Why small businesses need marketing automation
As a SME business owner, your time is precious. Not only do you have to worry about the general day-to-day running of your business, but you also have to think about the experience your customers receive when they choose to buy a product or a service from you online. Creating a first-class customer experience can be extremely time consuming - get it right and you can nurture a customer that will come back again and again, but get it wrong and it can be a drastically different story.
Many small businesses still rely on traditional methods of marketing and focus their marketing efforts within their limited means and resources. This involves performing many tasks manually, including social posting, sending emails, segmenting lists, following customers’ buying journeys and many more.
Sound familiar? Now imagine a world where you could automate all of these time consuming tasks, still provide a first-class customer experience and have more time to focus on running your business.
You need Marketing Automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Wikipedia refers to it as “software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks”.
Marketing automation can be a game-changer for small businesses. With limited time, resources, and team members on hand, automating repetitive tasks and processes allows your small business to do more with less for better marketing results.
“Sounds great, but it’s really expensive and we’re not big enough yet to warrant it”
Not true. There are plenty of reasonably priced solutions on the market to suit any type and size of business, it’s just a question of which one fits your needs the best. Investing in good SME automation tools will save you loads of time and money in the long run. Benefits include:
Giving you a clearer understanding of your customer data
Improving your customer experience and communication
Resulting in a better return on your investment and provide upselling opportunities
Increased customer engagement
Here are just a few suggestions of how marketing automation can literally change your life:
An intelligent way to stay in touch with customers is to update them on new products, features, or other news by adding them to an email marketing list. By adopting an eCommerce-Mailchimp integration, you can automatically add your Stripe or Woocommerce customers to Mailchimp for you so that you can keep your outreach moving.
Great customer feedback is so important. More importantly, you want your customers to know that you care, but it takes time to respond to all those reviews. By using automation, you can create, or update, a reply to a Google My Business review the moment it's submitted. Those quick replies will mean satisfied clients, but no extra work for you.
Still manually sharing posts to each of your social media channels? With automation you can post on Instagram and pull the same post across to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc automatically - saving you time and hassle.
Interested in using your email mailing list to connect with people on Facebook? Guess what… you can automate that too. Pull your subscriber data from Mailchimp to Facebook to create custom and lookalike audiences to target with social media adverts.
Using ManyChat on your website or Facebook page? Automatically add your ManyChat subscribers to Mailchimp to enrich your email list and to automatically follow up with your subscribers via email.
Want to know how marketing automation can seriously increase the productivity of your business?
Contact us now to see how we can help get you set up with all the tools you need to get more of your precious time back.
