When it comes to running a business, time is money. This is especially true for small business owners, where the responsibility of receptionist, director of sales, and human resources manager can fall squarely on your shoulders all before lunchtime. As a result, it’s natural for people to seek out help in trying to organize and manage the things that don’t directly need attention throughout the day. Well when it comes to the marketing side of your business, that very thing exists. It’s called marketing automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Now when people hear automation used in a marketing sense, they usually think of it as something negative such as spam. This is not the case at all. For the jack of all trades business owners out there, marketing automation is the goose that laid the golden egg. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look!
Taking Care of the “Boring Stuff”
Let’s be honest, keeping up with things like email and social media with all of your clients can be tough (not to mention extremely tedious.) When you are trying to think of the next best idea for your business, the last thing you want to be doing is spending half your day responding to emails.
That’s where automation comes in. By creating a variety of templates and setting the perimeters in which they are sent out, you can create a highly efficient and effective process of contacting your clients with little to no effort throughout your day.
So What Exactly Can Be Automated?
There are a variety of different things that can be automated in a business. For simplicity of this article we are going to pay attention to the two major ones.
Whether it be hyper focused messages or a standard drip campaign, having a highly optimized email automation strategy in place can do wonders in creating conversions. Did someone new just sign up for a newsletter? Automatically send them a thank you response. Did someone just make a purchase on your site? Send them an email with links to other items they may also enjoy. With an automated email platform in place, you can reach your consumers with the information they are looking for, exactly when they are looking for. Saving time and making money in the process.
Social Media
Don’t have time to sit on Twitter and Facebook all day engaging with your audience? Try automating your social media platforms. A program like Hootsuite is a great program for linking all of your social media accounts in one single location. Just log in once, schedule your posts for the week, and that’s it. Leaving you time to focus on what is really important, growing your business.
Optimization
Yeah it’s great being able to have emails sent out automatically, but where the real benefit automation lies is in the ability to highly specific parameters to decide who gets what kind of message when. Sounds complicated, but it’s not. Imagine being able to create segmented email campaigns that are separated according to:
Personal demographic (gender, age, education, income, life style, etc.)
Where they live (country, region, zip code, etc.)
Motivations
Personality
Purchasing habits (time, method, season, etc.)
Stage of the sales funnel
This is just the start. The more time you take to specifically segment your clients, the easier it will be to make sure they get exactly the kind of contact they are looking for at exactly the right time. This if done correctly, will help boost revenue for your business exponentially, all without you or anyone on your marketing team having to do a thing!
What do you think? What are some of your experiences with marketing automation? Leave your comments below and let’s get the conversation started!
Source: B2C
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