Small business owners understand how difficult it is to grow a business, especially when competing against larger companies with more significant resources. However, marketing automation has made it much easier for small business owners to create marketing activities and achieve their goals.
Marketing automation uses software to automate social media management, email campaigns, website tracking, and lead scoring. Marketing automation aims to help small businesses achieve more efficient and successful marketing initiatives, resulting in more significant revenue and customer retention.
According to HubSpot, 68% of businesses use marketing automation to reach their goals. Because it’s easier to organise plans and promote growth, there’s more room for significant results.
Marketing automation allows you to save time and automate repetitive marketing operations. It can also help you in managing your campaigns and analysing your performance. Marketing automation technologies can help small businesses grow more efficiently and successfully. In this article, we’ll guide you through all you need to know to build your small business with marketing automation.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is using technologies to automate repetitive marketing processes in businesses. Marketing automation tools analyses data and customer behavior using modern technologies such as big data analytics, AI algorithms, and machine learning, resulting in data-driven marketing campaigns that help businesses reach their objectives.
Marketing automation software can also help firms track and measure their marketing activities’ performance.
Typical automated marketing tasks include:
- Sending out scheduled emails.
- Lead scoring and segmentation.
- Social media posting.
- Tracking client behaviour on a website.
- Analytics and reporting.
Why do you need marketing automation for small businesses?
So, why is marketing automation important for small and medium-sized businesses? Your small business will profit significantly from SMB marketing automation. Consider the following automation statistics:
- 91% of marketers say that marketing automation technology is critical to the success of their marketing campaigns.
- Marketing automation boosts your revenue and sales by more than 34%.
- Companies that use marketing automation software enjoy 53% greater conversion rates.
Here are three more key reasons why SMBs need marketing automation:
1. It saves you time:
SMB marketing automation tools help you eliminate repetitive marketing operations such as sending emails or putting content on your social media page. These things chew up a lot of time on your to-do list.
If you remove these tasks from your daily calendar, you will have more time to focus on other business duties.
2. It tracks and measures your results:
Several SMB marketing automation tools can not only help you optimise your procedures, but they can also assist you in managing your campaigns and tracking your results. Automation software, for example, can save crucial campaign data. You may monitor critical information, such as conversion rates and analyse how customers engage with your website. Furthermore, you can identify which strategies produce the best outcomes for your company, allowing you to spend more time focused on revenue-generating techniques.
3. It helps you earn a higher return on investment (ROI):
One of the benefits of marketing automation technology is that it allows you to generate a larger ROI. When you invest in digital marketing methods, your primary goal is to see a favorable return on your investment. You may also make data-driven optimizations to your campaigns to get even better results for your small business.
4. Eliminates silo mentality:
To ensure consistency, each team must communicate clearly and efficiently. Marketing automation can help with communication by bringing sales and marketing teams together and minimising redundant labor and inconsistencies.
Marketing automation also allows marketing experts to track the efficacy of past initiatives and salespeople to analyses the quality of leads they receive.
5. Improved customer engagement:
Marketing automation enables small businesses to send personalized and tailored content to their target audience, conversion rates and increasing engagement. Small businesses can generate more relevant and engaging content that resonates with their target audience by using analytics to analyses their consumers’ behavior.
6. It helps you understand your customers:
As more consumers go online, salespeople must rely on their online behavior to identify a prospective customer’s interest in a particular product or service.
You can establish what your clients are looking for when you analyses a lead’s online activity, such as web activities, website visits, social media mentions, and more.
Marketing automation can help you streamline this process. You can categories prospects based on specific criteria and create individualized targeted and targeted advertising.
This saves time and gives you a better understanding of your consumers’ purchasing behaviour and journey.
7. Improves customer retention:
Customers dislike feeling insignificant. Marketing automation can develop comprehensive, holistic profiles and customised campaigns.
Marketing automation software can update data in real time, allowing you to engage with your consumers at the appropriate moment and in the right way. You can also automate customer retention techniques.
8. Increased revenue:
Small businesses can reduce the sales cycle and generate more income by automating marketing initiatives. Marketing automation can also assist firms in identifying new revenue growth prospects, such as upselling and cross-selling to existing clients.
How to use marketing automation to grow a small business?
Marketing automation is for more than businesses with significant resources or a seemingly endless list of consumers. It has the potential to significantly impact businesses of all sizes, including small businesses that are already limited in terms of time and resources.
1. Build Relationship:
New customers rarely buy from a company the first time they hear about it, which is why marketing automation, such as personalised emails, is critical to developing and maintaining that relationship. You can promote and increase conversions by informing your audience about your products and mission via regular, insightful emails.
2. Automates social media:
Report automation can save you endless hours spent on data visualization and basic analysis. Tableau, Power BI and Google Analytics are the tools you’ll need. You can quickly automate report generation with bespoke visualizations and almost no scripting. Google Analytics includes data collection and reporting capabilities that may be accessible without coding.
3. Tracks the customer journey:
The more information you have about your customer, the better. Marketing automation allows you to track the customer journey and see how long it takes on average for a consumer to complete a transaction, what information they require to complete that purchase, and which marketing assets contribute to the highest conversion.
4. Simplifies communication with a chatbot:
A chatbot is a pre-programmed responder that uses pre-fed responses, links, and questions to build an interactive tool that can help your clients immediately when they visit your website for the first time.
Chatbots can add considerable value even in the B2B industry by cutting bounce rates, freeing up resources and collecting client data.
5. Helps you follow up on potential sales:
Follow-up emails are sent to clients who visit your website, abandon their basket, or write in with a customer support query to help you finish the potential deal. Other marketing automation features, such as follow-up reminders, can assist your sales team in keeping track of the most qualified leads.