Marketing Automation: 5 Ways To Save Your Small Business From Disaster

Is your sales team getting enough qualified leads from marketing?

Are your marketing campaigns reaching the right customers at the right time?

Have you successfully visualised the customer journey and created processes around it?

If all these questions leave you baffled every now and then, it’s time to opt for marketing automation. As a small business, you might be running on a shoestring budget but that shouldn’t stop you from achieving desired revenue goals. Marketing automation for small businesses is crucial for getting a holistic view of the customers, qualifying leads, communicating at the right time, increasing sales, etc.

The latest research by Marketo shows that 76% of marketers using marketing automation tools experience a positive ROI within a year. If you have never thought of automating marketing tasks before, it’s time to realise the benefits of marketing automation and implement it. In this article, you will get to know more about marketing automation platforms along with why your small business needs to adopt marketing automation right now.

What is Marketing Automation?

You might be thinking - what is marketing automation?

Simply put, marketing automation utilises a set of tools to automate repetitive marketing tasks including running email marketing campaigns, qualifying leads, scheduling social media posts, implementing ad campaigns, and so on. What lies at the heart of marketing automation is the urge to deliver personalised experience to customers.

So, is marketing automation really effective?

Well, the latest research shows that marketing automation is capable of driving around 14.5 percent increase in the overall sales productivity along with around 12.2 percent reduction in the respective marketing overhead. Moreover, analysing data in-depth helps small businesses to yield highly compelling numbers or results.

Another study reveals that with the help of marketing automation, small businesses observed around 451 percent increase in the qualified leads. In turn, the given number of nurtured leads went ahead with ensuring purchases around 47 percent more than the non-nurtured groups.

5 Ways Your Small Business Can Grow with Marketing Automation

Now that you know what is marketing automation and what can be achieved with it, let’s delve deep into how it can help you grow your business and achieve the desired revenue. Be it improving productivity or running email campaigns, marketing automation for small businesses does it all. You can easily deliver strategic messages while driving engagement. Here are 5 ways you can implement marketing automation at your company:

1. Automated Lead Scoring

As a small business, you have limited resources. Your sales team may consist only of a few members who always have their hands full. Does that mean they can ignore potential leads? Absolutely not! You still need to connect with potential customers and that becomes easier when you are aware of the stage the lead is in.

Automated lead scoring makes it easier for you to understand which leads to engage with. You set up a few rules so that every potential lead is scored based on their engagement with your brand. Once the inbound leads are scored, they can be automatically assigned to sales folks. This is crucial at the early stage of business and becomes even more important when you start having more leads every day.

2. Email Marketing Automation

Small businesses sending newsletters and one-time campaigns don’t usually need email marketing automation. But what happens when you want to automate email campaigns based on certain triggers? That’s when you need email automation. For example, you want to:

• Send a confirmation email when your customers sign up to receive blog updates
• Automate the process of sending weekly news stories
• Nurture potential leads with a lead magnet
• Send a series of welcome emails to new users
• Garner product feedback

And, the list can go on.

Sending these emails manually will take more time than you can imagine. Email marketing automation makes it hassle-free for you. As long as the triggers defined are met, the software will automatically send emails meaning you can save hours for other important works.

3. Social Media Automation

Small businesses often spend hundreds of hours every month publishing content on social media. Using social media automation helps you to optimise social interactions and schedule social media posts ahead of time. This helps you to achieve steady growth of brand accounts in no time.

So, what does social media look like in reality?

Here a few things that you can easily accomplish with social media automation:

• Responding to messages via chatbots
• Scheduling posts ahead of time
• Posting tweets at the peak hours
• Get notified for brand mentions

4. Landing Pages

One of the most popular inbound marketing techniques is to promote your landing page to prospective customers. Designed to convert these customers into paying ones, landing pages should be pleasing, easy-to-understand, and have a CTA. A marketing automation software comes with a drag and drop tool which makes it a cakewalk for you to design and optimise a landing page. In addition, you will be able to track:

• Bounce Rate: Duration of your visitors staying on your page
• User Activity: CTA buttons that users click after landing on the page
• Inquiries: Queries that users submit via the form

5. Analytical Dashboards

When you start a small business, you don’t have the time to go through pages of marketing reports. Marketing automation platforms solve this problem by offering a bird’s eye view of all the activities and achievements. Most of the tools come with a real-time dashboard which helps you to monitor lead generation, customer acquisition, marketing spends, campaign performance, and so on. This helps you to make a data-driven decision and make plans for the future. Here are a few metrics that you can easily track with a marketing automation software:

- Revenue by channel
- Lead-to-cash flow
- Conversion rates
- Content engagement metrics
- Attribution modeling, and so on.

Must-use Marketing Automation Tools For Small Businesses in 2021

If you are reading this, you know you are trying your best to keep abreast of the latest marketing tips. Most of the marketing tasks can be repetitive, time-consuming, and exhausting. That’s why you need the best marketing automation tools by your side. Here are a few tools that you should plan to use in 2021.

5 Reasons for You to Deploy Marketing Automation Today

The changing market dynamics poses new challenges for small businesses. You need to engage with your potential leads multiple times before they make a purchase decision. That’s where marketing automation comes handy. These 5 reasons will help you understand why it’s worth deploying marketing automation today.

1. Saves Time:

Marketing automation uses innovative tools that speed up day-to-day business operations. This helps employees to remain focused on what they do best. The highest point of technological advancement is at the core of marketing automation.

2. Effective Spends:

As marketing automation speeds up things, you get to save money that will otherwise go into labor costs. Automation of marketing tasks in the organisation will liberate the precious budget to serve your team better. In fact, marketing automation solutions help you in achieving a positive ROI when implemented effectively.

3. Increased Efficiency:

When most of the repetitive tasks are taken care of, you can focus more on generating qualified leads. Marketing automation makes it easier for you to find sales-qualified leads and nurture them throughout the funnel.

4. Improved Scalability:

In addition to having access to the necessary tools for reaching out to the larger population in the modern era, there can be nothing more comforting for an organisation than to have all the respective pieces reach the target audience –several times bigger than current contact base.

5. Predictive Analysis:

High-end marketing automation solutions are capable of predicting the overall performance of future campaigns on the basis of historical data. This is achieved by using AI & Machine Learning. Nothing else is capable of providing a clearer picture than an advanced marketing automation solution featuring powerful revenue analysis.

Now that you know what you can achieve with marketing automation, it’s time to get to work and implement it. Possibilities are limitless when it comes to marketing automation for small businesses. Be it reducing churn rate, landing leads with a landing page, qualifying and nurturing them, or sending automated email campaigns, there isn’t a task that marketing automation can’t do.

You may need a marketing automation consultant to truly realise the potential of marketing automation. Because of their knowledge with multiple tools, consultants are able to direct you in the right direction. If things get too technical in the process of implementing marketing automation, don’t hesitate to give us a call at 0424 357 817! Or, drop us a line here.