Why You Should Consider Automating Your Marketing Efforts

As a small business owner, scaling your marketing and sales efforts can be extremely challenging. Between you and your personnel, there are only so many hours in a day, and small businesses typically choose to apply those hours to close existing opportunities with hot prospects or maintain the business they already have. Yet, without a system for steady inbound lead generation and a way to turn cold prospects into warm leads, your sales efforts are always in jeopardy of reaching a screeching halt.  

If this sounds familiar, a marketing automation strategy may be the answer to your problems.  

Marketing automation drastically reduces the hours required for marketing and sales tasks, allowing your sales team to spend more time with the hot prospects most likely to become clients. 

So, what exactly is marketing automation? Before you can fully understand automation systems and inbound marketing strategies, you first need to understand the concept of a sales funnel.  

Textbook marketing theory suggests that all potential customers — regardless of product or service — go through a fairly distinct decision-making process before purchasing anything. 

The stages of the marketing funnel are generally defined as: Awareness > Interest > Consideration > Decision

The more expensive and technical your product is, the more defined, distinct, and elongated these stages tend to be.  But make no mistake; the funnel stages are all there – regardless of the nature of your offering. This idea of a four-stage sales funnel is by no means new school marketing mumbo jumbo.

The concept of a sales funnel is as Marketing 101 as it gets and has been taught in marketing courses at every university for a long time. Many digital marketers have adopted a rebranded version of the concept that refers to the funnel as the “Buyers Journey” – though ultimately, it is the same thing.  

It is universally accepted that a cohesive inbound marketing strategy strategically moves prospects through the phases of the sales funnel (aka buyers’ journey). This is generally done via content marketing, which ultimately seeks to put the right content in front of the right person at the right time through a mix of blogging, social media, and advertising. Providing potential customers with the information and education they need to advance in the funnel is what marketers refer to as “lead nurturing.”

Using the stages of the buyer’s journey as their guide, marketers look first to understand the thoughts/conditions/concerns that lead to a prospect being aware that they have a problem (awareness stage) – a problem that their product could ultimately solve.  This awareness naturally leads prospects to an interest in solving that problem (interest stage), then an evaluation stage (consideration stage), and ultimately a conversion (decision) stage.

Lead nurturing takes a ton of time and resources. Businesses utilizing marketing automation software run laps around those that still rely on human beings to nurture leads. Meanwhile, businesses resistant to using software almost always have opportunities falling through the cracks. Marketing automation plugs up these gaps by automatically sending the right content to the right person at the right time based on website user behavior/engagement, social media behavior, and email engagement metrics (or lack thereof). 

Automation systems use a lead scoring system to understand how hot a prospect is. The more users engage with your content, the higher their “lead score.” Moreover, a good automation tool monitors the type of content a site visitor or email subscriber spends time with, helping your sales and marketing teams understand what stage of the funnel a buyer is likely to be in.  This helps them to prioritize their efforts with prospects and to know what types of e-mail marketing they are most likely to respond to. 

The ability to save business owners precious time and resources isn’t the only reason marketing automation has caught on. When calibrated correctly, buyers love marketing automation, too. Putting the right information in front of prospects helps them make better decisions, and a brand’s ability to anticipate a potential buyer’s wants, needs, and questions builds tremendous trust. This is a welcome deviation from the past’s interruptive advertising, which is why we say inbound marketing is “buyer-centric.”

Are you shopping for a marketing automation solution? You’ll find a huge list of options, but many aren’t suitable for small businesses. Here are a few options that are proven to work well for small and mid-sized business marketing campaigns:

• Drip:  Drip focuses on the e-mail marketing side of the equation. You can configure complex behavior-triggered workflows that send emails to the prospect to move them along the funnel. As you might guess from its name, it truly shines when you want to “drip” content to your leads.  This is what marketers call a “drip campaign.” 
• Keap; Keap takes an all-in-one platform approach to marketing automation. You would use it for customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, e-commerce, sales funnels, and other marketing tasks. While it’s feature-rich, especially for a more established small business, the sheer amount of features can be overwhelming.
• MailChimp: MailChimp is an email marketing tool with several automation features. Many small businesses enjoy this platform’s user-friendliness, but the more advanced features have a bit of a learning curve to overcome. Companies with a strong e-commerce focus will particularly like many of these options.
• ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign’s approach is entirely geared towards small business needs. Email marketing, lead scoring, CRM tools, and other features provide a robust platform for your company.
• HubSpot: Well-established small businesses with a strong growth plan can benefit from this market-leading automation platform. This software allows you to control your entire sales and marketing processes, but it comes with a sizeable learning curve and an equally sized price tag.

Finding the right marketing automation platform can transform your business. 

This article originally appeared on SCORE.