Ask HN: What's your best marketing automation techniques? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your best marketing automation techniques?

2 pointsrloc5 comments

I run an online SaaS business.

I discovered (as many before me...) that marketing is probably the hardest aspect of growing a business. It takes time, patience and perseverance.

I spend a fair amount of time everyday trying to be creative on how I could automate my marketing efforts.

I'm a dev and I work mostly alone so I learned to be efficient in almost everything I do. Always looking for low hanging fruits with maximum impact and controlled costs.

I use automation tools, connect APIs when it makes sense, code some connectors when the tool does not support it, etc.

But I often get stuck when looking to solve complicated problems with advanced scripts that could dynamically take decision based on text analysis, sentiment, topic, etc. In other words replace part of what a human would do but with AI.

A lot of the times, before you even go into automation, you should run continuous tests to see what content / message has the most impact and on which channels. I've run thousands of tests on posts, blogs, distribution channels to get a better idea of my audience and then I create a customer journey that feeds into my marketing automation and then I measure the success of my marketing automation. Depending on the nature of your SaaS business, you could run several drip campaigns at a time. I would also look into Account Based marketing techniques. Shoot me a DM if you'd like to learn a few more techniques that have worked for me. Have you looked into Zappier / IFTTT to automate some things as well?

Yes I use Zapier but I feel like I'm not using it at its full potential.

If marketing is a primary focus - a classic technique is to comment on relevant threads in your category - filtered RSS feeds from Quora, StackOverflow, Google Alerts, HN, Reddit, etc.

It only takes a second to review a thread and see if you can add value with a comment (and possibly plug your service).

Could use Zapier's Digest app to get them all at the end of a day/week so you don't have noisy alerts all day. Slack and/or email is usually a solid way to get those alerts.

If you haven't looked at it already, Patio11 has written and talked considerably about marketing SaaS projects: http://www.kalzumeus.com/

Good luck.

Thanks, a lot of content there.

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