5 Simple Ways I Use Marketing Automation to Build My Small Business

Being competitive against larger, better-funded, and more established rivals, is a challenge that small businesses face on a continual basis. As the owner of a small digital marketing consultancy, I live with these challenges daily and try to take advantage of anything I can to maintain our edge.

As someone that lives and breathes marketing automation I’ve been fortunate in being able to use technology to give us an advantage. In this, my first post on Medium, I thought I’d share with you some of those tips in the hope of helping other small business owners to increase your own chances of beating the big guys.

The following are 5 simple ways that we use marketing automation to support and build our small business. If you like them, feel free to copy them, tune them and apply them to your own business too.

1. Make Sure Responses are Fast

I recently read a survey which claimed 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. From our experiences, I can quite believe this.

The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.

Unfortunately, in this world of instant gratification, prospects expect an almost immediate reply, otherwise they’re off elsewhere. When it comes to responding to leads and enquiries, large businesses have a lot more resources that they can throw at the problem than us. So what’s our come-back?

A few years ago we started using marketing automation tools in-house. With a few simple changes to our website and back-office processes we were able to make a drastic improvement to our responsiveness.

Firstly, we removed email addresses from our website and replaced them with forms that captured visitor request and added them into the marketing automation platform. Using this approach, we were able to instantly send an initial response whilst also ensuring that our sales guy had all the information he needed to formulate a professional reply to the prospect.

If a prospect called, or if we met someone at a trade show, we also setup an automated follow-up email that sent them the information they requested. This enabled us to monitor whether they showed further interest and track their interactions after the first conversation.

2. Make Your Messages Individual

Anyone that understands the concept of buyer personas knows that your website will probably have visitors from various demographics looking for different solutions to individual needs.

These prospects will most likely interact with your firm via different pages or request different information, so that’s another way we tailored our appeal. Our marketing automation platform made it easy for us to put together unique messages and programmes for each of these different segments. With this approach, when someone views a blog post on GDPR email examples, we offer them content and offers related to our GDPR services and when they look at information on marketing automation platforms, we provided them with further information on that.

It seems obvious, but this small change made a massive difference to our engagement stats taking us from one lead per week, to several targeted leads per day.

3. Enhance Your Lead Qualification

As a small business, sales resources are always limited. In our case, we only have one person looking after business development and they have to juggle other roles too. Being able to effectively judge which leads to engage, and when, means that we’re not spending time and effort chasing people with no true interest in our offerings.

Lead scoring is one way we achieve this. We use our marketing automation platform to measure each prospect’s level of interest. For example: if a prospect downloads a white paper or subscribes to our newsletter we score them more than prospects that just visit our web site.

Within our web site, we also use something known as progressive profiling. As you know from filling in forms yourself, the more information they ask for, the less likely you are to fill them in. With progressive profiling, we just ask for something simple during the first interaction. Then, as each prospect engages further, we ask for additional details. This information helps us to shape our marketing efforts to each lead, and ultimately means a higher chance of them converting.

4. Take Away the Guess Work

Big firms devote millions to marketing research and testing in order to make their marketing as effective as possible. While we might not have the funds of Facebook or Amazon, with marketing automation we can at least do some basic testing ourselves.

We do something called split-testing. Also often called A/B testing, this involves sending two or more slightly different messages to our newsletter subscribers. With our marketing automation software we can measure things such as open-rates, click-thru’s, reading time, and conversions. It takes the guess work out of our writing and design processes and helps us to ensure the communications we deliver reach the broadest possible audience.

5. Bring Back One-Time Customers

No matter what size your businesses is, you have to agree that it’s easier to sell to former and existing clients than to find new ones. So why not follow this example and use your marketing automation platform to reach out to old customers and entice them to revisit your web site once in a while.

For us, this has been one of our largest uses of marketing automation. Newsletters with personalised content was our first project, and we quickly followed that with more targeted promotional campaigns. Instead of sending everyone the same mail, people are sent different messages based on the interests we have learned about them.

We also send out regular NetPromoter emails to clients. These are triggered using a recurring workflow task and capture regular feedback and satisfaction scores.

Give it a Try Yourself

In our business, we’ve found that marketing automation has certainly helped us to optimise our approach to sales and marketing and levelled the playing field a little. Based on what we learned, I would certainly recommend trying it for yourself too.

I’ve just thrown out a few quick examples, but if you’re interested in this topic and want me to write more then add a note below. Alternatively, if you’ve already travelled this road, how about telling me about your examples in the comments. I’d love to know what simple things you found that made a real difference for you.