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.
Page Contents
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
There are several points of evaluation for purchasing a marketing automation software:
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.
Small business owners can consider several free or open-source marketing automation software packages. The key ones are –
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:
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.
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.
Are you looking for ways to increase your website's conversion rate? According to research, the…
Mobile devices have revolutionized the way we interact with the world, and online businesses are…
If you run an e-commerce store, you know that driving traffic to your website is…
Are you trying to improve the conversion rate of your website? If yes, you need…
Increasing the number of visitors to your website doesn't necessarily improve your conversion rate. After…
Conversion Rate Optimization: What is it and why is it important? Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)…
This website uses cookies.