Marketing Automation for Small Businesses
How it Can Help Your Team Succeed
Managing Director
When you have a small team, it's important to use tools that make your work easier. Learn here how marketing automation for small business can help.
As a small business owner, it’s hard to keep track of everything. You need to manage your operations, sales, finances, and marketing at the same time. Most small businesses find that they don’t have the time to market their businesses consistently. The ones that do leverage the power of automation.
Before you start thinking that automation is a robot that handles marketing for you, you want to learn what it can do for your business.
Read on to find out what marketing automation is and how you can use it to grow your business.
Marketing automation for small businesses can transform the way you run your business.
What is Marketing Automation?
Are you curious to know what marketing automation really is? It’s the task of automating customer communications. This is used most often when you have repetitive marketing tasks.
For example, you can use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule social media posts months in advance.
Another example is email. How do you communicate with customers when they sign up for your email list? Odds are that you add them to your monthly newsletter, and they get information as you send it out.
What if you automated an email sequence that welcomes them to your company? It’s a powerful way to generate excitement because they get to know you and what your company is about. It creates a connection right away with your audience.
You can also automate emails to people who put items in their shopping carts and abandon them. That reminds people to complete their purchases and can improve your conversion rate.
Marketing automation can be used in just about every part of your digital marketing campaigns.
Benefits to Small Businesses
Marketing automation is a great tool to use in your business. One of the biggest misconceptions is that it’s something that’s only reserved for big businesses. That’s not the case at all, small businesses have a lot to gain by using marketing automation.
Here are just a few major benefits to small businesses.
Time
You need to make every minute of the day count. How much time do you spend on tasks that are repeatable and simple to do?
When you have certain tasks automated, you can then focus your time and attention to other matters, like closing sales.
ROI
How does small business marketing automation impact your bottom line? That’s probably the most important question to ask.
Marketing automation works because it can decrease costs while increasing sales. It’s been shown to increase revenue by more than 14% while decreasing costs by over 12%. That’s a formula for more profits.
Consistency
Many small businesses have trouble marketing on a consistent basis. They might have a week or two when they’re pumping out content. Then they have fires to put out that pulls them away from marketing. Weeks or months go by before they resume marketing.
Does that sound familiar?
Marketing consistency has a big impact on your bottom line. It builds trust with your audience and proves that your company is reliable, and they’re more willing to purchase from your company. Businesses that are consistent are more valuable.
Marketing consistency has a big impact on your bottom line. It builds trust with your audience and proves that your company is reliable
Reporting
One of the big benefits of small business marketing automation is in reporting. When you do automated tasks individually, it can be hard to measure the success of your campaigns.
Marketing automation tools have robust reporting. That allows you to see the big picture of your campaigns and pinpoint where things are going wrong.
You may have an automated email campaign where you send out a sequence of 5-6 emails spread out over 10 days. You find that the first email in your sequence has a low open rate. That’s causing the rest of your campaign to falter.
You can then look at the subject line of that email and make improvements. These improvements make the open rate go up, which makes the rest of your campaign successful.
How to Implement Your Own Marketing Automation
Are you convinced that small business marketing automation is right for you? Here are a few tips to get started.
Start with Your Customer
All of your marketing efforts begin and end with your customers. You need to know as much as you can about who they are and what motivates them to purchase.
You also need to map out the steps they take to make a purchase. This is called the buyer’s journey. Customers usually don’t show up on your website and decide to buy on the first visit. They will do research, compare brands, and then make a decision.
You want your brand to be in front of these customers at every point of the journey.
Spot the Automation Opportunities
Once you map out the customer journey, you can easily spot out the opportunities to automate marketing. Where are the points in the sales process that usually rely on repetitive tasks?
These are areas that should be automated. You can also automate what happens after the purchase to ensure your customers have a great experience.
You can send out automated messages after the purchase that includes information on using a product or what to expect from your services.
Marketing Automation is a Good Move for your Business
Running a small business requires that you wear many different hats. It’s a lot to juggle, but it is possible when you leverage emerging technology.
You need all the help you can get to ensure that your marketing is consistent and doesn’t take up too much of your time. That’s why marketing automation for small business is so powerful. It doesn’t take that much time to do, it keeps your brand in front of customers, and it delivers ROI.
Do you want to know how you can leverage marketing automation in your company? Schedule a free consultation today