As a small business, marketing automation can seem like overkill. But it could bring more quality leads and conversions, all with less work. Could marketing automation be the right choice for your business?
Small and medium businesses face similar problems with marketing, CRM, email management, and organizing their contact databases. When it comes to choosing automation, many entrepreneurs are skeptical of the benefits and are reluctant to invest in marketing automation software.
We’ve put together a checklist that might help you decide if marketing automation can make a positive impact on your business.
Your business finds it hard to follow up with leads and stay in touch with your customers
Engaging leads and staying in touch with customers at critical points in each of their unique buying journeys could mean the difference between a conversion and a lost sale.
When you don’t have the time to manually keep track of and follow up with every one of your leads, marketing automation software can help you design and build an automated campaign that uses logic and unique triggers to engage leads right at the moment of truth, with targeted messaging. You can also set up your automation to receive notifications when it’s time to take the conversation off email, and to the next step of a phone call or meeting. This will empower you to act at just the right time and maximize your chances of converting.
If you still aren’t tracking your emails “after-the-click”, you need marketing automation
Tracking clicks and opens is crucial, and if you send emails to your list of contacts, you probably already do this. But powerful marketing automation software lets you go beyond this traditional tracking functionality, allowing you to combine “after-the-click” tracking into your email campaigns.
Triggering tasks for salespeople to call a prospect because they clicked on a link will help them act at just the right time, and respond with truly personal messaging.
Your small business still uses a CRM that can’t track contacts through the sales funnel
A marketing automation software like SharpSpring will give you a bird’s eye view of your pipeline and let you track opportunities from creation to close.
With powerful software like this, you can create custom deal stages, fields, filters, and more to manage your unique sales process.
With software like this, the process of moving your contact through the various stages of the pipeline can be automated too. You can create triggers that will move them from stage to stage based on their behavior, and you only need to intervene when they are primed or a “hot” opportunity.
And if you already use a third-party CRM you are comfortable with, you can sync your data between the two.
If your business website isn’t capturing contact information and identifying visitors, you need marketing automation
Having a form on your website to capture contact information is just the beginning. To encourage your site visitors to share their info, you can offer them something of value, like a case study to download, a white paper, or a discount code they can use. Marketing automation will let you design and create these forms, and automate the process of sending out follow-up emails and add these newly captured contacts to your lead pipeline.
But what about visitors who don’t fill out your forms? Powerful marketing automation software can use the IP address of an anonymous visitor on your business website and gather some information on them. With some marketing automation, you can find out who is visiting your website, what content they are looking at, and even use behavioral-based tracking to truly understand what motivates each click.
Repetitive tasks are taking up your time and affecting the creative output of your team
Repetitive tasks can be almost completely eliminated with marketing automation. Automated workflows and campaigns need to be set up once, freeing up your staff’s time to focus on more creative tasks.
Managing social media for your business is easy with powerful marketing automation tools. While Buffer or Hootsuite lets you publish to multiple accounts and monitor them, the best tools go beyond and help you integrate your social media efforts into your lead tracking system. They’ll help you keep track of social interactions to start meaningful conversations that generate sales. You can even set social interactions as triggers to set off automated campaigns.
Witness the power of marketing automation.
Mystique can help you choose marketing automation that works for you and offers you exactly what you need.
If any of the above statements sound like something your business is facing, it might be a good idea to look into how marketing automation can help grow your small or medium-sized business.
Marketing automation will help optimize each phase of your marketing funnel, with more leads captured, better lead tracking, more conversions, and powerful analytics to identify successful tactics — allowing you to drive more leads with the same marketing dollars.
We invite you to schedule a 15-minute conversation with us to understand how you can make marketing automation work to build your business.
Pick a time that works for you.
Schedule time to review your current situation with us and discuss possible ways to optimize your brand experience to overcome your business challenges and reach your goals. Even if you choose not to use us, you’ll walk away with some great ideas to implement in your business today.