You need a strong content marketing strategy, consistency and persistence to get ahead or stay ahead, of your competition. With advanced analytics dashboards, a marketing automation platform can make your life easier and your business more profitable.
There are so many opportunities for marketing that prioritizing them can be tricky. Even when you have prioritized your goals, maintaining a schedule, and continuing with the plan can be challenging.
It is possible, as a business owner, to do your own marketing, but with email campaigns to build, social media to monitor, web content to write, and customers to nurture, that may not leave much time for running the business.
With improved lead generation through advancing your content marketing strategy and access to powerful analytics, marketing automation will give you improvements in everything from customer engagement to your bottom line.
When you have used a marketing automation platform for a few weeks, you will see time-saving advantages quickly. Also, you’ll be in full control, with a clear overview of your marketing processes and access to ways of interacting with customers that might not have been possible for you before.
Here are 6 ways that marketing automation will supercharge your small business.
Reduce staff costs
Many small businesses have a single person who performs marketing activities. This person may be the owner of the business. Even if not, he or she will often have duties other than marketing to perform.
Anyone responsible for marketing your business will be able to focus their efforts not on lead generation, but on identifying and nurturing the best leads. Marketing automation will take a lot of the guesswork out of your marketing. You’ll be able to learn the parts of your strategy that work so that you can double down on those and discard the rest.
Improve the efficiency of marketing and sales
The clearly defined processes associated with marketing automation will give you a good view of what’s happening when and where with your marketing effort.
Your marketing automation platform will enable you to track leads more easily and effectively than ever before. 610 Digital is partnered with ActiveCampaign, which looks very much like an app, with all the information you need to see where the leads are coming from, what your visitors and customers like, and what’s happening to them once they enter your funnels.
Use marketing automation resources to identify bottlenecks. You may be wondering why you appear to be generating new leads but your sales are not showing a corresponding increase. With a marketing automation system like ActiveCampaign, you’ll learn why. You will be able to see when leads that are captured are not being nurtured and moved along the funnel. You’ll be able to respond accordingly or have the software respond on your behalf, perhaps with the perfect message delivered at the perfect time, to the right individual.
Sales and marketing go hand in hand. Marketing automation will give you a dozen pairs of virtual hands, all working in harmony to achieve your business goals. Use high-quality analytics dashboards to push your sales efforts with the right leads, in the right places, at the optimum times.
Targeted, customized emails to convert leads into customers
Marketing automation includes email automation. This might not sound like anything new, but we’re not talking about mass emailing to your subscriber list.
Platforms such as ActiveCampaign can make timely, one-on-one communication with leads and existing customers. With all the data being gathered by the system, your automated marketing setup will be able to email a lead or customer individually based on his or her previous behaviors and criteria that you specify.
Consider the time it takes to monitor the activity of individuals and email them one at a time at their convenience. Use marketing automation and consider that time saved.
Constant split testing
Split testing, or A/B testing, is an effective way of seeing which of two ways of doing things performs best. Marketing automation makes split testing possible throughout your email marketing. It’s easy to analyze responses based on various factors, including the subject line, from field, content, and delivery time.
Honing these areas can be an easy and effective way to make your marketing dollars go further without having to make major changes.
Analytics
It’s hard to know which elements of your marketing are working and which are not performing effectively. The more tools you have at your disposal for working this out, the better. If you can identify what’s working best, you can concentrate your efforts where it counts.
With marketing automation, marketing analytics allows you to see end-to-end ROI. This information will enable you to eliminate waste and drive more leads into the funnel, both of which are likely to do great things for your bottom line.
Instead of performing repetitive marketing tasks, focus your efforts, and the efforts of your marketing team if you have one, on nurturing leads, producing sales-ready leads, and growing the business. Leaving the drudge to an automated platform frees you and your team to be creative.
Marketing automation platforms integrate well, and there is support
The right marketing automation platform will be easy to use. Automating your marketing shouldn’t require employing technicians to run the software 24/7. That would defeat the purpose.
Marketing automation is streamlined, as powerful as you like, and accessible. Once we get your system up and running, however, support will be available around the clock, every day of the week. The benefits of using marketing automation are huge, and you can be reassured that we will provide you with comprehensive, flexible support, should you require it.
Our friendly team at 610 Digital is also available for analytics consulting to help you get the most out of your new platform.
