Marketing Automation for Small Business: 5 Essential Tools
Running a small business means you often need to wear more hats to get the work done. That means more time spent on ‘back office’ tasks than billable hours.
Automation is a great way to claw back time to spend on more productive tasks. Stop wasting time crafting email sequences afresh or hanging out on Twitter.
Use marketing automation to speed up your workflow and bring in more income. Though it can be difficult to know where to start.
Wondering how to use marketing automation for small business? Read on to learn more.
1. Email Marketing
How often do you feel like you need to sit down and write an email to your list? When the time comes, you’re too tired or drained to write anything inspiring.
Email marketing automation offers two options:
- Write and schedule email content in the form of sequences.
- Create emails that are sent when the customer hits a ‘trigger’.
Either way, you write and schedule the content when you’re fresh. Then you don’t have to think about it again.
2. Social Media Scheduling
Use social media scheduling tools to publish content on a regular basis. You can choose time frames when you know your audience is online.
Make sure you devote time every day to logging on to respond to Facebook comments, tweets, or Instagram messages. By scheduling content in advance, this frees you up to engage with customers when it suits you.
3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A good CRM automates a range of tasks related to marketing. Many platforms offer ways to manage leads, email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, and ads. All inside one solution.
Your sales team can target the most engaged email subscribers since they’re the warmest leads. With so much data at their fingertips, your sales team can run personalized sales calls. It makes outbound marketing less cold and distant.
4. Enterprise Management
You may think of this as more of an ‘all-round’ admin tool. A platform like OnBase Document Management digitizes your documents so you can access them anywhere.
Because it manages transactions and orders, it sounds more like a management platform. Savvy businesses recognize that you need less marketing if you keep existing customers happy.
Using an enterprise management solution automates many of your back-office functions. This speeds up your workflow, improving the experience for your customer.
5. Google Analytics
This isn’t strictly an automation tool, but it will speed up your marketing flow. Some small business owners waste time trying to decide what content to create.
By getting to grips with your Google Analytics data, you’ll know exactly what to create. You can also improve the discoverability of your existing content. That means more new inquiries and leads through your website.
That’s the Best Marketing Automation for Small Business
There are hundreds of options available to fulfill each of these needs. When you want to use marketing automation for small business, you need to weigh each one up against your business needs.
Choose solutions that will grow with your business. If they integrate with one another, even better. Always prioritize things that will make your business run more smoothly.
Keen to learn more? Why not check out our other business articles?