Thanks to your incredible goods and services, your business might be the best in its local area. But it might only reach its full potential if you market your business well with a powerful strategy that highlights your competitive advantages. But with all the time you spend making sure your service and fulfillment is the best, where do you find the time to do so?
If you’re not careful, marketing may quickly take over your calendar, and the business will run you instead of the other way around!
Marketing can often take up your entire week or month, from planning strategies and launching campaigns to qualifying leads and following up with prospects. This leaves you little time to work hard to grow your business by making new products, ensuring customers are happy, and doing other things.
Even if you handle your business’s marketing plan, you need more knowledge to measure results effectively and efficiently and adjust your campaign for the most outstanding results.
Effectively marketing your small business might seem complicated and time-consuming, but there is an easy way to do it. Marketing automation could make your marketing efforts more effective and consistent, help your business grow, and get you to your goals faster. Implementing automated tools and procedures can significantly increase lead generation and brand awareness. It’s like having an additional employee, without the headaches and expectations.
We’ll go over all the information you need to know about marketing automation in this guide.
Why is marketing automation important?
“Marketing automation” describes using software to manage your marketing initiatives. This technology automates managing, optimizing, and tracking repetitive internet marketing processes across several channels. A lot of marketing automation began with simple automated tasks like notifying users if they had a purchase or a lead that wanted more information.
Nowadays, you can automate everything from the acknowledgement message, to the follow up, welcome series, and even parts of your fulfillment!
So how can you implement marketing automation in your business? To automate your marketing, you should set up these automations once and keep an eye on it now and then. You can use a tool like LeadDragon, which already replaces most of the software tools you’re going to sign up for anyways, to automate a lot of these marketing tasks and processes. You would use their “workflows” feature specifically.
This frees up time that you can use for more complex or strategic tasks. Because marketing automation is meant to improve your performance, you can get even better results than you could by hand. It also helps you launch faster and quicker by duplicating past marketing automation projects on the fly.
Why Marketing Automation could help your small business have a fighting chance
For small companies trying to expand, marketing automation provides several alluring advantages. A small business owner basically needs all the automation and tech “leg up” he or she can get. Here’s some of the best benefits.
Saving time: If your staff uses this solution, they will save time on tedious tasks like sending out individual emails or making posts on social media. You could create campaigns or tasks once and let your marketing platform decide who to target and when.
Increases productivity: You can concentrate on essential duties with more free time and less time-consuming activities. Your team will be much more productive if they spend more time on long-term planning and growing the business.
Enhance results: If you use a manual marketing strategy, your team can spend time and resources cold contacting or reaching out to clients who aren’t interested. Your efforts have a higher chance of success when you adopt automation. This is so that you may concentrate on the correct clients at the right time and make your job more valuable and efficient.
Upgrades to customer experiences: Automation may improve customer experiences and simplify tasks for your staff. After all, this technology is made to focus on the most relevant clients. Customers will feel like you are reaching out to them personally to help them solve their problems rather than sending them useless information.
Consistency is guaranteed: When you use a manual marketing strategy, you can use a different method for each new client you get. However, you may automate the process so that each prospect goes through identical stages. Every consumer gets the same experience, so you can collect precise data, identify what functions best, and then modify your system for even better outcomes.
Staying organized: Having a database is the lifeline of any healthy business. By tagging and keeping your list of past, current, and potential customers in one place, you control your destiny. When choosing a marketing automation software, make sure they have built in CRM features so you can have valuable customer data at your fingertips when making marketing and sales decisions. This is especially important if your staff or sales team is using the software as well. This enables you to curate and run hyper personalized campaigns instead of shooting in the dark.
Increases sales possibilities: Using marketing automation software makes it simple to boost your current sales opportunities or find new ones. When you combine marketing funnels, email sequences, and ad retargeting on many platforms, you can automatically cross-sell or up-sell related products or services. You can increase sales and customer lifetime value (CLV) without wasting more time or work. The good thing is, there’s beautiful software like LeadDragon that has this built within its marketing automation platform. They will even help you set up and get your first marketing automation tasks going.
Tie together marketing channels: If your small business is like most others, your clients engage with you through various channels. For example, people who follow you on social media often visit your website and sign up for your email list. Marketing platforms may automatically link the data from each channel. As a result, you may follow prospects more precisely and avoid putting in the same effort for the same clients across many channels. It’s incredibly important more than ever to keep everything under one roof and have one consolidated inbox for all of your sales channels to manage and avoid leads and potential customers falling through the cracks.
What’s a good marketing automation gameplan?
In general,marketing automation campaigns try to increase leads and sales by sending targeted content to potential clients.
To help you better comprehend how marketing automation functions, here is a marketing automation game plan example you can implement:
- A weekly email campaign urging people to register for a webinar is sent to your email subscribers. A link in your email would be clicked by interested customers, taking them to a signup form. Data from the registration form is collected by your automation platform, which then uses it to find interested customers.
- Before the webinar, registrants get several emails. To encourage interested prospects to take actions like reading a branded case study or signing up for a trial of your new service, your automation program delivers these emails at predetermined intervals. The platform would track which potential customers took action and use that information to qualify leads better or deliver more relevant content.
- Participants receive additional email reminders after the webinar based on the steps they’ve previously completed. You might send out email reminders urging other clients to join up for the trial or notification of renewal to those who have already finished it. The emails are scheduled to be sent out over weeks or months by your automation software. The program keeps track of each customer’s activities, sending reminders to those who have already bought or sending a different email sequence to those who have yet to renew their subscriptions.
There’s also other potential campaigns you could launch and implement like birthday reactivation campaigns, onboarding series, welcome series, abandoned cart, reminders, and so much more. Marketing automation software like LeadDragon makes all of this magic happen and allows your business to unlock its full potential.