In order to stay competitive against larger, better-funded, and more established rivals, small- and medium-sized businesses have to use every advantage that they can. Fortunately, marketing automation services are the life-blood of modern marketing and they can help any smaller firm increase its chances of converting prospects into loyal customers.
If you’re getting started in the world of marketing automation, here are 5 simple ways small business should use marketing automation to build their revenue:
1. Make Sure Your Communications are Fast
Large businesses have a lot more resources when it comes to lead response management than do small businesses. A large firm is much more likely to have staff dedicated to fielding inquiries and responding to emails than SMBs will. Unfortunately for the smaller firms, prospective customers expect a quick response time—one wide-ranging survey found that
customers who contacted a firm expected a response within 5 to 30 minutes. The longer a company took to respond, the more the prospect’s confidence plummeted.
Fortunately, marketing automation software enables smaller businesses to close the gap. With email, for one, your firm can collect names on the contact form and then send an automated response which addresses the prospect by name. If a prospect calls, software enables you to automate a follow-up email and to track progress after the first conversation. All this will give you much-needed capabilities to keep leads fresh.
2. Tailor Your Messages to Different Buyer Groups
Your SMB can streamline its marketing efforts if you use marketing automation software to segment prospective buyers into distinct categories and appeal to them accordingly. Any business that understands the concept of buyer personas knows that their website will probably have visitors from different demographics looking for different products to meet different needs.
These prospects will most likely interact with your firm at different parts of the sales funnel, so that’s one place where you can tailor your appeal. Marketing automation software makes it easy to craft unique messages for these different segments, which will then go out with a minimum of hassle.
3. Enhance Your Lead-Scoring Capabilities
Any firm that’s familiar with marketing automation software knows that lead-scoring is one of the big advantages it offers: a customer who downloads a white paper or subscribes to an email list is a much likelier prospect than one who just visits your website.
However, it is less known that you can go beyond this basic functionality. For instance, many firms are now implementing what’s known as progressive profiling, which asks for one or two pieces of information before a prospect receives content. While increasing fields in contact forms causes follow-through to decrease, you can generally get prospective customers to provide one or two pieces of information before they start losing interest. This data is information that you can use to augment and shape your future marketing efforts, which means higher chances of converting.
4. Perform Split-Testing
The world’s biggest firms devote millions to marketing research in order to make their messaging as effective as possible. However, while a small company doesn’t have Facebook or Amazon’s resources, marketing automation makes split-testing easy.
Split-testing (also called A/B testing) involves sending two or more different messages to subscribers. Marketing automation software enables you to easily measure click-rates, reading time, and conversions, giving you capabilities that the biggest firms have been enjoying for years. With marketing automation software, you can close the gap between your smaller firm and the capabilities enjoyed by the giants.
5. Bring Back One-Time Customers
Once you’ve done the hard work of convincing a prospect to buy, you’ve accomplished a lot. Capitalise off of that hard work by bringing previous customers back. Through marketing automation platforms, you can reach out to old customers and entice them to revisit your web site once again.
For example, you can automate it so that a customer can receive an email 4 or 6 months after their purchase, reminding them of their business and thanking them. The email could describe new developments and products, or offer a coupon as incentive to visit again. You could even set a program to search for 4- and 5-star reviews on popular consumer review platforms like Yelp, and then reach out to those customers.
Conclusion
Marketing automation offers countless functions that will help your small- or medium-sized business to level the playing field against larger competitors. Are you still wondering how the field of marketing automation software can help your business? Contact us today, we’d love to discuss it with you!
