Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation for Small Business
Should we consider Marketing Automation for our organization?
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Here are a couple of important findings from the fifth edition of Salesforce’s State of Marketing Research Report released in 2019, which reports on insights and trends from over 4,100 marketing leaders worldwide.
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Real-time customer engagement is marketers’ top priority — and their top challenge.
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69% of business buyers expect Amazon-like buying experiences — such as personalized recommendations.
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79% of customers are willing to share data in exchange for contextualized engagement, and 88% will do so for personalized offers. (see image below for details).
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Source: Salesforce’s State of Marketing Research Report released in 2019
Getting Started with Marketing Automation
While marketing automation might sound intimidating for small business owners, there is clear evidence that email and social media (both organic social posting and pay per click advertising) generate results when looking to acquire, retain and service customers.
Across a number of key stages in a customer’s journey, it is evident that email and social media currently play important roles that are producing results. These stages include:
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Branding
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Lead generation
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Customer acquisition
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Upselling
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Customer retention
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Customer advocacy
See the below image for more details.
Source: Salesforce’s State of Marketing Research Report released in 2019
What is Marketing Automation?
According to one data point, 80% of sales require at least five follow-ups after the initial contact. How can we speed up this process and make it easier to do? This is where marketing automation comes in to speed up this process.
According to Wikipedia:
“Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.”
One of the key parts of this definition is “and automate repetitive tasks.” This could be initiating the sending of one or more automatic emails, scheduling meetings, requesting a consultation, purchasing a product, making a payment, assigning tasks internally and many more actions.
Here is one example of some specific automated actions:
Benefits of Combining CRM and Marketing Automation
Another step in an organization’s ability to effectively utilize marketing automation is to take advantage of the combination of CRM (customer relationship management) and automation strategies and tools.
What benefits are realized in the combination of CRM and marketing automation? There are many, and they include:
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Generate new and repeat customers
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Automate repetitive tasks
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Improve customer service and operational efficiency
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Get yourself and your team organized and focused
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Improve communications and collaboration across teams
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Maintain complete activity/communication history of leads and customers
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Get paid more quickly and track payment history for every customer
Next Steps
If these challenges sound like what you are seeing in your organization and some of the benefits of combining CRM and marketing automation sound appealing to you, perhaps it’s time to consider implementing a new solution.
Read more: 6 Benefits of Combining CRM and Marketing Automation
Do we have any recommendations? Check out Keap (formerly Infusionsoft), a CRM and marketing automation platform designed expressly for smaller service businesses. Here is a quick video demo below, if you are interested in learning more.
