Only about 50 percent of businesses will survive past the first 5 years, according to the latest research on Small Business. But this is not something that should make any small business give up before trying yet rather should inspire small businesses to look for ways on how to survive those struggling first 5 years and even flourish in their business vertical. One of the business tools to consider when thinking about your business growth and longevity is Marketing Automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
How do you fish? Do you just go to your local fishing areas any time, throw your rod’s line and wait until something bites? If you really want to catch fish you must think of the perfect time and the perfect bait to use. Just like in business, one must think of a way to reach more of your target market in the first few years in business. That’s what marketing automation is all about, targeting credible prospects and product-fit customers without worrying about handling A LOT of manual tasks to reach these target clientele. Being described as a technology platform that assists organizations manage multiple marketing tasks on various channels, perform manual processes in automation, and simply record results. Just imagine email marketing being married to an organized sales process.
Why rely on Marketing Automation?
If you really want to maneuver qualified leads for sales, make use of marketing automation that does the managing of lead scoring and outbound campaigns. It definitely optimizes one’s business as the marketer makes the most of their time or improves the customer’s journey through automation. Automation which connects you with your customers through key data, channels and relationships you summed up in the most genuine approach. Such marketing automation vendors that execute on these features well are Act-On, Constant Contact, HubSpot, MailChimp, Pardot, and others.
Why rely on Marketing Automation? These are the following overarching benefits.
1. Control by Personalization
Marketing automation enables you to personalize your own strategy making your communications with your customers more relevant and more up-to-date. It’s a way for your business to create better relationships with your customers and prospects. And since there are small businesses, just starting out, which are not technically inclined, marketing automation is just simple for them to apply. It’s because one doesn’t need any coding or designing experience to create visually effective email with today’s automated marketing solutions available, offering easy-to-use editors, ready-made templates and guides to help you get through processes of creating and distributing campaigns. Thus, the marketer can simply control their own marketing plans with marketing automation. But to say that the marketing automation system that is being used is good, the marketer should get a single customer view and should see how the multiple channels are doing. The small business marketer must also now come up with creative ways to deal with, for example, excess inventory without jeopardizing results to the bottom line of the business.
Because when marketers slap a quick discount on items and re-market them it gives them more marketing control, yet without marketing automation to track the discounted promotions against other items the customer buys, the ROI of the marketing efforts are greatly diminished. Events for excess inventory are a good idea as you can email market to your existing clientele using personalization for the event, tracking the sales in real time too if your marketing automation solution is tied to your Customer Relationship Management software (CRM).
Marketing automation benefits: Satisfy both parties, the business owner and the customer through personalization.
2. Brand Consistency
Marketing automation also allows the marketer to maintain consistency of their business’ brand. Why maintain brand consistency? To help customers identify your business and connect with you, allowing mutual interactions which is both convenient and relatable for your customer. But how? With marketing automation, you are able to expand your campaigns across various channels namely email, Facebook, Twitter, text messages and yes, even fax. You can effortlessly publish posts or tweets by scheduling. Through automation, you won’t get confused when and what content you’ve posted or tweeted or get worried when you have no posts or tweets on that specific day, by creating your posts and tweets ahead of time and schedule them to be published on your Facebook and Twitter profiles so your accounts still stay fresh and up-to-date showing your customers that you’re consistently active and an engaged business. On the other hand, an inconsistent approach to social media may hinder your audiences including your target customers that your business is not properly managed and they may become unengaged or even unsubscribe from your email marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation benefits: More essential engagement from your end customers via the use of social media and other channels to create consistent brand awareness.
3. Time-Saving and Enables One-To-Many
Marketing automation is a time saver. With an automated solution your marketing staff members can distribute multiple targeted campaigns and can reach, connect with many MORE customers. Thus, lead nurturing is done easily. Let’s take newsletters for example. If your target customers have already signed up to receive your newsletters, you can connect with them right away by having an automated solution. That is the automated welcome and confirmation message they’ll be receiving. You can also configure the marketing automation solution to send discount coupons or surveys to your new customers for deeper brand engagement. Simply put, marketing automation assists you in reaching out to EACH and EVERY customer or prospect more effectively.
Marketing automation benefits: Makes the most of staff allocation and marketing budgets.
4. Prospecting Customers and Detailed Insights
Through marketing automation, the marketer can easily track prospects and segment data that are valuable for the business. Being focused on the marketing control element, the marketer can foresee what the structured information shows in light of forecasted results.
You are then then enabled with the statistics needed to reach each one of your unique customers with marketing automation. Some automated solutions enable you to simply manage your marketing better by automatically separating customers based on their needs and preferences rather than segmenting them manually.
Detailed marketing graphs, statistical reports and other important insightful marketing data are being provided with the popular marketing automation solutions. The key is keeping track of each of the multiple channels you’ve managed such as your email campaigns, Facebook posts, text messages as you will be using these for analysis on how to optimize your future marketing efforts and campaigns.
Marketing automation benefits: Lets you analyze records and reports of your business activities thus, hints you to foresee the nonsense efforts to be eliminated or the future plans and strategies to apply.
