5 Marketing Tasks You Should Automate Today

Every startup has that person — the one who spends Monday morning copying data from the ad platform into a spreadsheet, manually forwarding lead emails to sales, and scheduling the same social posts they batch-wrote last Friday. That person is expensive. And they should be doing something more valuable with their time.

Here are five marketing tasks you can automate this week. None of them require custom code, and each one frees up real hours.

1. Lead notification and routing

The problem

A prospect fills out your contact form at 10am. The email sits in an inbox until someone checks it at 3pm. By then, the prospect has already talked to two competitors. A widely cited MIT and InsideSales.com study found that contacting leads within 5 minutes makes you 21x more likely to qualify them compared to waiting 30 minutes.

The automation

• New form submission triggers an instant Slack notification with the lead's details
• Lead is automatically added to your CRM with the right tags and source attribution
• If the lead meets certain criteria (budget, company size), it gets flagged as high-priority
• An auto-reply email goes out immediately confirming receipt and setting expectations

Setup time: 1-2 hours with Zapier or n8n. Time saved: eliminates lead response delays entirely.

2. CRM data entry

The problem

Your sales team spends 5-8 hours per week manually entering contact information, updating deal stages, and logging activities. That's an entire working day spent on data entry instead of selling.

The automation

• Website form submissions automatically create CRM contacts with all fields populated
• Email conversations get logged to the contact record automatically
• Calendar bookings update deal stages and create follow-up tasks
• LinkedIn connection data syncs to CRM profiles (with tools like Phantombuster + n8n)

Setup time: 2-4 hours. Time saved: 5-8 hours per week. That's 20-30 hours per month your team gets back for actual selling.

3. Campaign reporting

The problem

Every Monday, someone logs into Google Ads, then Meta Ads, then LinkedIn Ads, then Google Analytics, exports data from each, pastes it into a spreadsheet, and emails it to the team. This takes 2-3 hours and the data is already outdated by the time anyone reads it.

The automation

• Connect all ad platforms to a single dashboard (Looker Studio, Databox, or a custom n8n pipeline)
• Set up automated daily/weekly report emails with key metrics
• Create alert triggers: notify the team if spend exceeds budget, CPA spikes, or ROAS drops below target
• Build a live dashboard the whole team can check anytime — no more waiting for the Monday email

Setup time: 3-5 hours initially. Time saved: 2-3 hours per week, plus faster reactions to performance changes. If you're spending serious ad budget, automated reporting pays for itself in the first week by catching overspend faster.

4. Review and testimonial collection

The problem

You know testimonials drive conversions. But asking customers for reviews feels awkward, and it always falls to the bottom of the to-do list. Result: great relationships but zero social proof on your website.

The automation

• After a positive customer interaction (deal closed, support ticket resolved, milestone hit), automatically trigger a review request email
• Include a direct link to your Google Business, G2, or Trustpilot profile
• If they respond positively, follow up with a request for a longer case study quote
• Automatically aggregate reviews into a dashboard so you can spot trends and pick the best ones for your website

Setup time: 1-2 hours. Impact: goes from collecting 0-1 reviews per quarter to 5-10 per month — all without anyone manually sending emails.

5. Social media scheduling

The problem

Posting to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram every day takes 30-45 minutes of context switching. You open the app, think of something to say, write it, find an image, post it. Then you lose 20 minutes scrolling because you're already on the platform.

The automation

• Batch-create a week's worth of content in one 2-hour session (even faster with AI content tools)
• Schedule everything through Buffer, Hootsuite, or a custom n8n workflow
• Auto-repurpose blog posts into social snippets — new article published triggers social posts across platforms
• Set up evergreen content recycling: your best-performing posts get re-shared on a rotation

Setup time: 1 hour for the scheduling tool, 2 hours for the auto-repurpose workflow. Time saved: 3-4 hours per week of daily posting replaced by one batched session.

Where to start

Don't try to automate everything at once. Pick the one task that eats the most human hours and automate that first. For most startups, that's either lead routing (because the cost of slow response is highest) or campaign reporting (because it's the most tedious).

Our recommendation for tools:

• **Zapier** — Best for simple, linear workflows. Easy to set up, reasonable pricing, connects everything
• **n8n** — Best for complex workflows with conditional logic. Open-source, self-hostable, most flexible
• **HubSpot** — Best if you're already in their ecosystem. Marketing + CRM automation in one place
• **Make (Integromat)** — Best balance of power and price. More complex than Zapier, cheaper than most alternatives

The goal of automation isn't to replace your marketing team. It's to free them from repetitive work so they can focus on strategy, creativity, and the human connections that actually grow the business.

The bottom line

These five automations — lead routing, CRM entry, reporting, testimonial collection, and social scheduling — save a typical startup 15-20 hours per week. That's two full working days reclaimed for work that actually moves the needle.

Start with one. Get it working. Then add the next. Within a month, your marketing operation runs smoother, responds faster, and wastes less of your team's most valuable resource: their time. If you need help building these workflows, that's exactly what we do.