How Marketing Automation Can Make Your Business Smarter (and Richer)

Perhaps you keep hearing about this marketing automation thing, and how much of a lifesaver it can be for small businesses? You’re curious but skeptical. Can marketing automation really be that great?

I may be a little biased on the subject since I help firms incorporate automation software into their existing sales and marketing processes, but I think there are some pretty fantastic reasons to consider it.

1. You can focus on more important things

Whether it’s crafting individual emails to send to leads or endlessly updating your social media stream, marketing data-entry tasks can be very time-consuming. And if you don’t have a marketing team to do this work for you, you as the business owner are likely stuck with these tasks. But because that list is so long, you often don’t get to marketing at all.

The wonderful thing about marketing automation is that once you create the initial content, you simply forget about it and let it work its magic. Emails automatically get sent to any prospects who sign up for your updates. Social media posts get published on a schedule. That means you get back to focusing on running your business like you should.

2. You can stay relevant to customers as their needs change

Often with time-strapped small businesses, more focus is put on acquiring customers, not keeping them long-term. That’s another perk to marketing automation: with analytics, you can determine likely interests or behaviors of existing customers and market to them accordingly.

Let’s say you have a customer who subscribes to your cloud-storage service and every six months adds more capacity. You don’t need predictive analytics to tell you that in another six months, that pattern will likely happen again. But you could market to that customer, offering twice the capacity at a discount right when that six months rolls around.

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You can also simply stay in touch via engaging, personalized but automated emails that make past customers feel like they’re still valued, which goes a long way to making them lifelong customers of your brand.

3. You can easily track results

Marketing automation software always has insightful analytics baked in so that you can see exactly how your campaigns are doing at achieving your goals. The secret here is to actually pay attention to this data! A lot of small businesses simply overlook it, but even a glance at the data can net major results if you’re willing to make small changes to improve future campaigns based on what you learn.

Let’s say you have an email drip campaign that people who sign up to download your whitepaper receive. Results show that after they download the whitepaper, an overwhelming majority of them unsubscribe from your emails. That’s your cue to change things up. That might indicate that the whitepaper was not what they wanted, and you could then add an informative article that piggybacks onto the subject of the whitepaper or offer a product discount. Try that and then measure those results.

These benefits are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to marketing automation. It’s worth a bit of time and financial investment to get set up, and after that, you should see a fast ROI.

RELATED: Top Marketing Automation Platforms for Your Small Business