We all know about the vast majority of marketing tools that are on the market. Marketing automation programs like HubSpot and MailChimp have become game-changers, but most of the questions we get tend to be related to automation, so hopefully this post will shed some light on that subject.
Marketing Automation is a Must for Businesses of Any Size
There’s a lot of competition in the marketing automation niche today, so you have a lot of options. Small businesses tend to use the two platforms mentioned above, while large businesses use more powerful variations like Salesforce to handle a full range of marketing. My point is that automation is not limited to large businesses. There are options for everyone.
The Top Payoffs of Marketing Automation
In most cases, small businesses will want to focus on using marketing automation to streamline their repetitive tasks. Here are a few of those.
Free Up Time for Creativity
First and foremost, using automated marketing tools frees up creative time that can be used to grow your business. Wouldn’t it be nice to have more time to craft creative emails rather than having to rush through the process? While there’s a lot of tasks that can be automated, creativity is not one of them. By spending more time on the creative side and less on repetitive tasks, you’ll see conversions go up.
Automation will be used to handle the actual delivery of your marketing materials, since you should be using your time to actually create it. For example, automation can handle the delivery of emails through segmented lists and scheduled deliveries. You will then use that free time you gained to write creative emails and more effective ads.
Automate Social Media
Small businesses must have social media automation tools. This is no longer an option. In today’s business world, small businesses are not likely to survive without automating their social media platforms. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that make this extremely easy. HootSuite is probably the most common social media automation tool but HubSpot comes in at a close second. These types of tools allow you to streamline all of your social media channels into a single interface. You can write a single message and easily schedule it across all social media platforms. These tools even provide analytics for each channel!
You can even invest in higher-end social media tools that alert you when “trigger events” occur so you can respond. Trending content is one of the best ways to get noticed on social media, so these alerts are quite handy.
Create Intelligent Email Campaigns
Automating your email campaign actually makes it convert at a higher rate because you’re able to ensure that messages are only sent when a subscriber performs a specific action. Automation also allows you to see exactly what your subscribers are doing. You can see:
- How quickly emails are opened.
- How many of your emails are being forwarded?
- How many subscribers are opening your emails.
- How many subscribers are clicking links within your emails.
Streamlining your email list frees up valuable time that can be used to grow your business. Manually sending emails every day would eat away a lot of your time. Furthermore, they would not convert as highly due to the lack of segmentation.
Delegation Made Easy
By automating your marketing, you make it much easier to delegate specific tasks as you grow your business. For example, if you decide to later hire a content writer, you could have the creator plug the content directly into your system for review, fully streamlining the creation of content.
Marketing Automation Gives Your Business Time to Grow
There are many possibilities when it comes to marketing automation. It should be used as a means of streamlining repetitive tasks so that your business can grow around it. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to incorporate it into your marketing system.
Still think you’re “too small” for marketing automation? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments!
