How To Effectively Automate Your Small Business Marketing

There’s a lot to be said about marketing automation and how varied its uses are. Some may think from a cursory glance at our site that solutions with applications as widespread and useful as the ones featured would be cost-prohibitive for the smaller scale businesses of the world. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Marketing automation is just as viable an option for smaller businesses, and we’ve even covered some vendors that are particularly good fits for SMBs. 

Though automation is open to all levels of business, the way that smaller entities utilize their solutions will be different than their larger counterparts. Enterprises will use automation to operate at scale. Obviously, SMBs won’t have that problem. Instead, SMBs need to be clever and precise with their marketing strategies that incorporate marketing tech and play to their strengths.

The first step SMBs need to take to ensure optimal results on their automated efforts is to know their audience. In this case, it means knowing their leads inside and out. SMBs have a distinct leg up on enterprise-level entities in that their smaller size allows them more time to spend with potential customers. This level of interaction builds the customer’s relationship with your brand that much earlier and makes it all the stronger in the long-haul.

Thankfully, your solution will be feeding you the necessary data to help foster these relationships right out of the gate. Lead nurturing and lead management systems are your bread and butter as a small-to-mid sized business. Never forget that.

The next thing you’d be wise to note is your solution’s capacity to pick up on website traffic. Most solutions will have some way to monitor click-throughs to landing pages and a way to report on who it is that’s clicking. This is something that even enterprises are privy to, but smaller companies would do better to pay extra attention to the data provided here. Since so much of SMB marketing is in understanding your base, tracking features give you valuable intelligence about who’s interested in your product and who you should be looking to appeal to.

What’s worse than not getting a sale? We’d say getting halfway to a sale and then having the customer abandon their shopping cart. That’s not a great feeling no matter what size your business is, but cart abandonment has some larger implications for SMBs. It means reduced revenue which is obviously going to hurt a smaller entity more than a larger one. This is why cart abandonment emails are critical for those smaller organizations.

Though it a less common feature than the previous two we’ve discussed, cart abandonment management is a very important asset to a small business that has any sort of e-commerce presence. It entails sending out automatic messages to users who’ve left their carts without purchasing. These messages have a solid effectiveness rate and often entice the customer’s return with special offers and deals. Securing more revenue and making those sales is ultimately what marketing is all about and these handy automated messages are lifesavers in that regard. Check out our other article for more information about cart abandonment emails.

Speaking of lifesavers, there isn’t much you can do as a marketer without some solid qualified leads. Getting those leads a can be a hassle though, can’t it? To that we say three simple words:

Lead generation software.

Lead generation takes a broad list of potential leads, isolates the most interested and engaged individuals, and presents them to your team as the highest value opportunities. After that, focusing on a handful of targets is a small matter. Certain vendors are better at this than others, but if you pick a high performer, struggling for leads will be a thing of the past. For a list of the better lead generation solutions, consider checking out Capterra’s listing on their site.

If you’d like more specific information about vendors well-suited to SMBs, check out our article on the subject. If you’d like to look at a wider range of solutions, we’ve also got a marketing automation guide that will take you through the market vendor-by-vendor.