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Guide to Marketing Automation for Small and Mid-size Businesses (SMBs)

Meta: Wondering what marketing automation is or why you should use it as a small or mid-size business? We’ll cover the pros and cons, how to get started, and which software to choose.
Author: Shane Guiltner

If you run a SMB and your plate is already full, the prospect of getting your head around marketing automation can seem daunting. Yet with 76% of companies using automation to boost their marketing efforts already, neglecting it could put you behind. There’s good news — marketing automation doesn’t have to be as complex as many people assume, and it isn’t just for big corporations. At StrategyWise, we’ve helped companies of all sizes achieve success in this domain, and we’ve compiled everything you need to know in one place.

In this guide, we’ll run through:

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a way to carry out your marketing processes and operations more quickly and efficiently. Instead of your team manually carrying out certain marketing tasks and processes, you hand the work over to artificial intelligence. Sometimes, AI can even do things that your team wouldn’t be able to handle thanks to its speed and nifty algorithms.
The list of possibilities for what marketing automation can achieve is practically endless. But overall, most types of marketing automation fall into one of the following categories:

Carrying out repetitive tasks to save you time
Facilitating personalized customer communication
Connecting your marketing channels with databases or syncing data across platforms
How to get started
Handling analytics

We’ll dive into some more specific examples shortly — but first, you may need some convincing that marketing automation is worth your while

Why use marketing automation?

Marketing is ultimately a game that’s all about trying to figure out who you’re trying to reach, reach as many of them as possible, and appeal to them as much as possible. You don’t need marketing automation for any of that — but it does go a long way toward making those steps easier to achieve
It requires a lot of time and thought to analyze questions like: How can my ecommerce store get more sales? And once you come up with an answer, implementation is likely to involve a time-consuming process (such as testing out different strategies to engage customers more).

Marketing automation has the potential to solve these problems. Why do something the hard way when there’s a better alternative?
According to a study by Pedalix, the main benefits of marketing automation among respondents are:

Less time spent on repetitive tasks (e.g., transferring contacts from one database to another)
Personalized communication (e.g., by segmenting customers and sending them targeted information)
Higher-quality leads (e.g., by targeting ads at people who have already viewed your store)
Improved ROI

Best of all, the less time your marketers spend on the tasks automation can handle, the more time they have to focus on executing their wider vision

Does marketing automation really work? Possible drawbacks

Successful companies are three times more likely to use marketing automation, and the practice results in more leads or conversions for around 39% of businesses.
But despite the benefits, there are also challenges — which may explain why not all customers see their conversions rise.
Firstly, there are entry barriers to getting started. Most people find it tough to understand how to use marketing automation software when they’re trying it for the first time, which means some businesses give up early due to confusion over how to set things up. If a company passes this hurdle, they’ll often need to spend time training others on their team to do the same. This requires time and money that not all businesses have.
But even after this point, there’s potential for things to go wrong. 54% of marketers don’t think they’re using marketing automation tools to their full potential. The best programs are often complex, contain many features, and are most effective when combined with other tools through integrations. Not all companies have time to master them.
Working with a specialist can help you to overcome some of these initial barriers and hit the ground running.

Top marketing automation strategies for small and mid- size businesses

Now we’ve given you a brief overview of what marketing automation involves, let’s get specific about the kinds of practices we’re talking about. Some of the top marketing automation strategies you may want to consider implementing to start off with include:

Welcome email sequences. May be used to teach new subscribers about your product/service and gradually nudge them toward a purchase
Chatbots. Add a chatbot to your website so customers can get an instant response to frequently asked questions.
Automated social interactions. Engage your audience by automatically sending direct messages to new followers or replying to comments.
Automated posts. Schedule social media posts in advance so you can post consistently and at optimal times without having to keep track yourself
Segmented customers. Use data collected from your customers to put them into segmented categories (e.g., based on location or the types of products that interest them).
Landing page behavior tracking. See how your customers interact with pages and understand their journey throughout your marketing funnel.
A/B tests. Automatically test out new targeted landing pages and view the success of each variation with minimal time outlay on your part.

This is far from a comprehensive list of all the marketing automation strategies you could possibly attempt. However, they’re some of the more straightforward methods you can try out at first.

How to get started with marketing automation for small and mid-size businesses

No, you know what marketing automation can do for you and you’re starting to visualize what it might look like. But don’t make the mistake of picking one of the strategies outlined above at random and hoping for the best. Instead, you need to be strategic about what’s going to work for you and your customers.

Here’s how to get started with marketing automation for SMBs the smart way.

Decide on your goals and workflow

The process of setting up automation isn’t automated — and for many companies, it can be the most challenging part. Your team needs to come together to decide how to get the best results for your business. That means choosing which workflows (sequences involved in a marketing task) to target.
To help you decide, you need to figure out your main goals. For instance, are you hoping to convert more leads, improve your sales processes to save time, or find more high-quality leads?
This may also give you clues about choosing the right software (which we’ll get to shortly).

Understanding your customers and their journey:

Another crucial consideration in deciding where to focus your marketing automation efforts is understanding your customers and their journey (the process buyers go through when deciding whether to purchase from you). Who are your buyer personas? What are the goals of your customers? How do they carry out research to make purchase decisions?

You can represent the answer to these questions through customer journey mapping, which outlines exactly what a typical customer goes through at each stage. For instance, they may see your Facebook ad on their phone, browse your website, and then add items to their basket. Note that different types of customers will have different types of journeys, and you should account for that.

Marketing automation can be a useful tool in filling in the gaps for different kinds of customer journeys without requiring much work on your behalf. In the example above, you may use retargeting ads for customers that filled their basket but left your website (meaning they will see adverts for your site when they browse social media or Google).

Some other steps you may want to add to your customer journey to reduce friction include:

Analytics

In marketing, there’s never a point where you stop and say: “Okay, I’m happy with that.” As with all other types of marketing efforts, you’ll need to use analytics to adjust your marketing automation strategies as you go. Some efforts will likely work better than others at first.

Some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you may want to focus on include:

Open rates or click-through rates for your emails
Bounce rate (percentage of people that leave a website page)
Engagement (how many people continue to engage with your website after viewing one page)
Conversion rates (number of people that take the action you wanted, such as buying a product after viewing your landing page)
Customer acquisition cost (how much you’re spending to acquire a customer)
Customer lifetime value (value of a customer over time)
Customer retention rate (how many customers stay with you or continue to make purchases)
ROI of marketing automation

While not all of these are specific to marketing automation, they’ll show you how effective your strategies are and can help you to identify the best places to implement automation. For example, a high bounce rate could signal that your website viewers get overwhelmed and confused, suggesting a chatbot could be helpful.

Which marketing automation software is best?

Marketing automation can mean different things to different companies, so it’s tough to give a one-size-all answer as to the best marketing automation software. Plus, some businesses may want to use multiple tools to handle different types of tasks, whereas others prefer to stick to a single multi-faceted program. Here are our top software recommendations for different uses.

Marketing automation with CRM

One of the most important parts of marketing is having a good grip on who your customers are and where in the funnel they are. A CRM is essential for tracking this, and it’s the cornerstone of many other automations. For instance, you may select a group of customers from your CRM and send them a specific email (e.g., a discount for customers that haven’t made a purchase over the last six months).

You have two main choices here.

An out-of-the-box CRM is one that you can use literally straight out of the box — meaning it’s perfectly designed for certain uses. This is often the easiest way to start, and most of the big names fit into this category, such as SalesForce, HubSpot, and Freshsales. However, it does mean you may have to alter your processes to the program’s functionalities (instead of things working the other way round).

Alternatively, a custom CRM gives you more flexibility by perfectly mirroring the types of processes you carry out. However, it’s a more expensive option since an external company will need to build the software especially for your needs.

Marketing automation for data collection

Data tells us what we’re doing well (and what we’re not doing so well), giving us a tool to continuously improve our operations.
This can be used for any process that involves collecting contact information, including:

For instance, Rafflecopter handles giveaways and sweepstakes, Convertkit is great for encouraging sign-ups, and Google Forms is one of the best contact form tools out there.

Marketing automation for distribution

By distribution, we’re talking about sending content or other information to your customers — usually by email but sometimes SMS or other methods. This allows you to communicate with your audience.

Often, CRM systems also contain functionalities for distribution. For instance, Hubspot lets you craft email newsletters within its platform. However, there are other apps specifically for this purpose, such as Mailchimp, SendGrid, and Zoho.

Marketing automation for integrations

Integrations allow marketing automation to really work their magic by connecting everything together. For instance, data analytics apps can take info from your marketing campaigns to help you tweak them.

Fortunately, most popular tools have in-built integrations for other popular tools. Hubspot has integrations with Gmail, Survey Monkey, Salesforce and more.

However, if the integrations you need haven’t been built-in already, you can use an app to carry that out for you, such as Zapier, Integratedly, and Leadsbridge.

Marketing automation for comprehensive management

If you’re looking for an advanced platform with a good overview of your marketing automation and insights, Hubspot, Zoho Marketing Plus, and Insightly are all great options.

Automate your way to success

Once upon a time, marketing automation might have been an expensive, complex process that was out of reach for the average small business — but this is no longer the case. Whether you opt for simple automations like a sequence of welcome emails to new signups or create a complex database of customer segments with various actions, there’s something that every business can implement straightaway.

If you’re looking for guidance to take you through the process and ensure you get the most use of your marketing automations, contact StrategyWise to learn more. We’re experienced in helping businesses implement the latest technologies and tools to boost their efficiency and profits.