, including the ability to add images and GIFs. With TweetDeck you can also track your own tweet activity, you can also use your TweetDeck columns to monitor mentions of your competition. If you are not using TweetDeck, it might be worth checking in.

What more are you looking for? All these automation tools are very affordable and some of them are even free so that you can be more active on social media automation platforms. Get started and see your social listening grow in no time!