Small Business Marketing Automation: Myths vs. Reality
Apr 16 2012
Marketing automation is a loaded term and one that is often misinterpreted. Often when a small business person thinks about marketing automation, they are envisioning a magical process by which they get to sit back and marketing just appears like a bag of chips from a vending machine. Yes, it sounds terrific but this scenario really doesn’t reflect reality.
As a business owner, I am by definition a subject matter expert on the products/services that my firm provides. I can’t outsource my expertise, nor can I build a machine capable of recreating it.
There are, however, mechanical processes associated with just about every marketing activity that can be automated. You fuel your machine with expertise regularly and let it do the work for you. Here are just a few examples of tasks that can easily be automated:
- Posting blog, news and website content that has been written in advance
- Synchronizing content across multiple social networks
- Formatting landing or offer pages
- Formatting email newsletters
- Sending leads generated on-site to third party CRM or email marketing packages
- Adding leads and contacts to lead nurturing or drip email marketing programs
- Updating email signatures with company news or blog posts
- Updating SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sitemap.xml files
“Do more with less” is more than a catch phrase for small businesses with limited resources in both time and money — maximizing effort and creating marketing efficiencies are necessary ingredients for success. Simple marketing automation techniques can greatly reduce the burden and stress that often comes with small business marketing efforts and make both maintaining and growing marketing efforts a more realistic (and profitable!) endeavor.
Stay tuned over the next few weeks: marketing automation will be a recurring theme on this blog as well as in our weekly Thursday webinars. We’ll be showing tips and tricks on how to execute on basic automation tricks like the ones I mentioned above as well as a few others.
Published by Erik Wolf under EM Featured,Featured,Online Marketing
Erik,
I’m excited to see you discuss marketing automation in your blog! It can be a powerful tool for small businesses, and yet relatively few know what it is. Marketing automation definitely automated a lot of the routine tasks in marketing, as you say, but it can also do a lot more than that.
Not only does marketing automation make an SMB marketer’s life easier, but it also makes the quality of the leads they generate better. In other words, it’s not just about generating the same number and quality of leads with less effort – it’s actually about being able to produce more high-quality leads with less work.
Marketing automation does this by scoring leads based on their actions(if they download a white paper or attend a webinar, for example) to see if they are likely to buy soon. Strong leads are passed to the sales department. Leads that don’t score well are recycled back into the marketing database, where they are nurtured through an automated marketing campaign that continues to engage with them. This ensures that you don’t drop leads just because they’re not ready to buy right now.
We’ve put together an introductory toolkit on Lead Scoring in case your readers are interested:
http://spark.marketo.com/marketing-automation/toolkits/lead-scoring
Thanks again – I’m looking forward to more discussion around marketing automation.
Seth Resler
Program Manager, Content Marketing
Marketo
Comment by Seth Resler — April 19, 2012 @ 6:19 pm