6 Ways Marketing Automation Helps SMEs Amplify Their Growth 

If you’re running an SME without marketing automation this post is going to be life changing, find out how to cut wasted time and amplify growth now.

Marketing Automation Helps SMEs Amplify Their Growth

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Marketing automation refers to the process of automating routine marketing tasks using tools such as email automation software, robotic process automation (RPA), and marketing bots.

 

Many people think marketing automation requires specialist knowledge of artificial intelligence and machine learning or that you need advanced programming skills to carry it out. If that were the case, it would be out of reach for many small and medium-sized enterprises.

 

Luckily, however, thanks to modern automation management platforms, it can easily be integrated into any enterprise’s martech stack, providing an opportunity for even small businesses to boost their growth using this tech.

 

Read on to discover six ways marketing automation can amplify business growth.

1. It enables targeted marketing and content personalization

Today’s marketers recognize that a targeted strategy is more effective than running endless, generic campaigns. Whether it’s promoted social media posts, email campaigns, or online ads, one of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is its amenability to personalization. 

The best modern martech tools take the hassle out of running personalized campaigns by automating the process of adjusting content according to predetermined factors.

Personalized marketing makes the most of your customer data by tailoring content to different segments of your audience. For example, if your database is subdivided into categories such as age group or purchase history, you can design different marketing approaches for each.

Even if you run a more general campaign, it can still be personalized with customers’ names, browsing history, and the time they’re targeted.  All you need to do is create a template, choose how you want it to be customized, and use the best eSignature service for businesses with leads and deals to close! 

Intelligent personalization engines can even algorithmically infer the lowest discount needed to maximize the chance of converting a given consumer. By feeding behavioral data into predictive analytics models, such engines lower the cost of offering discounts, boosting your revenue.

2. It aligns business processes

One of the less-known benefits of marketing automation is its capacity to align diverse business processes to maximize growth and allow different teams to effectively help each other.

If you’re asking ‘what is a business process’, this is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks carried out by people, equipment, or software in which a specific sequence serves a particular goal. 

Due to the routine nature of many business processes, they’re ideally suited for software-aided automation. Besides marketing, there have been significant advances in the automation of various business operations, management, and even gains in the challenge of automating HR processes.

 

A major advantage of such a widespread application of automation technology is that a good business strategy can connect the dots and bring previously divergent business processes into closer alignment.

 

For example, the automated data collection capacity of phone call management software can be fed into intelligent RPA bots responsible for carrying out marketing tasks such as ad personalisation and email targeting. This streamlining and improvement of processes naturally supports long-term business growth. 

3. It boosts your marketing team’s productivity

With the right marketing automation tools, marketing teams can get more done in less time.

 

Used in combination with BPO automation software, an automation platform can free marketers from the burden of carrying out repetitive tasks. Repetition often leads to boredom, and bored workers are unlikely to achieve the same results as those engaged in creative challenges that inspire innovation.

 

With more time to focus on conceiving and implementing original marketing campaigns, marketing departments often find that when they start using automation software, not only does productivity increase, but their performance sees a boost too. 

 

It’s best to think of automation tools not as a replacement for a good marketing department and strategy but as a way to augment your team’s digital efforts. By easing the burden of repetitive tasks and giving teams access to the vast data analysis capabilities of machine learning, automation software helps marketers to achieve more with fewer resources.

marketing automation

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Because an effective marketing strategy is the backbone of sustained business growth, anything you do to increase the productivity and performance of your team will see a worthwhile return on investment – not only in terms of immediate sales but in the long-term reception of your brand and the ultimate success of your business.

4. It increases the effectiveness of email campaigns

Email marketing automation software is one of the most popular offerings in the sales marketing automation toolkit – and for good reason.

 

Most people will already be familiar with the simplest form of automation regarding email marketing: the auto-send features most email clients have built in. These allow you to batch send a single email to a large mailing list at your chosen time. However, free email with custom domains are usually limited to a handful of recipients at most.

But what if you want to send more than one version of an email to multiple mailing lists? With more sophisticated automation software, you can subdivide your mailing list and tailor your messaging for each one, then have the software automatically send different emails based on a single template.

 

You can even integrate your email automation tool with a DocuSign account to personalize each message individually with different names, images, subject lines, phone numbers, and sign-offs.

 

Just as personalized ads lead to a higher conversion rate, personalized emails are more likely to be opened, and people are more likely to follow the links they contain.

 

Even in the age of dynamic omnichannel marketing that operates across multiple platforms and a diverse social media ecosystem, email marketing is still one of the best ways to nurture leads and build sustained relationships with customers.

 

Enlisting the help of a smart email marketing automation tool paired with the best quoting software means you can target the leads who are closest to converting with a higher frequency of emails or offer them exclusive promotional offers to encourage them to make a purchase. 

 

What’s more, you’ll be able to plan and create a strategic sequence of emails that can be automatically sent when customers meet certain criteria.

5. It boosts cross-channel marketing

Cross or omnichannel marketing refers to a marketing strategy that focuses on providing a consistent experience for customers no matter how they’re interacting with your business. As more consumers interact with brands via digital channels, VoIP for call centres is a crucial component of any successful cross- or omnichannel strategy.

 

If you want to make the most of the capabilities of automated marketing, you should be using your automation platform or software suite across your marketing channels.

 

Whether it’s social media, email marketing, or telemarketing using a cloud-based phone system, your different avenues of communication can be coordinated with an intelligent approach to automation. 

 

Avoid mixed messaging and content overlap by comparing different marketing media in advance and scheduling channels so they don’t overlap – a major cause of marketing fatigue and communications overload.

 

RPA can help you create a centralized database that draws from your incoming customer data streams. The same database can be used across the board, ensuring greater harmony between marketing channels and a seamless customer experience. 

6. It streamlines data management

A data-centric approach to digital marketing allows for greater content customization. The more you know about your customers’ tastes, habits, and purchasing behaviour, the more you can adjust your marketing to appeal to their specific requirements, delivering the content they want.

 

Rather than spending hours inputting data by hand, streamline data management by automating the process of collecting, labelling, and organizing customer data.

 

As well as generating significant time savings, implementing automation in your data flows reduces human error and creates more precise databases. These can be automatically updated no matter how your customers tell you that important information about them has changed. This takes much of the menial work out of database management and ensures data streams are optimized for marketing workflows.

 

To get the best return on investment for marketing automation software, it should harmonize well with your other martech tools. When properly integrated with your CMS and web development tech stack, marketing automation technology can help you make the best use of browser data generated by cookies and trackers.

 

While it’s always a good idea to keep track of the data coming from your website traffic, you can’t always be manually redesigning online ads based on web traffic and individually targeting browsers. Make sure you realize the full potential of Google’s advertising platform by using its inbuilt automation and personalization features and integrating analytics into your martech stack at every stage.

Smart marketing for SMEs

Hopefully, this guide will have demonstrated that marketing isn’t only for large enterprises with highly skilled programmers and developers on their payroll.

 

Thanks to a range of intelligent marketing tools and platforms designed with usability in mind, RPA, email automation, and customized chatbots are realistically implementable marketing solutions even for small businesses. 

 

So, don’t let the big players reap all the rewards of the latest automation technology. Start your smart marketing program today!