How Marketing Automation Boosts Small Business

Rohan Ayyar is a project manager at E2M solutions, a digital marketing firm.

In many ways, owning a small or midsize business is like being David battling Goliath. Larger companies have the budget and manpower to maximize their marketing efforts while smaller businesses struggle to find cost-efficient marketing methods that attract the attention of prospects.

As online marketing evolves, small business can take advantage of a growing number of tactics, platforms and strategies to take on larger competitors and big brands.

Companies of all sizes need an effective marketing strategy to survive and prosper. Two key factors can lift small business or startup marketing to the next level: They are effective time management and efficient use of resources. Combined, they increase productivity.

Automated marketing tools can boost your team’s productivity while reducing costs. A survey by Statista found that 73% of marketers believe the main benefit of automated marketing is an increase in efficiency. So let’s explore how marketing automation can be the crucial factor that helps small businesses better compete against larger companies.

Efficient Content Marketing

A report from the Content Marketing Institute says nine out of 10 marketers – across B2B and B2C industries –use content marketing. Their single most important priority is to “create more engaging content” next year.

However, content marketing tasks such as template design, blog posts, ebooks, and email creation can require substantial time and effort. So much that around 62% of companies tend to automate these jobs so they can focus on other initiatives. With the help of marketing automation’s WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) email and landing page editors, you can free your team to complete other tasks. You can use the budget previously spent on outsourcing or in-house content creators for promoting your core capabilities. Less time spent on mundane tasks allows more time to develop innovative strategies and creative techniques that reach and resonate with consumers or B2B decision-makers.

CoSchedule is a simple drag-and-drop content calendar plugin that allows you to plan your content marketing for the next few months. It allows you to integrate multiple tools like WordPress, Google Docs and Evernote with social networks, to give you a bird’s eye view of your content’s effectiveness.

Once everything is implemented, further automation can facilitate social conversations and follow up emails, and guide your leads down the sales funnel.

Deeper Insights from Social Media

Over the past decade, social media has become incredibly influential in digital marketing. For a small business, scanning through every platform to find out what people are saying about the industry – let alone join these conversations – is an impossible task that consumes way too much time.

Fortunately, marketing automation can monitor social media outlets and find what people are saying about you and your competitors. Additionally, you can learn which platforms your target audience uses the most to get a better idea of where to place your content. The SEMrush marketing suite, which most businesses and agencies already use for SEO and PPC automation, has a social media tool that measures the reach of your posts, your audience’s engagement level, your competitors’ activities on various networks, and other factors, and then visualizes data in intuitive reports.

With this information, you can post the right content at the right time.

Other tools take social media monitoring a step farther. Glean.info, formerly CyberAlert LLC, provides comprehensive monitoring of both traditional and social media. Its advanced keyword search features eliminate most irrelevant results, and its automated alerts inform you when social media comments or news articles require an immediate response. Its new dashboard can integrate data from different sources and provide a single overview of how social media and public relations campaigns are impacting key business objectives.

Qualified Leads from CRM

Customer relationship management is a vital part of business strategy. By adding automated marketing to the mix, you can easily track and engage potential customers. You can also organize contact lists and keep a closer eye on customer data, ROI reports, and sales alerts in real-time. A study by ResearchCorp found that in 2016, 89% of businesses using automated marketing have integrated it with their CRM system.

One of the most difficult sales and marketing tasks is determining exactly what defines a qualified lead. Is a lead simply anyone that comes in contact with your brand? Or do they have to be ready to buy?

Separating genuine buyers from casual visitors can be very difficult and time consuming. In addition to wasted resources, this confusion can often lead to weaker leads. Automated marketing can simplify this process and improve a small company’s sales pipeline.

CRM combined with automation provides deeper insight into the potential buyer’s behaviors, desires and challenges. While more expensive solutions like Salesforce integrate with Google Analytics and help track website visitors and record their information and browsing habits directly to your CRM, small businesses can put together a cheaper solution with a few hacks. A typical example could be:

Capture email addresses with a lead capture form such as OptinMonster.
Connect OptinMonster with Zapier, which in turn can push this data into any number of CRMs, including Agile, Highrise and Streak.
Score and qualify your leads.

With integrated data, your team can better decide which leads are worth pursuing and then nurture those leads.

Workflow Management and Communication

One of the biggest advantages automated marketing gives small businesses is workflow-based lead management. Your audience –segmented into leads, customers and advocates – are the heart and soul of business. Managing thousands of leads can be a daunting task. Some will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Once you define the unique characteristics of your leads, automated marketing and process management tools can help coordinate a successful communication strategy. For example, GetResponse, a multi-function platform, can build intuitive workflows by gauging visitor involvement based on criteria such as clicks, cart abandonment and purchases to help you target your audience better. You can set automated events (such as sending an email, tagging the visitor or pushing a notification) based on these triggers.

Using this data, you can personalize how individuals view your website. If a visitor is returning to your website, the website can display specific promotions or items based on their last visit to fuel the buying process.

Effective Split Testing

Especially with small businesses, the growth stage involves lots of trial and error. Split (or A/B) testing can help identify best approaches. Marketers can test a practically infinite number of variables. You can experiment with factors such as headlines, landing pages, calls to actions, and offers to find what works and what doesn’t. One important principle of A/B testing: Test only one variable at a time.

Upworthy, a viral video publisher with a strong emphasis on social sharing, has tested every aspect of its platform right from its beginnings to find new ways to optimize their viewers’ experience. A few years back, they realized that as their audience grew, their content was not meeting visitors’ needs. Visitors expected more in-depth, personalized material.

At first, Upworthy feared that recommending content would diminish the site’s primary focus on social sharing. However, they decided to split test different placements for a “recommended stories” module while measuring engagement and shares across the platform.

The top result increased social shares 28% while improving overall engagement. Upworthy went on to make the content recommendations permanent.

Split testing and optimizing should be a never-ending task. Understanding what kind of information and interactions work for an ever-evolving digital audience is crucial in today’s business world. The more you test, the more your brand will grow. Tools you should check out include Mixpanel for mobile A/B testing and Omniconvert for website conversion optimization and personalization.

Final Words

Automated marketing is a pivotal lever in marketing. Even without the resources of bigger enterprises, small businesses and startups can build competitive campaigns that run 24/7 and yield improved results in terms of both brand awareness and sales. There is no substitute for a good marketing strategy, but automation can do a much of the legwork, freeing time and resources for strategic and creative tasks.