How Marketing Automation Can Help Smaller Businesses

Marketing automation is rapidly becoming an essential tool, even for smaller businesses. One of the biggest difficulties of running a business is completing all of the essential tasks each day, while also engaging with customers and building the sales pipeline. For small marketing teams, continuous, personalized, timely engagement with their customers across a variety of platforms can be a struggle.

So, it’s hardly surprising that software built to automate repetitive marketing activities is becoming very popular.

But marketing automation doesn’t just manage marketing tasks such as emails, social media, and lead management, it can significantly improve their effectiveness. When used strategically, marketing automation has the power to seriously upgrade the performance of smaller businesses.

Automation … and so much more

Marketing automation can track prospect behavior online and uses this data to prioritise the highest value leads or those with the greatest propensity to convert.

The tracking data is used to trigger the most appropriate message or offer that’s best suited to the prospect’s stage in the buying cycle. In this way it makes it easier to deepen engagement with prospects by adding progressive levels of value to their shopping journey. Automatic scheduling lets you pop up in front of them just when they need you!

These data-based customer insights are of course invaluable. Brand preference and loyalty are both enhanced when you understand what your customers like and dislike and deliver to those needs.  And pre-sales qualification makes the job of closing that much easier; armed with the knowledge of what the prospect already knows, what they’ve looked at, what they need – how could you fail to close? Using automation to identify, prioritise and nurture prospects has been found to increase sales by 20%.

And of course, the most obvious benefit of marketing automation is productivity through the reduction of manual activities, particularly those simple and repetitive tasks that drive us nuts. Needless to say, this also removes the probability of human error.

How you use marketing automation will of course depend on what you are trying to achieve in your business: lead generation, prospect nurturing, cross and upselling, retention – it can all be enhanced.

A very simple example is a welcome program; when a new contact opts into your list, they automatically receive a series of welcome and onboarding emails. You automation platform will not just ensure these emails are sent out at specific times, they will also direct the new prospect into the most appropriate communication flow according to their responses.

Other features of marketing automation platforms include analytics, social media scheduling, and landing page creation. All of these tools are designed to save time and often provide useful data. Take time to analyse this data, so that you can personalise your communications with clients and target your ads more effectively.

By making it easier for businesses to create personalised content, engage with customers, and nurture new leads, automation can save both time and money. However, to achieve significant results, it’s important to use this technology thoughtfully and methodically.

There is currently a plethora of marketing automation platforms that have the potential to transform the results of smaller businesses. It may be hard to choose one. Have a chat to us today to see which platform is right for you. Contact us at ask@insideoutgroup.com.au today! We are here to help you!