Marketing automation is a great way to streamline your marketing efforts and increase the efficiency of your small business. This chapter will discuss the different types of marketing automation, including email, social media, advertising, mobile, and CRM tasks. We will also go over the most popular marketing automation software and create an effective marketing automation strategy.
For those new to marketing automation, I will explain what marketing automation is and what it’s used for before going over the different types available.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a system that automates the marketing process, from lead capture and qualification to communication. Marketing automation tools are used for repetitive tasks like sending out requests for proposals (RFPs), generating reports on leads, or managing your sales pipeline.
What Is Marketing Automation Used For?
Marketing automation is used to automate tasks that every business does, including generating leads, scheduling posts on social media channels, creating automated email workflows, and responding to your website visitors. A survey by Social Media Today showed that more than 75% of companies use a marketing automation tool.
What Are the Main Benefits of Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation has many benefits, including increased sales and higher return on investment.
The main benefits of marketing automation are that it saves time spent doing repetitive tasks like email follow-ups or sending out proposals to potential customers. Marketing automation also allows you to spend more time focusing on the long-term strategy for your business instead of having to worry about relatively minor tasks.
The best benefit of marketing automation is that it allows you to be more efficient in your business and spend less time on menial tasks while generating the same number or even higher quality leads than before. Using a CRM with marketing automation will also allow you to stay organized because every lead goes directly into one central database that’s easy to access.
What Is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, meaning that it’s a system designed specifically for managing your customer relationships and all of the data associated with them. For example, you can use a CRM tool like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 to manage things like which customers are active or inactive, what you’re selling to each customer, and what deals you have going on at any given time.
Types of Marketing Automation
We will now discuss the different types of automation and how you can use them for your business. There are many types of automation globally, but I will go over the most common methods being used by successful companies.
Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing is a strategy to send out emails to customers or potential buyers to increase sales and leads. An email automation tool will allow you to create automated campaigns that can be sent on a specified day, at a specified time, or in response to certain events, such as clicking on an article about your company.
For example, if you’re running a promotion and want to invite people to your email list, there’s an option that will allow you to send out the offer directly after they sign up for it.
Social Media Marketing Automation
Many of us are familiar with social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter because we spend so much time using them in our personal lives. Social media marketing automation is the process of automating your social media efforts with tools that allow you to schedule posts or send out automated messages in response to certain events. 83% of marketers believe that social media post scheduling is a great way to do social media marketing.
For example, if a new article about your business is published on an industry blog and you want it shared across all of your different social networks, there’s an option for that. Check out A Beginner’s Email Marketing Guide to learn more.
Advertising Automation
There are many types of advertising, but we’ll focus on ads that you can use for your business in this chapter. Advertising automation is automating these campaigns with Google AdWords to reach more potential customers and increase conversions. You might be thinking, “but I still have to create my own ads!” and in some cases, you would be right, but a lot of ads that use automation are created by machine learning.
Mobile Marketing Automation
Mobile marketing is the process of reaching consumers on their mobile devices with things like push notifications or other forms of advertising. With mobile marketing automation tools, it’s possible to create automated campaigns for your business to send out the most relevant information to your mobile customers through automated SMS workflows.
CRM With Marketing Automation
You may have heard about CRMs before, but if not, they’re a type of software designed specifically for managing customer relationships and all of the data associated with them. There are many types of marketing automation, so we’ll go over the most common ones that successful companies are currently using.
Review Generation Automation
Review generation automation is the process of automating reviews for your business with tools like Google Reviews. For example, if you get a new customer and they’re happy with the service that they’ve received so far, there might be an option to leave them a review directly from within their experience on your website or app without needing to ask them, which might lead to more reviews.
Let’s not forget about messaging automation. Messaging automation will help you carry on conversations on your website, Facebook Messenger, and Google My Busines. By creating autoresponders, you will not miss any messages while helping visitors interested in your products.
Messaging Automation
Messaging automation is a feature that allows you to create automated messages for visitors who are interested in your products or services. These messages might be about the product they’re looking at or information related to what type of purchase they want. These responses mustn’t sound robotic because they can make customers feel alienated and less likely to buy their product.
Marketing Automation Software
The tools on this list will help make running your business a lot easier. We’ll start with marketing automation software. Marketing automation software is a type of tool that allows you to automate aspects of your business by linking together different types of apps and sending out automated messages in response to certain events or triggers, such as when someone signs up for a promotion on your website. According to invesp, 63% of marketers will be increasing their marketing automation budgets to improve their strategies.
Hubspot CRM
Hubspot CRM is a marketing automation system that allows you to manage your customer data and automate responses in real-time. These tools are offered as an add-on for many different popular email providers, so it’s possible to create automated messages on Gmail or Outlook without ever having to leave the program.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is a marketing automation system that integrates many different CRMs, CMSs, and other tools. For example, it doesn’t take very long to set up your website to automatically track when people sign up for your newsletter or download an ebook just by linking the two together on this platform.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is a marketing automation app that focuses on the customer journey. You can create automated campaigns and messages with this software and measure your success through analytics by tracking things like how often people are opening emails or clicking links in them.
Marketo
Marketo is an all-in-one marketing automation and CRM system that focuses on handling any data related to your customers. With this tool, you can create automated campaigns for each different stage in the customer journey, so everyone receives relevant information at all times.
Manychat
Manychat is a tool that exists to help you manage your marketing on Facebook. One of the main features, which has already been included in many other tools such as Leadpages or Optimizely, is automated messages to keep up with conversations between visitors and potential customers.
Facebook & Google Adwords Pixel
To really take advantage of marketing automation, you’ll need to have a way for your website and advertising campaigns to talk with each other. When someone visits your site from an advertisement on Facebook or Google Adwords, they will be assigned a pixel that tracks what people do in your store without them needing to fill out any information. You can then retarget them with personalized ads to gain trust and hopefully get them back to your site and purchase or sign up for your services.
HootSuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that offers automation in message scheduling for Twitter and Instagram and automating replies for Facebook.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool that offers automation in message scheduling for Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube and automating replies on LinkedIn or Facebook. With Buffer’s publishing tools, you can set up messages to send when your blog posts go live, so they are automatically shared across all platforms.
Lead Convert Pro
Lead Convert Pro is not just another contact management system. Send and receive text messages, make live phone calls from your web browser, send ringless voicemail messages, set up automatic outbound campaigns… and much more! Lead Convert Pro gives you all the tools you need to create a solid marketing strategy that includes everything from lead nurturing to customer communication—all in one place. This sales automation software was designed for small businesses like yours, so it’s easy-to-use without needing an IT team on payroll.
Next, we will discuss creating a strategy like getting to know your audience, the customer journey, and reviewing your automation workflow weekly or monthly.
Creating Your Marketing Automation Strategy
Now that you have a better idea of marketing automation and the different types available, it’s time to build your strategy. Below we will discuss standard marketing automation practices to keep in mind when building your own automation process.
Understand Your Target Audience
Before you can even begin building an automated marketing campaign that drives leads towards conversion, it’s important to get really good at understanding your customer.
For example: Knowing where the consumers that purchase your products or services hang out will help you focus your automation efforts on those platforms. If your target audience hangs out on Facebook, then creating a Messenger Bot Flow that will engage, respond and provide different options to those prospects can be highly beneficial.
Understand Your Customer Journey
It’s important to understand the complete journey that your prospects will go through from initial contact to becoming a customer. Does your business require a user to sign up for a demo before anything else? Do you want your leads to book online? Or do you sell products and want them to complete the check-out process?
Setting up automation to help facilitate the buying process will help you decide what type of automation software your business needs.
Marketing automation does not end once the lead becomes a customer, so it’s important to know what comes next in their journey and be prepared for any potential issues that may arise. Creating an automated review email to ensure that your customers/clients are happy will let you know how your business is doing.
Manage Your Automation Regularly
Review Your Workflow Weekly or Monthly: It is always helpful to check in with your analytics regularly to ensure everything is running smoothly and provide insights into what might need tweaking.
At 2DaMax Marketing, we use Lead Convert Pro for all of our own and our client’s automation because then have an entire team that sets everything up. They make it super simple to create email and SMS workflows, sales funnels, review generation followups, and so much more. Plus, they also have an analytics dashboard inside the CRM that will provide metrics on how everything is going.
Final Thoughts on How To Implement Marketing Automation for Your Small Business
Marketing automation is the key to growing your business. Every successful company uses marketing automation. Implementing it will allow you to focus on actually running your business instead of spending hours a day doing repetitive tasks, such as sending emails or updating social media posts. If you’re looking for help creating an effective marketing strategy that incorporates marketing automation into all channels, contact us today! We can provide expertise in email design, digital advertising campaigns, website development/maintenance, and more, so we are confident our team has what it takes to grow your business using state-of-the-art technology.
This is the final chapter of our small business marketing guide. Let us know if you have any questions about how to implement marketing automation in your digital campaigns, and we’ll be happy to help! Thank you for sticking with us through this entire series. We hope that these posts helped clarify what it takes to start a successful small business, market it online, or grow your customer base.
