Today’s main challenge for small businesses is to generate a sustainable pipeline of customer traffic and leads. People (customers) are constantly on the go and access information on multiple devices. Their attention spans are minimal, and finding a window for engaging the customer at the right time and place is practically impossible without automation.
The growth of web marketing, digital media, mobile apps, and other digital platforms to engage, educate, and entertain audiences has led to a bewildering and complex marketing funnel challenge that small and entrepreneurial companies find difficult to manage and master.
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Definition: What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of a multichannel software package to consolidate, create, and automate a variety of related marketing activities. These platforms are designed to help marketers automatically execute routine and repetitive marketing tasks.
What marketing initiatives can automation simplify?
Marketing automation today is at the core of a marketing department’s activities, irrespective of the company’s size. The digital and social channels and platforms that run these activities are constantly evolving, and marketing automation keeps getting better at managing, executing, and forecasting successful marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation was initially designed to simplify the email marketing process. The huge growth of digital marketing channels, processes, and initiatives over the last few years offers tremendous lead generation opportunities for small companies. Marketing automation software can automate different kinds of marketing and content initiatives. A study by the Content Marketing Institute found that nearly 85% of all automation was geared towards social media posts management, while marketing automation was used by more than 50% of respondents.
In brief, automation can be used for the following marketing initiatives:
- Social media posts management
- Email marketing
- Analytics
- Marketing processes
- Workflow management
- Content creation
- Content management (CMS)
Why is marketing automation important for small businesses?
Small businesses are big on growth ambition but lean in staff, finances, and resources. All such companies make efforts to grow their business exponentially. Though a small team can manage the initial phase, the effort of nurturing existing leads and finding new ones is a highly time-consuming marketing process. Small business owners need to spend time running all aspects of their business, and marketing automation can help manage a lot of what are essentially routine marketing or sales tasks as described above.
How can small businesses benefit from marketing automation?
Marketing automation helps marketing teams in small businesses allocate their time and resources more effectively towards better messaging and marketing recommendations instead of just concentrating on one or two initiatives at a time.
Therefore, small businesses must invest in a software platform that does much more than send emails. Today, companies need to align their marketing campaigns across social media, paid digital advertising, and SEO audits, among many others.
Marketing automation brings anonymous visitors to the organization’s digital marketing channels, converts leads into new customers and helps retain existing customers much more organized. Marketing automation can help an organization do its marketing better in the following ways:
- Maintain updated customer data without manual entries
- Help build positive customer relationships by collecting and acting quickly on customer feedback
- Track purchase behavior and engagement
- Automate all social media channels
- Design customized loyalty programs
- Create special offers regularly
How can small businesses plan a marketing automation strategy?
Small businesses start small and want to grow big, fast. They have to consider several factors to design a proper and scalable marketing automation strategy:
- Align various marketing departments before automating the processes to avoid communication gaps and improve collaboration for more effective customer funneling.
- Set appropriate goals for lead generation, lead conversion, or contribution to converting potential leads.
- Define buyer personas to ensure that the marketing initiatives target the right customer at the right time with the proper messaging.
- Define the “lead flow” to design the right path for the customer lead to travel to the customer “destination.”
- Develop dynamic, relevant content. Sending the wrong content at the wrong time to the wrong lead results in the loss of a customer.
- Nurture your customers and guide them through your purchase funnel. Moving a customer from an MQL to an SQL stage requires you to understand your customer, and marketing automation can provide the data necessary for managing this journey.
- Design the marketing automation for multichannel engagement. This requires the company to identify all the channels used by its customers and develop content and marketing plans that can be used seamlessly across all these channels.
Marketing automation software for small businesses
There are several points of evaluation for purchasing a marketing automation software:
- User-friendly with a simple interface
- Enables social media management
- Provides A/B testing possibilities
- Facilitates leads development and management
- CRM integration
- Allow email marketing
- Create landing pages
- Provide detailed analytics
Small businesses can also explore the option of starting their marketing automation efforts with free or open-source software and scaling it up to a proprietary solution in line with the company’s growth.
Examples of free marketing automation software for small businesses
Small business owners can consider several free or open-source marketing automation software packages. The key ones are –
- FreshWorks CRM: This software is powered by AI (artificial intelligence) and unites CRM and marketing automation in one easy-to-use module.
- SendPulse: Ideal for bulk marketing campaigns to multiple target markets, this is a cloud-based marketing automation tool that integrates email, web, SMS, FaceBook, and Viber into one unified interface.
- EngageBay: It is a popular tool that helps companies manage email marketing, sales, and live chats. It also provides a strong CRM platform and is one of the most affordable and versatile marketing automation tools in the market today.
- MailerLite: Primarily an email marketing platform, Mailer Lite is a feature-packed software with automation integration.
- MailChimp: This automation tool is best if your marketing campaigns use a lot of newsletters. It can help organizations manage both leads and existing customers and is equipped with pre-made templates that can also be modified.
- SendInBlue: This is one of the few marketing automation software platforms fully compliant with European GDPR data regulations. Users can create and manage their marketing campaigns from a single location.
- Mautic: Though this is limited to one user in its free version, Mautic is a feature-rich marketing automation software that integrates multiple digital marketing channels for a seamless customer experience.
- Moosend: A powerful tool for unified marketing automation, it can be used by organizations of any size.
Is marketing automation software worth it for a small business?
Most free or open-source marketing automation tools are equipped with plenty of robust features, which allow small businesses to ramp up their evolving automation requirements in line with their business growth. There are many ways by which a good marketing automation software helps small businesses:
- It saves valuable marketing time.
- It allows small businesses to allocate more funds and resources towards strategic marketing initiatives rather than routine or “labor” costs that do not give an ROI.
- It has inbuilt scalability features to cope with increased lead generation and conversion demands, database management, marketing campaign management, and overall marketing growth.
- It leads to better marketing and sales coordination by lengthening the marketing pipeline and helping sales close deals faster to improve business and profitability.
- It helps small businesses identify the most relevant customers by segmenting anonymous website visitors by demographics, buying or browsing behavior, and other characteristics.
- It allows campaign management across multiple channels so that the company has an overall view of all campaigns simultaneously and can allocate funds to those campaigns that are doing well.
- Finally, a good marketing automation software gives a better, positive customer experience by maximizing individualized experiences.
Therefore, it is clear that a small business can – and should – implement free or open-source marketing automation software to manage its business and processes in a better way.
Conclusion
Today, there are many marketing channels to allow businesses to attract, engage, and convert leads into customers. This has made marketing automation a necessity for organizations of all sizes. In particular, small and medium-sized companies need marketing automation to monitor and manage routine marketing tasks that will help draw customers to the websites. These tasks include generating interesting content, managing all social media channels, and generating innovative ideas to engage potential leads. Small businesses can also use marketing automation to rework, quantify, and better focus marketing campaigns and workflows.
In fact, the biggest buyers of marketing automation software are small and medium businesses, and this trend is growing exponentially.
But marketing automation can be useful only if businesses use it smartly and effectively. As a unified communication platform, a marketing automation solution helps the marketing teams track and refine the customer’s journey through the marketing pipeline.
Perhaps the most important contribution of marketing automation for small businesses is in helping the company focus on building and strengthening client relationships by streamlining business operations.
In short, marketing automation makes marketing easier for small businesses to boost their marketing ROI and sales efforts.