Once you've opened up your doors, scored some important clients, smoothed out the kinks in production and operations, it's time to really scale your business up.
Your website is the perfect reflection of your brand, a beacon of information that your future clients can come to and learn why yours is the right service for them.
Why, then, do you hear the metaphorical crickets chirping when you view your site metrics?
With all the pieces in place, the final master stroke that will take your business soaring above the margin is increasing exposure to your brand and content on the web. Generating more traffic to your site is just a part of that.
Marketing automation software is a sustainable way to reach potential clients on every digital channel and meet them where they are using marketing workflows that are tailored to each specific type of targeted buyer persona.
Before you commit to an automation-based inbound marketing strategy, it's important to understand exactly how automated marketing tools can take your business to the next level.
That's why we've broken its advantages into seven specific points for our readers!
1. Marketing Automation Tools Enable a Sustainable Long-Term Marketing Strategy
You're busy enough as it is operating a small business. Marketing requires a lot of time and attention, and you might not have the resources to hire any dedicated marketing staff at this point.
Enthusiasm for growing your business can only take you so far. That's why marketing automation is such a wonderful resource for small businesses; it's a way to take your strategy, build it into an automated process, and keep to your busy schedule.
This is not to say that an automated solution can take care of 100% of your marketing tasks. You still need to monitor its performance, refine your content, and make sure your buyer personas are on point.
However, an automated marketing solution will take care of the repetitive marketing tasks that can burn you out on marketing altogether. This allows you to keep your eyes on the prize and your focus on bigger picture marketing strategies that will win the day.
2. Relevant Marketing Emails
Automatically generated emails represent some of the most effective automated marketing content available to your business.
The best automatically generated marketing emails are refined based on customer profiles. For repeat customers, it's important to be able to promote products that make sense based on prior purchases.
Automated marketing gives you the control that enables you to generate relevant emails and the email marketing tools to send out the volume of emails you need to produce the leads you need.
Of course, the quality of your leads is just as important (if not more important) than the number of leads you generate. That's why it's so important that the content of your emails builds the right expectations for your leads as they work with a sales rep.
3. Consistent Social Media Presence
When you're operating a small business, it's hard to find time to sit down and update your business social media channels.
However, as social media represents one of the most prolific marketing channels for generating hits, it's so critical to stay active on all of your social media pages. The opposite side of the same coin is that inactive social media business profiles sap credibility away from your brand image.
That brings us to our next point: automated marketing tools are a way to ensure consistent social media activity. That means that you're taking full advantage of one of the most powerful marketing channels available and avoiding neglecting your social media pages.
This keeps your brand looking sharp, active, and present. In the eyes of social media users, this means staying relevant.
4. Measurable Marketing Content Performance
Marketing channels are not a one-way streets. The insight that your marketing tools can gather from its interactions with potential leads is as valuable as any third-party market research you may find, if not more.
By monitoring information like the number of automatically generated emails opened, the number of social media reactions, clicks to links to your page, and leads created, your marketing automation tools enable you to track the performance of your content.
This information allows you to tweak your content and branding to line up with the interests of your target market.
5. Minimize Marketing Spending Early
As your business grows, you're going to need to build a marketing department at some point. By starting out with automated tools, you're creating an efficient work flow that will allow your marketing department to do its job efficiently.
Small businesses have the advantage of flexibility. Some of your bigger, well-established competitors are going through growing pains as they try to improve their marketing ROI (return on investment).
These companies work with expensive incumbent marketing techniques that don't perform well on an ROI perspective. It's a painful process for these companies to integrate automated marketing solutions, as it requires changes in culture and sometimes in personnel.
As a small business, you have the advantage of being able to start your marketing department with a "clean slate," cementing the techniques that optimize marketing ROI from the very start.
6. Multiple Channels, Single Message
As you adjust your marketing content and brand image based on the feedback you see, it's extremely useful to be able to distribute your changes across all of your marketing channels instantaneously.
That's exactly what automated marketing enables you to do.
It does this by keeping all of your marketing content "in one place." This allows you to control your overall brand message and keep it consistent across all channels.
This goes a long way in building a trustworthy image of your brand.
7. Streamlined B2B Sales and Customer Pipeline with Marketing Software
Efficiency is important for every aspect of your customer acquisition and service process.
Automated marketing is a great way to automatically populate your sales and customer management pipeline with the leads you generate. Keeping your client information together will help keep all of your customer-end tasks efficient.
Businesses need to be efficient by necessity. The right marketing tools should be just a part of your overall strategy of staying efficient as your business grows.
Need help finding the right marketing software or marketing automation tools for your business? Get in touch with us! We specialize in inbound marketing strategies and we can help you get started!
