When you conduct a small business, you don’t implement complicated solutions. With small marketing team already overloaded with various tasks, there is no time for long learning and testing fancy new options, not to mention financial restrictions. You need something simple, effective and measurable.
That’s why Marketing Automation is cut out for you. The system will automate all mechanical tedious tasks and let you do your job: invent, innovate and build relationships.
Why small companies should use Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is no longer a choice for big players only. On the contrary, it’s one of the most dynamically growing markets, hence you can easily find an offer tailored to your specific situation.
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Why to implement Marketing Automation?
- Save time: thanks to automation of mechanical tasks, you gain more creative space.
- Reducing human error: automation minimizes the risk of human errors (like spelling mistakes) and ensures cohesive communication across all channels.
- Measurability: Marketing Automation allows you to measure performance of each action, so you can focus on most effective ones (and you can be more trustworthy as a marketer who delivers real value).
- Planning: Marketing Automation creates really planning-friendly environment, where less is done spontaneously, and employees rather try to create procedures, not isolated events or campaigns. It brings more strategic planning and security to marketing departments.
Marketing Automation in Small Business: Statistics
According to recent survey, many marketers in small business limit themselves to manual methods: 47% of them write emails manually or use pen and paper only to produce strategy, while 17% use marketing software: 15% use CRM, 8% – email marketing program, and only 2% apply Marketing Automation.
Small and medium enterprises need marketing automation mostly for contact management (74%), email marketing (55%) and drip campaigns (43%). At the same time, they show no interest in automating social media.
In conclusion, although a need to introduce marketing automation is widely recognized and declared among small business, marketers intending to do so find it hard to choose the right platform. As Andree Jones from Venture Beat puts it, marketers know that automation delivers value (as 80% of users see lead increase, and 77% – conversion increase), but have problems with making the final decision.
How to choose Marketing Automation Platform for Small Business?
Start with defining what do you expect from Marketing Automation: what are the problems we try to solve? What do we want to achieve with Marketing Automation? Focus on specific needs of your company instead of getting distracted with common knowledge like “We should have a mobile app” or “We should be more visible in social media”.
Spot what your team lacks: analytics skills? Deeper insight in customer behavior? More effective email marketing?
Most useful Marketing Automation features for small business
Marketing Automation offers a huge amount of functionalities, so for layman it might be difficult to identify most useful ones for them. According to businessmen surveyed, the most functional features are:
- Newsletters and landing pages: you can create compelling emails and landing pages without technical skills or HTML knowledge.
- Cart rescue emails: are favorite feature of all e-commerce marketers. Emails with offer from abandoned shopping cart show 621% higher conversion than batch email.
- Dynamic 1-to-1 emails: like welcome message, thank you message, or win back campaign. As they are sent to user individually, in response to his action, their content is more precisely tailored to the context – particular customers need in that moment.
- Lead Generation: dynamic personalized contact forms are the best source of new contacts in your database. Marketing Automation Platforms allow you to create them, post on your website and manage acquired contacts.
- Content optimization: very often owners of small, niche businesses have expert knowledge in their field, but when they try to share it, it takes shape of a blog that nobody reads. What a waste! With Marketing Automation you unlock the full potential of your content with effective distribution.
- Monitoring efficiency: as Lauren Licata proves, measurability problem is one of the biggest challenges for small enterprises, as businessmen don’t have time to learn how to measure performance of their actions, a lot of their energy and resources goes for waste. With Marketing Automation measuring effectiveness is easier.
Marketing Automation is a great tool for small business, although making the decision and choosing your platform might seem scary. But with so many options available, ask yourself “What Marketing Automation should improve in our company? What exactly do we need?”, and find a platform that meets that requirement. It will help you find a system that will deliver real value at palatable cost.
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