It can take a lot of tools to run a successful small business, or it can take only a small handful if you’re smart about it. You need to have the right software applications for tracking appointments, managing inventory, recording your finances, and supporting your sales and marketing efforts.
Marketing automation platforms can help small business owners get ahead of the competition and reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive marketing tasks. When you have the right marketing automation tools at your side, small business owners can succeed and grow without any marketing tasks weighing them down.
Finding the best marketing automation tools for your small business is easier said than done. However, once you understand what marketing automation is and what benefits it can provide, it’s easier to see through all the options and find the best marketing automation for small business needs.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a type of marketing software that can automatically manage routine marketing tasks and projects without manual intervention from people. It helps to handle different marketing processes and campaign steps so that you can spend more time focusing on high-level marketing activities like strategies, decision making, and long-term goals.
Examples of marketing automation in action include sending out emails, following up with customers after an appointment, sending birthday reminders, replying to messages or reviews, re-engaging with cold leads, posting on social media, or running digital ads.
Why is Marketing Automation Important?
Today’s business world is increasingly competitive and complicated. The business environment for small businesses is even more complex, with new competitors, changing landscapes, and updates and changes to the best marketing practices in order to succeed.
Marketing automation helps you manage your business more effectively and efficiently. It gives you control and insight into labor management, evolving and proliferating marketing channels and tools, and changing customer demands. Rather than getting overwhelmed and frustrated about the state of things, you can rely on marketing automation to help get important marketing tasks done while still spending your own time on more important tasks.
Without marketing automation, it becomes that much harder to get ahead and find new customers. Marketing is essential for getting your business out there and making a name for yourself, but if all your time is spent sending emails, you can easily get dragged down. Marketing automation takes away the burden and makes it much easier for your small business to succeed.
With so many different tools and software options available online, marketing automation is one of the most important tools to invest in. If you use the right marketing automation platform, it can help you achieve much more than just online marketing automation tasks. A platform like Surefire Local, for example, will provide marketing automation as just part of a bigger solution for small business marketing. Surefire Local can help you manage all of your marketing activities and select which ones you want to automate and which ones you want to manage on your own.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Now that you understand more about what marketing automation for small business owners is and why it’s important, let’s dive into the specific benefits of automation that you can use in your own marketing initiatives.
Improved Efficiency
The first major benefit of automation is the improved efficiency of your marketing efforts, both in terms of time and in money. Marketing automation takes away the time spent on manual marketing tasks. Rather than sending every email by hand or posting on social media from your account every day, you can leverage automation tools to schedule your content in advance. You can also automate lead generation tasks to help reduce the time spent bringing in leads and instead focus on converting them into customers.
Marketing automation saves money by helping you be more efficient with your time and spending fewer working hours on tasks that are important to your marketing plan but don’t tie directly to your revenue. Making these tasks part of your marketing automation leaves you with more time to focus on other parts of your business.
When you manually do your marketing tasks, there is a higher risk of error just from human mistakes. Marketing automation helps reduce the odds of making small mistakes by following simple logic inputs and getting the best possible results from your marketing initiatives online. Marketing automation also provides detailed reports that can be used to help understand where previous errors came from and make a correction plan to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
Enhanced Targeting and Personalization
Another important benefit of marketing automation is enhanced targeting and personalization. When someone gets a marketing message, whether that’s an email, an ad on a search engine, or a boosted social media post, they want to know that they are the intended audience and that the message speaks to them.
Marketing automation has tools and capabilities that help you better understand your audience and target them with language, demographic indicators, and even personal information when allowed to create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns. Marketing automation not only gathers this information, but will automatically populate it into specific areas of your marketing, like email headlines or ad descriptions.
Better Measurement and Analytics
As mentioned above, marketing automation can help you gather more information about your audiences to create personalized campaigns and messaging. It also works as a data analysis tool to help you gather more insights about your customers and your lead and use those data points and metrics to drive more effective campaigns and more accurate information gathering.
Marketing automation uses advanced analytics tools to get detailed insights about the effectiveness of your campaigns and other marketing efforts. These insights help you know what you are doing well and what areas of your marketing program need improvement. This drives better planning and strategy for future endeavors and makes it easier to get the data needed for shareholders or other people who have a say in decision-making.
Greater Reach and Visibility
With the help of marketing automation, you can expand your reach and visibility into different markets and audience targets. By leveraging digital marketing channels and targeting specific audiences that you want to appeal to or showcase your business to, you can increase your market share and stand out above competitors in the same space.
Marketing automation will also help you increase your brand awareness and visibility to customers in your local area. You can use marketing automation to drive local search campaigns and help boost your social media presence, both of which will help your brand name become more recognizable in your community, which can drive sales and revenue and help your business show up higher in organic search rankings.
Improved Integration and Collaboration
A final but still important benefit of marketing automation is the improved integration and collaboration it can bring to your teams. Most small businesses have many different internal and external team members, vendors, suppliers, and support partners who have an impact on your marketing efforts and are a part of your bigger business plan. Marketing automation platforms can help bring these different parts of the business together.
By integrating your marketing efforts across different channels and teams, you can improve the communication and coordination between parties and teams. When everyone is on the same page and has the same source of truth for driving results, you can work together much more effectively and reach your goals without being slowed down by miscommunication, different information sources, or even unclear objectives and roles.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
At Surefire Local, we understand how important it is for small business owners to have the best tools in order to achieve their goals without breaking the bank and spending money on tools that don’t provide enough for their investment. That’s why the Surefire Local Marketing Platform is designed to help small businesses succeed and provide the tools needed in order to achieve their online marketing goals.
Surefire Local is a business intelligence software solution that comes at a fraction of the cost of other tools and agencies. It can manage the most important online marketing activities that you have within one platform. Surefire Local is an all-in-one solution that brings together your teams and helps you automate, manage, and track all of your essential business marketing activities, including advertising, content, social media, email, ads, reporting, and much more. To learn more and see what the Surefire Local platform can do for your small business today, schedule a demo and explore the features that make Surefire Local so valuable today.