4 Benefits of Marketing Automation for Small Business
Your local business has been thriving lately and you’re ready to take things to the next level. What does that mean? More staff? More processes and systems? Perhaps...more revenue?
That sounds amazing! So maybe you’re ready to start scaling your marketing budget. But to spend that budget efficiently, especially as you grow, you’ll need to automate your operations.
What are the benefits of marketing automation for small business?
Marketing automation software is a huge boon. It frees up your time so you can focus on important daily tasks and helps optimize your profits despite initial, short-term investment costs.
The marketing automation sector is expected to exceed $25 billion in value within a couple years, a five-year growth rate of over 60%.
And already, almost half of all small- and medium-sized businesses use marketing automation for social media. That’s impressive since large corporations aren’t included to inflate the data.
Plus social media is just the tip of the iceberg. Think of all the potential ways your company can leverage automation, from email to website marketing.
Implementing customer loyalty programs for small businesses is also a great example of how local companies can use marketing automation to increase revenues and retain customers.
So it wouldn’t be wrong to say that this is the right time to implement marketing automation for your small business.
In this post, we will walk you through the nitty-gritty of marketing automation and cover the benefits your business will have by adopting a marketing automation strategy.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation enables your small business to automate marketing tasks to save time and improve efficiency. Various types of marketing automation tools will streamline workflows.
In other words, with marketing automation, you can plan your strategies ahead of time and leave them to function on autopilot.
For instance, you can create a stellar email marketing campaign through marketing automation. This will allow you to send the right email at the right time as a customer engagement solution.
As a result, marketing automation will not only save you time and effort but will also increase your sales and reduce your capital expenditure.
Imagine implementing an email marketing strategy manually. You would need a team to create an email list, manage your subscribers and broadcast the campaigns.
No wonder it would be time-consuming, expensive and exhaustive! Marketing automation frees you up from the responsibilities of managing mundane and repetitive marketing tasks.
With the extra time that you will save, you can focus on your business’ core competencies, such as strategy and innovation.
How Marketing Automation Is Used by Small Businesses
Small businesses use marketing automation to streamline tasks for email marketing, social media, their website and more.
Different softwares help you execute strategies of marketing automation like pre-publishing posts, creating a/b tests and generating instant estimates & quotes for more leads and sales.
With marketing automation, small businesses improve both the efficiency of their operations and the quality of their customer data for further marketing and reselling opportunities.
Let’s dive into some of the advantages of marketing automation to see how it can help your business grow.
Top 4 Benefits of Marketing Automation for Small Business
- Save Time and Improve Efficiency
- Better Target Your Customers
- Increase Conversions
- Minimize Costs
1. Saves Time and Improve Efficiency
You can steer clear of the following repetitive and mundane business tasks through marketing automation:
- Publishing articles and blogs on your website
- Posting on your social media handles
- Sending emails and text messages to your customer base
So instead of putting your time and effort into performing these ordinary tasks, automate them. It will give you ample time to plan new marketing strategies and scale your business.
One great example of saving time is that marketing automation helps solve the issue of how to get more reviews.
For instance, instead of spending time manually asking customers to leave online reviews with a low success rate, you can implement software to solicit reviews for you automatically.
Further, you can utilize the time you save from marketing automation to:
- Develop new products and services
- Work on a better understanding of the customers and the marketplace
- Collaborate and promote teamwork
2. Better Target Your Customers
A marketing automation software can help you collect relevant customer data. This empowers your business to enrich details about customer behaviour to better sell to potential leads.
Marketing automation can give you an in-depth insight into the following aspects of the customer’s buyer journey:
- What kind of products and services do they want?
- What keywords are they typing to find your business?
- Which social media do they actively use?
- What’s their position in the sales funnel?
- What’s their purchasing power?
With extensive customer data, marketing automation software can analyze and organize it so that you can create effective buyer personas easily to improve your marketing targeting.
In short, it will help you ace your personalization strategy.
For instance, if your customer base engages with your Facebook posts more, marketing automation software can target them exclusively on Facebook for improved lead nurturing.
Another excellent marketing automation example for better customer targeting is with emails.With the right email-marketing tool, you can send hyper-personalized emails to your customers.
You can address the customer by name to hit a personal chord, remind them of a recent buyer intent (did they request a quote and then forget?) or subtly make personalized sales pitches.
No wonder email automation works as one of the top marketing strategies for small businesses!
3. Conversions
Did you know businesses that provide a response to new leads within five minutes are 21x more likely to make a sale than those that take 30 minutes? That’s huge!
Remember, lead conversion is directly proportional to your responsiveness. The sooner you respond to leads, the higher their chances of converting.
Say, for instance, a lead messages your business in the middle of the night. It is past your team’s working hours and there's no one to answer.
But with marketing automation, you can ensure that your lead receives a quick response. And voila! Who knows, you might just score a customer.
4. Minimizes Cost
Marketing automation works on predefined rules and carries out multiple tasks every day. This helps you manage your business more efficiently such as not needing to hire extra workers.
Also, since a lot of marketing automation works as omnichannel support for your business, you don’t have to invest in a variety of other softwares.
All you need to do is incorporate marketing automation software in your business’ CRM and you are good to go.
In short, the decrease in employee hiring and software implementation minimizes costs and helps you utilize that capital on business growth.
When It Makes Sense to Use Marketing Automation in Small Business
If you’ve worked hard to build your local business to a point where there is an opportunity to scale your operations to grow revenue, you’re in a prime spot to use marketing automation.
That’s because marketing automation is a strategy you can use to get the job done.
Since automation puts each of your business’ marketing channels on autopilot mode, you end up saving a significant amount of time and money.
And automation facilitates personalized and relevant targeting to provide instant gratification to your customers.
With marketing automation, you can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns, your company website or in-store opportunities.
All in all, marketing automation streamlines, simplifies and manages repetitive marketing tasks. This will help you nurture high-quality leads instantly and generate sales.
