To stay productive and retain the intimate feel fundamental to small business success, smart marketers chart for growth with the right tools at their side. Marketing Automation with SharpSpring will get you there.
As a copywriter Olivia William creates content and brainstorms marketing initiatives at SharpSpring. An avid reader and writer, she brings creativity and top-notch communication skills to the marketing team. Here she offers 3 tips on why small business needs marketing automation.
You’ve heard it before: Marketing automation helps businesses grow. But if you work for a small business, you might feel like you’re constantly competing against the “Goliaths” of the industry. With labour costs sky-high and not enough time in the day, small businesses face big brands that wield more manpower and resources.
How can they keep up with larger, more well-equipped companies?
The challenge is reaching your audience and developing a meaningful relationship that surpasses what top-dollar companies can offer.
But how?
The New Age of Marketing
Gartner predicts that by 2020 a full 85% of consumers will manage their customer relationship without talking to a human.
Today’s consumers demand authentic relationships across a dizzying number of touch points, channels, and devices. To stay productive and retain the intimate feel fundamental to small business success, smart marketers chart for growth with the right tools at their side.
Growth-oriented brands use marketing automation to maximize on finite time, energy, and resources. By doing more with less, a small business can gain a foothold in the market.
A centralized marketing automation hub helps marketers generate leads, nurture their pipeline, manage their customer relationships, and optimize their marketing spend. Small brands use tech to boost functionality, enhance productivity, and remain competitive in an increasingly tech-driven market.
You can’t create more hours in a day, nor can you pull dollars out of thin air. Fortunately, your brand can outperform the competition with the right marketing tech.
Let’s examine the three critical reasons why small businesses need marketing automation.
1) Marketing Automation Provides Crucial Campaign Data
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
– John Wanamaker
Analytics and reporting (52%), campaign management (46%) and lead nurturing (46%) are considered the most useful marketing automation features. And it’s no wonder that analytics and reporting resonate with so many.
Marketers need to execute campaigns that drive sales as well as prove their campaign’s success. But without any data to measure, it’s difficult to accomplish this.
Marketing automation makes it possible to gain insight into your strategy’s effectiveness and marketing spend. And for a small business with limited resources, this can be even more challenging.
Typically, a marketing automation platform includes reporting and analytics features that provide all the valuable data you need. You’ll have the ability to:
- Track email performance
- Measure campaign effectiveness
- Monitor your leads’ behaviors
- Track specific websites
- Prove ROI
Knowledge is power, especially for marketers. If a small business can determine what strategies are effective, they can double down on what works and axe what doesn’t. And that means they can win more sales and grow their revenue.
Use your data to stay effective and adaptable and you’ll start seeing results quickly.
2) Marketing Automation Helps Personalize Messaging
Allegra reports that 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that offered a personalized experience.
Your competitive advantage is offering a unique experience that prioritizes customer service. But can you do this consistently for all prospects and customers across all channels as you grow? Creating 1:1 relations with prospects is an expensive, difficult process.
Engaging the right person at the right time in the right way is its own hairball. Complicate the need for omni-channel functionality with the consumer expectation for a seamless experience and you’ve got a real challenge.
No wonder that 91% of the most successful users agree marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels. It’s the high-impact way to allocate resources that guarantee both reach and relevance with consumers.
To compete for your audience, customize marketing messages to prospects in different stages of the buying cycle. Stand out in the noisy, value-driven digital space by surfacing authentic content that interests your audience.
Marketing automation helps you create personalized content by providing you a wealth of customer data. Leverage email templates, landing page builders, dynamic content, blog builders, and call to action buttons to pull user segments back to your site.
Develop content to enhance your brand voice and pique your prospects’ interest. Then nurture your prospects with targeted messaging triggered by behaviors and based upon individual histories. And voilà! Conversion. This is how the best brands share the meaningful interactions consumers love and expect.
Small business marketers keen to build a personalized, cross-channel brand experience use a robust marketing automation platform as their toolkit.
3) Marketing Automation Boosts Client Retention
Did you know that a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to an increase in profits of between 25% and 95%? Marketers are so busy trying to capture new leads, that it can be easy to forget to put effort into retaining existing customers. But customer retention is actually highly valuable to your business.
How can marketing automation help with that?
Nurturing customers post-sale is a great way to maximize cross-sells and upsells. Continue sending personalized messages to your customers and monitor their behavior. Attending to customer experience helps with customer retention and cements customer loyalty. Plus it returns critical feedback to help you improve your offering. Automate surveys to garner customer feedback and drive referral revenues.
Triggered messaging is a perfect way to suggest testimonials, ask for product reviews, and send referral incentives.
This will also return user-generated content that acts as the much-needed social proof to empower future lead generation and lead nurturing strategies. You can highlight a winning customer review on your website, landing page, or social media to drive action with prospects.
Because time is money, marketing automation is a cornerstone of productive efficiency that both liberates and enables teams to acquire, nurture, and close the best leads.
Small Business: Go forth and conquer
Marketing automation platforms allow growing brands to make use of crucial customer data to empower their messaging, drive sales, and mitigate risk simultaneously.
Delivering consistent value in a shifting market is what positions your business for success. To avoid data myopia is to stay competitive and relevant with your audience and drive the highest revenues.
Adapt your strategies to what customers really want and capitalize on trends in real-time. This allows you to make the most of your current and future customer base.
Future leading brands use marketing tech to go long, aim true, and come out on top in the end.
PRowl Communications is pleased to be a SharpSpring Partner.
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