Labour Intensive Marketing is yesterday’s news. This is why your business simply needs to start automating aspects of the marketing process. In fact, less then 10% of companies are using marketing automation which you can read more about in this report.
Every business today understands the need to incorporate a well thought out online strategy into their operations, no systems have shown their worth more than marketing automation tools. Formally tools exclusively accessible to big companies, businesses like yours can now have access to them that allows you to create diverse campaigns, even with a shoe-string budget.
We’ll consider some benefits in more detail below but as a starting point, your experience with automation will:
- Significantly improve lead generation
- Drive more revenue through increased opportunities for conversion, upsell and resell
- Ensure all your contacts are engaged with consistently with personal interaction
- Reduce the cost of your marketing, whilst ensuring your efforts are maximised
Find out how automation can work for your business by reading our ’25 things every small business should automate’.
In the meantime, discover some of the benefits to why you should be automating your marketing, as originally touched on by CMS Critic.
Incorporate A New Strategy or Get left Behind
As a businesses you realise the need to get on board with digital marketing, and have a number of different software and strategies all going on at the same time. You’ve opened up a Twitter/ Facebook account, dabble in LinkedIn groups, run paid campaigns or even do email shots using a free cloud-based email marketing solution. I think you can agree that this approach is a logistical nightmare and through half-hearted measures, has little overall effect.
Unless you fully throw yourself into these new platforms, you’ll never implement a full strategy that actually works. A toe-dip attitude makes efforts futile and will eventually leave stragglers behind as competitors reap the rewards of these simple, yet effective systems. Once you do this and implement automation to do all the heavy lifting, your marketing cost will drop and you’ll have access to completely new and revolutionary means to interact with customers.
Reduce Your Costs
It’s not just marketing costs that will reduce, automation is proven to increase conversion rates and sales. If aligning sales and marketing was easy, it wouldn’t be such an issue. But unfortunately, it’s a massive problem that business struggle to overcome. These departments often have different goals and metrics, yet they want to achieve the same thing – maximise sales and exposure.
Get Your Business Working Together
Marketing automation provides a framework that requires the teams to collaborate, beginning with defining the characteristics of a good customer and building buyer personas. Building a dynamic pipeline also segments all contacts, separating existing customers and prospective leads.
This holistic approach can define how you qualify and pass leads to sales, determine how you engage respective to their status and finally, how you’ll follow up. This creates communal objectives and makes the most of every potential client. These structures and functions are all basic components of any automated marketing system.
Automation Works Even When You Don’t
Integrating these strategies will save time (which is money, yes), but also take human error out of your programs. Fine tuning your campaigns to replicate your most successful lead nurturing processes can be done with minimal effort. And once you do this, they’ll run exactly as expected, no matter who misses work or is busy elsewhere. Once a lead is hooked into your setup, they’ll be treated as you want to be, and any chance of them becoming a lead is maximised.
It’s Easy To Use
As we’ve discussed, marketing automation enables businesses to execute campaigns, automate processes, and measure their impact. Most importantly though, automation is now rather easy to manage. Whereas marketing departments of past may have faced comprehensive and setups to operate functional automated strategies, this challenge is not one that face today. You don’t need to be overly tech savvy, this software shouldn’t intimidate you.
Here at Green T Digital, we use a marketing automation system geared specifically towards small businesses and SME’s. We build individual and heterogeneous campaigns for our customers tailor-made to achieve what they desire. We can do this quicker than any labour intensive marketing department could dream of, and business owners can still understand what we’re doing. With our guidance, even the most un-savy or users can manage these efforts.
While there’s no substitute for good marketing planning and strategy this no reason why to cause so much grief for yourself when these simple tools are available? Once you have your goals and roadmap set, let automation do the heavy lifting and provide you with the analytics to achieve sustainable lead campaign success.
Want to learn about some things you can start doing today to automate your marketing efforts?
Download our FREE eBook on “25 Things Every Small Business Should Automate”.
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