Automating marketing has so many benefits for small business owners, as it significantly improves business outcomes. Instead of spending an hour or so every day in developing your marketing strategy and planning your next marketing move, having to spend just a day or two and have an entire month planned out would definitely benefit you, as you would do the work more efficiently and with more focus.

With marketing automation for small businesses, you can:

• Save time
• Save money
• Focus on scaling up your business
• Have more time to analyze customer data
• Focus on team building
• Focus on the customer
• Establish metrics to understand the success rate of marketing campaigns

Time is the most precious resource in any business. For any employee, time is valuable, because nobody wants to take work home. For you as a business owner, time is also precious because there is no more of it. An average entrepreneur works anywhere between 60-100 hours a week, so being able to save time here and there will spare your health and free up time for some other activities.

Setting up an automatic email marketing campaign for example takes a long time. The thing is that the time invested now is the time saved later on in the process. It goes without saying that automation takes a huge burden off your chest, but the real beauty lies within its universality: the same steps, if proven effective, can be reused for every new marketing campaign. This approach will effectively save you a lot of time in the long run.

Saving time is ALWAYS a key aspect of improving your small business digital marketing.

Save Money with Automation

Time is not the most precious resource per se, but it is so because every hour worked is the hour that has to be paid. Work hours spent idling around or doing repetitive tasks that are easy to automate are the most expensive of all. Email automation can halve the staff you have in your marketing team, and it can also help you be more efficient with market research.

If your marketing team is not burdened with repetitive tasks and sending individual emails, scheduling other emails to send, etc. then they will be more productive in some other areas of their work. They can go about doing a more detailed research of your market share or they can analyze other data in greater detail. Both ways, your business benefits.

What small business doesnt want to save money? That’s something we all need to think about with COVID and inflation. Marketing Automation benefits cost savings in many ways.

Having a more detailed market breakdown and analysis reports is the first benefit of marketing automation for small business. It gives you a great opportunity to scale up your business. Scaling up can be seen from two perspectives: scaling up productivity or increasing the number of clients.

If you decide to scale up your productivity, the extra cash and time you have can be used for additional training and software purchases. This will, in turn, make your work more efficient and of a higher quality.

On the other hand, the ability to enjoy free time and extra cash will also pay off because, with a more detailed understanding of your share of the market, you will now have the resources to plan out a more detailed approach to it. Having multiple marketing campaigns is a no-brainer, as they can provide you with a higher outreach and push more people into your conversion funnel.

Marketing automation can also enable outreach to more prospects and on multiple platforms. Approaching your audience on social networks, search engines, email and your website will easily result in more leads and more people accessing your content.

Existing customers should never be forgotten. Marketing automation will necessarily prove laborsome since you’ll have to answer questions, such as how your market share is further segmented and what it is that makes people stay on your website.

To properly automate your marketing campaigns, you need to know a lot about your returning customers. Use the extra time to understand them better. Your next marketing campaign can then be aimed at this particular group.

Focus on the Customer

Focusing on the customer and providing them with a personalized approach will speak volumes of your business and the value it can bring to them. Compile several emails, based on your findings of your own audience. Then, these emails can be used as templates that are to be sent out to prospective customers.

The level of personalization you would want to achieve depends on you and your business needs. In general, the higher the personalization you set up in the early stages of a marketing campaign, the more free time you will be able to dedicate to other business decisions down the road.

On the contrary, the less time that is spent in setting up marketing automation in the initial stages of its development, the more time will be spent down the road. This extra time will be used to further improve or do the work that has not been automated.

You will now be able to automate various SEO and PPC campaigns such as Google Ads & more for direct customers.

Focusing on the customer and providing them with a personalized approach will speak volumes of your business and the value it can bring to them. Compile several emails, based on your findings of your own audience. Then, these emails can be used as templates that are to be sent out to prospective customers.

Instead of rethinking the entire campaign creation process, you will be able to easily and effectively make changes to the existing marketing process. Imagine having an idea and entering it into the template that you have formed and that has been reused multiple times.

The change made should result in some changes in the conversion rate, visits, or the rate of returning customers. Anyway, you should be able to easily quantify this change and see what kind of improvement it has (or has not) brought to your business. So, automation can help you streamline your metrics and the analysis process.

Final Considerations

When automating your business, always start with a clear idea of what can and what should be done. Being detailed in the initial stages of marketing automation planning and marketing campaign development can easily save you tons of time and effort down the road. In small business ventures, doing this exact thing can further increase your chances of surviving in the over-competitive market and having booming business years from now that you can be proud of.

Thanks for reading more about how marketing automation benefits small businesses in this week’s marketing blog!