The pros and cons of marketing automation

Could Marketing Automation Work for Your Small Business?

Broadband And Search - Kevin ConnerWe welcome a guest post from Kevin Conner, founder of several successful startups including Vast Bridges and Broad Band Search. Kevin shares the pros and cons of business marketing automation.

Could Marketing Automation Work for Your Small Business?

Competition is at an all-time high in the world of marketing. People have more choices than they’ve ever had before, and thanks to social media and other digital communications, people are constantly being reminded of this plethora of choices.

For marketers, this means we need to be exploiting all possible channels as well as we can. But there’s another element involved: efficiency. We obviously need to be good at reaching people, but we also need to do it in a way that isn’t going to sink our budgets or ruin our personal lives.

Overall, there are many ways to save money on your marketing budget while also improving the returns you get from your efforts. Outsourcing content, for example, can save you a good amount of cash, as can reducing the amount of money you spend on your internet subscription by changing providers. But if you really want to get better for less, then you need to consider automation. Yet not all automation is the same, and it doesn’t work for every business. So to help you decide what’s right for your company, here’s some more information about marketing automation.

Small business marketing automation

The Benefits Of Automation

  • There are two major benefits to marketing automation: efficiency and accuracy. Properly used, marketing automation can help you learn more about your markets and what they respond to, and it can also help you be more efficient by pointing you to the areas that promise to deliver the best returns.
  • For example, if you automate data collection, then you can learn more about the people who are responding to your content and calls to action, which will allow you to dedicate future communications at these people and get better returns from the same amount of work.

The Downsides Of Automation

  • However, there are of course some negatives to marketing automation, and they are mostly what you would expect. Specifically, if you overuse automation, especially for content creation, then you run the risk of sounding robotic.
  • People don’t like the idea that they are dealing with computers or robots, or that their every move is being watched and tracked. And if they can see that happening, then expect them to tune out and maybe even abandon you.
  • This is why it’s so important for you to spend the time to determine how marketing automation can actually help you. If you just apply it haphazardly to your business, then it might end up backfiring.

Types of Automation

  • To know if marketing automation is right for you, then you should first understand the available options. Some of the more widely-used automation techniques out there are:
    • Customer Relationship Management: These platforms collect data about your customers and help you identify where and how you could get more value out of those you’ve already managed to convert.
    • Email Marketing: Despite all the new ways we have to communicate, email marketing still produces great ROI. Automating it can help you reach more people with more effective messaging, giving you more chances to leverage this powerful tool.
    • Social media: You can automate anything from content creation to post publication and data collection, all of which will help you get your message out more frequently and more effectively.
    • Analytics: It’s important to know as much as you can about the people you are reaching so that you can determine what is working and what isn’t. Doing this manually is possible, but it’s incredibly time-consuming and less accurate. Consider automating to help you get more information.

Is Marketing Automation For You?

  • In short, the answer to this question is probably yes. Automated marketing is such a powerful tool that most businesses will do well incorporating it into their marketing operation in at least one way or another. But to help you narrow down which automation strategies might work best for your company, then consider asking yourself the following questions:

What Type of Content Do You Create?

  • As we mentioned earlier, the biggest danger when automating anything around content is in sounding robotic. If people feel like you are just sending them content that’s been generated by a computer, then they likely won’t respond too well to your messages.
  • This is why automation is a no-no for anyone who depends heavily on blogs, newsletters and other written content. It’s impossible to make this stuff sound human, even though many companies will try to sell you on the idea that it’s not.
  • However, if you’re really only sending out small social media posts that encourage people to click-through to your website, then you can probably get away with automating this, which will help you save both time and money.

How Do You Generate Sales?

  • Another thing to consider is how you generate sales. For example, if most of your revenue depends on driving traffic through SEO or PPC, then you might be able to get away with less automation. In this case, your success will depend on your ability to attract links, maintain your rankings and convert visitors with good copy.
  • However, if you need to nurture your leads a little more, say by sending them follow ups, or by including promotions in your newsletter, then you’d be smart to incorporate some automation, specifically CRM automation, as this will allow you to send out more targeted, and therefore more effective, follow ups, helping you convert more leads into sales

Do You Use Email Marketing?

  • So much of marketing automation centers around email marketing. This is because it’s one of the few areas where you can automate but still be personal.
  • For example, if someone gives you their email address and name, then your automated email marketing platform can collect information about that person and then send them an email addressed directly to them that also speaks to their own personal needs or tastes. This is becoming increasingly important, especially since consumers are increasingly interested in receiving personalized promotions.
  • However, if you’re not using email marketing, then you may not find much use for marketing automation in your business. But if this is the case, make sure you are clear about why you’re not using this tactic. It’s highly effective, and if you use the right software, it can also be a rather easy thing to do.

Do You Really Know Your Target Audience?

Another thing that marketing automation does really well is it tells us specific information about our audiences. Some software, such as HubSpot, can actually recreate the customer journey, which tells you the path people took to end up on your site, something that can be really helpful for figuring out where to go next with future marketing campaigns.

Other software will tell you about people’s demographic information, and you may even be able to learn about people’s interests and desires, which can also be used to help you forge a better connection with your target audience.

Because of all this, marketing automation is going to be a good tool for most businesses, but if you already have a good understanding of who you’re targeting, then maybe you can get away without it.

What’s Your Budget?

By now, the benefits of marketing automation should be obvious. But there is one thing that could prevent you from employing this tactic: your budget.

Depending on which services you are using, marketing automation tools can cost you anywhere between $200-1000 per month. But before you freak out, remember all the information that these tools can provide you.

However, it’s still worthwhile to spend some time figuring out if you are really going to be able to produce sufficient enough returns with these tools to justify their expense.

Some Marketing Automation Tools To Consider

A quick Google search of “marketing automation tools” will generate a billion hits, and there are so many PPC ads that you’ll need to do a fair bit of scrolling before you get to some actual unbiased reviews.

Overall, the tools you choose will depend on your needs, but many of the tools out there do a combination of the things we’ve discussed. So to get started, consider looking into these services to see if they can help your business:

  • HubSpot pretty much does everything, such as CRM, analytics and email marketing.
  • HootSuite is great for social media automation
  • Marketo provides you with data so that you can better nurture your leads
  • AdRoll helps you automate your digital advertising so that it gets in front of the right people and is more effective
  • Pardot is great for those looking to boost their analytics game
  • Constant Contact is a useful CRM-specific tool that can also be integrated with other services for increased performance.

Automate Where You Can

In the end, it’s likely that there is some form of marketing automation that is relevant to your business. The question you need to answer is which avenue do you want to go down.

Hopefully, the information provided here has helped you understand just how powerful marketing automation can be, allowing you to implement it into your marketing operation in a way that will help your business grow.

 

About the Author: Kevin Conner is the founder of several successful startups including Vast Bridges and Broad Band Search. His passion is to help entrepreneurs and other business leaders develop and implement a strategic vision. Over the past 7 years, he has helped connect millions of customers to a wide range of businesses, and he looks forward to continuing to do so well into the future.