How does Marketing Automation work for your small businesses?

Is your sales team facing a problem with managing leads and converting a lead to a customer? Is your team looking for techniques to streamline the marketing process and reduce timing in calling old, cold leads? We have found that even after having tons of leads, on average only 20% of leads are closed successfully. So what is the solution for all the above questions and turning maximum leads to paying clients?

A solution that can not only do a little of the work for your small business but can make your marketing process more efficient. The solution? Marketing automation, yes small businesses do need marketing automation. 

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is nothing but software that automates your marketing activities for you based on the goals you set. The software is designed to help your team to prioritize and execute your marketing tasks in a more streamlined and efficient way.

The ultimate goal with the marketing team is to generate more business for your company. The digital marketing approach to achieve this goal is to drive traffic to your website, convert that traffic into leads and close those leads into customers. So where does marketing automation fits in the above process? The answer is marketing automation plays its role in all two stages which are conversion and closure. So following are the major areas where your team can apply Marketing Automation :

• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Lead Generation
• Lead Nurturing
• Metrics and Analytics
• Management Activities

How To Use Marketing Automation?

Email marketing is one of the significant marketing approaches in today’s world. Generally, the marketing team sends the blast email to their entire list of prospects and customers, hoping the message resonates with some of them and gets them to purchase. to read more about marketing automation please click here. Sending a blast of email to an entire list may get you results sometimes, but the reality of the situation is this:

• You’re wasting your major time and money in marketing to someone who may not be interested in what you’re sharing
• You could be annoying your contacts and missing an opportunity to market to them in the future.

These two mistakes can be easily avoided by applying marketing automation for email marketing. Marketing automation will allow you to nurture your leads through the entire buying process, delivering highly targeted, personalized messages that address their specific barriers to purchase.

Here is a small example of what a basic automated email workflow could look like:

• Step 1: First, send an email invitation to download your latest ebook related to your services or products to a targeted list of contacts. Try to make this information as personalized as possible. Like creating content on geography-based.
• Step 2: Send a thank you note to all the people that downloaded the offer. At this stage, you have applied your first filter. Great!
• Step 3: A few days later, send a follow-up email to your filtered list, offering them a case study relating to that topic
• Step 4: When someone downloads that case study, this person is now much more qualified and is likely farther down the buying process. Your sales team will get a notification so they can follow up with them.

Now, you are first sharing the information which is helpful for your customers. You are trying to set communication and show that you want to solve their problems with your service/product. It makes your leads trust your company more than the others who are just sending bulk emails with different product offers. And ultimately, these leads will be more likely to buy, doesn’t it? There you go! Driving revenue for your company with an automated system.

This is the foundation of marketing automation. To provide you, as a marketer, with the ability to target your contacts and send them content that is based on their behavior. You’re giving them the information they need when they want it. You’re easing their buying decision. And as a result, your conversion rates and ultimately revenue will increase.

What Are The Keys To Successful Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is not rocket science. Your marketing team just needs to create basic blocks and execute them one by one. There are some key principles that will help your team set marketing automation. Keep these principles in mind when developing a strategy that scales and evolves with your customers.

1. Marketing automation does not do marketing and lead generation for you: It will help you to scale your successful efforts. Don’t consider marketing automation as magic. You need to define a strategy for your business. Marketing automation plays a major role in scaling your efforts. The first step in making your client base is building a pipeline of good leads. The best way to create leads is by generating relevant, optimized content that speaks to your prospect’s needs and challenges. Here is our detailed blog on how to generate leads for small businesses.
2. Personalize your campaign as much as possible: That means we should treat them like a real person, not a fragmented self across different tools like email, social media, etc. Try to leverage all the marketing tools, channels, and behavioural data possible to get a complete picture of a person and nurture them based on their unique challenges and interests, not based solely on the emails they open or click through. 

As a part of the marketer team, it is your goal to generate high-quality leads for your sales team to successfully close into customers. Marketing automation for small businesses will definitely help your company to streamline your own process and give you greater visibility into what your visitors and leads are actually doing. With marketing automation, you can quickly track what content your leads are downloading, how they are responding to your emails, and how they are moving through the sales funnel. Each step of the way, you can monitor and measure how the marketing automation system you have in place is performing and shows you where you might need to make tweaks to get better results.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we all want to see our companies succeed. By leveraging marketing automation for us as well as our own clients we have seen incredible results. We encourage you to explore your options and find a platform that gives you flexibility, and a proven track record to help you reach your marketing goals. If you are finding any difficulty in setting marketing automation for your different campaigns, Straight Growth will be happy to help you.

We are a HubSpot Agency Partner which is a great marketing automation tool for Inbound Marketing campaigns. We can help you set up the tool as well as run successful marketing campaigns to get results!

All the best for your journey toward success!!!