Whether you’re running a business, or you just have a lot of things to do around the house on a Saturday, you know how friendly the word “automation” sounds. Marketing automation saves you more time by doing the work you don’t want to do while achieving successes in areas you may have missed yourself.
When it comes to marketing automation, that’s huge. It’s probably why 80% of the world’s best performing companies have been using a marketing automation service for at least the last three years. They’re able to save time on repetitive tasks and increase customer engagement by offering more timely communications—and that’s just the beginning.
The good news is that you don’t have to be in that list of the world’s best performing companies to take advantage of a marketing automation service yourself. We’ll tell you more about what they are, how you can apply them to your business, and how Brandography can help you get a leg-up when you’re ready to start your automation journey.
Examples of a Marketing Automation Service
As a business owner or marketing professional, you’ve likely heard of the big names in marketing automation software; these include platforms like Hubspot, Zoho, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Additionally, you may have signed up for more specific marketing tools like Mailchimp or Constant Contact for email marketing, or Hootsuite for social media marketing.
What these marketing automation services all have in common is their ability to free up your teams for the harder work involved in growing your business. Mainly used for inbound marketing, these tools know when to email your customers, who to target on social media, and how to manage your contact information for following up.
Why is Marketing Automation Important Right Now?
Generating leads is no longer about casting a wide net and hoping for the best. You first want to generate quality leads—and then you want to nurture your leads. That can involve a long game with many steps (and a lot of work!).
The right marketing automation service helps you across each part of your buyers’ journey with tools like:
- Automated, triggered email workflows
- Timely SMS and mobile communications
- Custom audience building and retargeting on social media
- Content scheduling and publishing
- Lead scoring based on engagement
Let’s face it—your customers and prospects expect a more personalized experience, especially online. Your competition knows that, too. Fortunately, the work involved in increasing the quality of your leads doesn’t have to be on you; today, 86% of marketers attribute their higher quality leads directly to a marketing automation service.
Benefits of Small Business Marketing Automation
Don’t have a high-powered marketing team or the budget for a full-scale marketing automation platform? Don’t sweat it! Even the least expensive tools can offer a better ROI for your business. Feel free to ask what we advise our clients on at your free consultation with Brandography.
We know that most small businesses have three main goals when it comes to boosting their marketing efforts. Typically, those are to save time, save money, and beat the competition. With the right small business marketing automation tool, you can accomplish all your goals at once.
Save Time with Marketing Automation Workflows
Have a brochure on your site you’d like a new visitor to download? By setting up a marketing automation workflow, you can send the brochure, segment or score the lead, and have another email fire off a few days later to follow up.
Nearly all marketing automation software includes some type of workflow tool; even if it’s just a single step, you’ll still be cutting out a lot of time from having to manually reach out to each new lead.
Save Money with Targeted Paid Ads
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a pivotal factor for small businesses. It’s what potential investors look at, and it’s how you keep from bleeding your already-tight margins.
By targeting the right prospects through marketing automation, you can ensure your ad spend has the best ROI possible. Not sure how to get started? We have a team of PPC (pay-per-click) and SEM (search engine marketing) experts on hand to guide you through it.
Beat the Competition with the Best Lead Nurturing in the Game
If you’re not connecting with your audience, your competition will be happy to steal them from you. It’s not too late to improve your lead nurturing game; all it takes is the proper first step.
Find the marketing automation software that allows you to welcome new email subscribers, personalize messaging to unengaged contacts, and reward your VIPs. These seem like common sense goals, but a good chunk of companies still aren’t using automation. This gives you a prime window of opportunity!
From there, you can begin to master advanced capabilities like A/B testing your collateral to see how users engage, upsell or cross-sell your other products or services, or provide chatbots (now boosted by A.I.!) to improve your customers’ experiences.
These may sound like intimidating tasks, but many of the inexpensive small business marketing automation tools we recommend offer great support to help you along the way.
How to Use B2B Marketing Automation
Marketing automation may be getting a lot of press lately for helping ecommerce businesses sell their products, but in truth, B2B marketing automation may be where it all got started!
Businesses who offer services to other businesses have always needed a way to build awareness, collect information on clients, and track leads. And though most automation software began as sales-oriented platforms rather than market-oriented, they created the backbone of what eventually became the marketing automation we see today.
Not sure how automation can help your B2B or software-as-a-service company? We consider it a nitsche of ours at Brandography, and we’d be happy to discuss how we can grow your business.
How to Use Your CRM with Marketing Automation
If you use a CRM for your business, it’s likely there’s some marketing automation built in. As we mentioned earlier, platforms like Salesforce revolutionized the automation industry in the early days of the Internet, spawning recognizable competitors like Hubspot, Pardot, and Marketo.
Soon, these CRM platforms became cloud-based, providing B2B companies of all sizes with access to their service. And now, many smaller, more cost-effective platforms offer both sales and marketing tools in one solution. However, most CRMs can only go so far when it comes to nurturing new leads. That’s where B2B marketing automation comes in.
Here’s how we suggest you use your CRM with marketing automation for your B2B business:
- Welcome new leads who have signed up for or attended a webinar, downloaded a brochure, or interacted with a member of your sales team
- Score your newest leads via their marketing engagement to identify which contacts are most likely to be converted by your sales team
- Download reporting and analytics to learn from and show off the effectiveness of your efforts to your company’s stakeholders
It’s best to imagine your CRM with marketing automation as one large, revolving cycle, similar to the buyer’s journey. Your CRM captures data on your leads, sends it to your marketing automation software, and refreshes the data with any actions they take. This helps your sales team save time and effort on which leads to follow up with, and when.
Need Some Marketing Automation Consulting? Ask Brandography for Help!
You know that marketing automation can help your business. You may have even investigated some of the software out there to see what aligns best with your business or industry. That’s because you’re looking to save time, energy, and money. We can help you save on each of these even further with some marketing automation consulting. We’d love to find the right solution for you and set you up to succeed.
With over a decade of experience helping small businesses and B2B companies, our Minneapolis digital marketing agency has gathered all the tools and knowledge on marketing automation to help our clients become more efficient. We’ve seen where it’s come from, and we know where it’s going—and we’re ready to help you stay on that cutting edge to fly past your competitors. Check out a few of our case studies or read some of our previous blogs to get a sense of our knowledge and our results.
Ready to hear how we think marketing automation can help you right now? Send us a message and we’ll reach out to hear more about what you need and how quickly you’re looking to get there.
