As a local business owner, you understand that there is an increasingly difficult environment that you need to navigate within. Things like labor management, evolving your business, proliferation of marketing channels and tools, and keeping up with changing customer demands can create frustration for you and your team.
Having as much time available in your day to deal with these challenges is essential, but oftentimes business owners are forced to deal with repetitive and mundane tasks when they don’t have the right software solution. At other times, important marketing tasks are put to the side so that other priorities can be addressed. However, this can create a bigger issue when it comes to finding leads and ensuring that you are expanding the brand reputation of your business.
It’s clear that there needs to be a solution in place to help address these issues. Thankfully, marketing automation is the perfect tool for addressing repetitive tasks in marketing and helping reduce your stress as a small business owner. In this blog, we’ll talk about what marketing automation is and why it is so essential for business owners to invest in.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation uses software and other technology to automate and streamline marketing tasks and processes. Oftentimes, these automations are built into a marketing platform or software like Surefire Local. By having some of the menial and time-consuming tasks of the day taken care of with automation, you can find more free time to dedicate to higher-level projects.
In essence, marketing automation makes marketing easier. It takes the burden off the shoulders of you and your team and helps you refocus on more important tasks. It streamlines most of your repetitive and menial tasks like email marketing, social media posting, and managing online revirews, among other things. By using marketing automation to bolster your current marketing efforts, you can turn your attention to other areas of your business that need manual input.
In an increasingly competitive business world, marketing automation is becoming part of the norm for businesses that want to succeed. If you don’t currently have marketing automation capabilities, you should seriously consider adding a marketing platform with those abilities to your tech stack.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can be particularly valuable for small local businesses for many reasons. Here are a few of the most important benefits to keep in mind.
1. Improved Efficiency
Marketing automation can help small local businesses save time and reduce the need for manual tasks. By automating tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and lead generation, you can focus your time and efforts on more pressing matters. When you have to manually apply all of your time to tasks that don’t require much strategy or thought, it distracts you from working on more important projects.
Your team also has other priorities during the day that they want to spend their time focusing on, so having marketing automation can boost their morale. When the repetitive and, let’s face it, boring tasks are taken care of by automation, your team is more motivated to work hard on other projects and deliver results for your small local business. That’s an important factor to keep in mind when engaging with marketing automation possibilities.
2. Enhanced Targeting and Personalization
Marketing automation can help small local businesses better understand and target their audience, allowing them to create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns. Without the support of marketing automation, you might find yourself struggling to put together campaigns that make an impact. When you have to manually track down personal data like first names, job titles, or addresses, it can slow your progress.
Having marketing automation allows you to add custom fields to emails and web pages, which makes the experience of working with your brand more personal to leads and customers. When you have those important details done for you, it creates a better experience for customers, which makes them more likely to purchase from your small local business.
3. Better Measurement and Analysis
Another benefit of marketing automation is that it provides detailed insights into the effectiveness of marketing efforts, helping small local businesses identify areas of strength and areas for improvement. Analysis is an important part of a successful marketing program. When you have data, it’s important that you go through it to fully understand the impact of your efforts and the behavior of your customers.
When you utilize marketing automation, you can get even more clear marketing analytics. In fact, some marketing automation actually creates actionable insights for you from your collected data. That takes some of the pressure off of you to analyze your data manually and can deliver even better perceptions of how your business is functioning.
4. Greater Reach and Visibility
Marketing automation can help small local businesses expand their reach and visibility by leveraging digital marketing channels and targeting specific audiences. While you likely know some information about your target audience, there is always room for perfection and growth. Marketing automation can help you create campaigns and utilize channels that have a bigger impact on that key audience.
When the visibility of your brand grows, it has a major impact on your brand reputation. This is especially important for small local businesses that live on word of mouth referrals. As you become a more recognized name in your community, you can draw in more interest from your target audiences and expand your customer base while improving your local reputation among customers and other businesses.
5. Improved Integration and Collaboration
Marketing automation can help small local businesses integrate their marketing efforts across different channels and teams, improving collaboration and coordination. Oftentimes, businesses will utilize a wide range of platforms and tools in order to accomplish marketing goals. However, when those platforms all work independently of each other, you aren’t getting the best possible results.
Rather than having your platforms and channels in competition with each other, it’s important that you have integration and collaboration. This means that your platforms share data and key information while working together to help improve your business. Marketing automation can help improve integration between tools and even between your different team members, bringing everyone together on the same page.
Why Marketing Automation Should be a Priority
Overall, marketing automation can help small businesses improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing efforts while providing better reach and engagement with their target audience. The right marketing software will seamlessly integrate into existing workflows, making implementation easy. It will also have a wide variety of marketing automation tools, which increases the options that you have when creating campaigns and initiatives.
With so much change in the business world, you need to be agile and able to attack new problems that require your priority. If your small business doesn’t utilize marketing automation now, you might already be falling behind your local competition. It’s clear that winners and losers will be made in the next few years as we return to a typical operating environment. Now is the time for local business owners to lean in, learn, and transform their businesses into marketing machines to protect their legacy.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
In order to get all of these marketing automation benefits and more, you need to make sure that you are working with the right tools. There are many marketing platforms out there, but the best option is right here. Surefire Local provides business intelligence marketing software that offers incredible insights and benefits to local businesses at a fraction of the price of other tools or marketing agencies.
Surefire Local helps you manage the most important online marketing activities from one platform. Rather than struggling to navigate between different tools, you can have a single login to access all of the essential tools for marketing success. With Surefire Local, you can optimize your lead generation, reduce your cost-per-lead, and generate more revenue for your small local business. As an all-in-one marketing solution, Surefire Local stands above other options and delivers a seamless, integrated experience with an easy-to-use interface and an incredible range of tools.
To learn more, get a demo of the Surefire Local marketing platform. There you’ll learn how to use the tools in the platform, get an idea of how to use marketing automation, and discover how to set up your own dashboard and start using the tool today. Take charge of your marketing and create a local business legacy that will last ages with the support of Surefire Local today.