Setting up and running your own small business is no easy feat. With limited budgets, time, and manpower, entrepreneurs often find themselves wearing many hats. Managing inventory, dealing with customers, organizing finances, and developing and promoting new products and promotions all take time out of a small business owner’s day. Spread yourself too thin and some parts of the business might suffer, but neglect a few aspects and you might see performance suffer. So what’s an entrepreneur to do?
One solution that’s gained ground in the last few years is marketing automation. In our article Top 9 Automation Software and Tools of Marketing, we mentioned that 45% of activities performed by people can be automated. While the name itself might sound intimidating, the role is simple. Marketing automation is a service or tool that automates certain marketing tasks, taking them out of the roster of day-to-day duties. Here are just a few of its benefits below.
Cut Down on Time
Possibly one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is just how much it frees up time for you to do other tasks. This takes out a huge chunk of simple activities from your day, such as checking results or sending out emails.
Automation is especially useful when generating responses to customers. As Triadex Services Director of Sales Ryan Mogged explains, “The email platform has numerous automated and trigger features based on each user’s engagement level. Putting all these automations in place to message each user based on their activity level ends up saving the email marketing team countless admin hours throughout the year.”
Using these tools like webinar software therefore allows companies to direct their energies towards tasks that are more complex and necessary for the success of their business.
Help Track Results
Marketing automation isn’t just limited to use in digital marketing— it can also be used to make traditional marketing methods go more smoothly. Take direct mail marketing, for instance. Direct mail marketing involves sending out marketing campaign materials to large numbers of people. While the returns are high, they often require a little bit of investment at the onset.
If you’ve made use of a direct mail marketing campaign, then you know that keeping track of responses can get tiring. Marketing tools like tracking portals and UTM codes can help you keep track and measure your campaign’s impacts in real time. This allows you to make decisions about this or future campaigns much faster.
Compile Data
Finally, marketing automation helps you deal with the most important marketing element of all: data. Despite the important role it plays in marketing, data can often be dense and complex. As data scientist Nikhil Goyal writes, marketing is one of the toughest fields to work in for data analysts. Research and campaigns can create large swathes of data, which are obviously difficult to work through manually.
Marketing automation helps make the process easier by automatically compiling data. Many automation tools also allow you to arrange your data according to certain categories or points, making generating insights faster and easier. In a world where data and information are as good as currency, you want to make sure that you’re collecting your customers’ information properly. Proper data collection and analysis allows you to create more accurate and relevant insights, which in turn can drive better product and campaign development.
As marketing gets more and more complex, small business owners should make sure they aren’t left behind. Marketing automation allows entrepreneurs to have the full range and scale of big marketing campaigns with a smaller team. A little bit of investment in these automation tools can absolutely spell big gains for small business owners.
