One of the biggest challenges faced by marketers and business owners the world over is finding the right customers and selling their products or services to the right markets to make a killing. Marketing is the keyword that many of us are actually afraid of. We often wonder how to market our products and services, especially if we own a small business and we want to play in big markets. This is a challenge that scares many business owners. Yet, you can take heart in the fact that there are a number of tools and technologies that can make your life easier when it comes to marketing your products and services.
These have evolved in the past two decades ever since the Internet of Things or IoT has exploded with many opportunities and even more information pertaining to one’s ideal customers. One of these tools would be marketing automation, which has revolutionized the way we do business and sell our products to the end user.
Before we actually understand what marketing automation really is, we need to know that it does not merely mean making a sale. With a marketing automation software, the focus would actually shift towards creating brand value and brand recall by playing on elements to put the brand on the map and make it more visible. The marketing automation software would literally play by the rules of the information age by taking that big data and churning it into a neat insight that can be used to articulate the needs or problems of the core customers, along with a solution to the same for some real engagement. This would be the crux of all marketing cavities in this day and age where all the brands and marketplaces are online, in some form or the other.
Marketing automation is even more important for the small business in 2021. This is due to the fact that the pandemic and the unprecedented times including the crash of the markets have pushed more and more businesses to actually do business online rather than just having a presence online. So, in this spirit, one can define marketing automation as a tool or platform or a software that comes together with the core CRM software or system in order to use the right information to create and deliver data driven and relevant campaigns for engaging the right customers. This would push the customers or leads towards the sales pipeline which is where sales automation would take over.
With marketing automation, you can be sure that you will do away with all the monotonous activities and your marketing team will be able to focus on core tasks that would bring leads closer to the point where they are about to become prospects and then customers. The marketing automation software is one that can render great scale and real growth to the small business, especially in the year 2021.
Let us now cast a glance on the four ways in which a marketing automation software can help a small business grow in the year 2021:
1. List Building
This is something that can give even the most seasoned entrepreneur or marketing head the jitters! Building lists is a monotonous task in itself, and finding the right basis or intuition to build data driven ones can be quite a task too. You would want to automate this task with the help of marketing automation. Now, when you employ a marketing automation software, you are essentially creating a framework that would have a number of parameters. Based on these parameters, the system would then capture the data about the relevant parties and leads which would help in building lists for you and your marketing team to make use of.
These lists can be built for a number of customer segments and different kinds of products and services. When you build these lists, you can also see your own plans with much more clarity and the information or data that is mined would make your pitch and your overall approach even more polished and fine tuned. Therefore, building lists should necessarily be automated tasks for small businesses.
2. Faster Communication
The marketing automation software will automate many of the regular deliverables like emails that would serve more as notifications and carry valuable information for the team members and your customers. This automation would make your communication that much easier and faster. For example, if a customer has an issue with the way a product works, and sends you an email, the marketing automation software can easily respond with an email regarding that feature so that it saves you the time and energy of looking for the information and then reverting. This would also portray you in good light as far as the customer perception of your brand and business is concerned.
3. Customized Deliverables
Different markets segments would require different kinds of messaging and deliverables. While some can be engaged on social media, some would require an email marketing strategy. Also, the strategy would depend on the kind of product or service that you are trying to sell to the end user or the customer. The marketing automation software would give you the right insights with an analysis tool so that you are able to create customized messages for each segment and for each product group. This would help you reach out to the people in that segment, in a more customized and personalized manner for better engagement.
4. Split Testing
This is one of the most important tools that marketing automation would offer you. You can easily conduct A/B or split testing so as to study the rate of clicks and the time spent on each deliverable. This can be done by sending different types of messages to each of your subscribers so that the marketing automation software can accordingly track and report back to you. This will help you choose the absolute best template.