Many small business owners harbour aspirations to expand their marketing efforts. Navigating this challenging period of expansion can be taxing for the owner and their employees, who may have to resort to spending extra time, effort, and resources to keep up with the demands of a growing business. Investing in small business automation tools, however, can help them smoothly transition during this phase.
Sales and marketing professionals are busy bees and juggle many responsibilities on any given day. For small businesses that do not invest in automation technologies, the execution of tasks is done manually. These activities can be laborious, time-consuming, and oftentimes counterproductive, as processing errors due to human error are bound to happen through manual inputting.
Small businesses that invest in automation tools, however, can help significantly reduce the workload of employees as they’re coping with the growing pains of an expanding business. To effectively revamp their marketing strategies, making the right choice in automation tools is equally important to facilitate their growth efforts.
That said, what are some essential small business automation tools that enterprises should invest in? Let’s explore four of these in detail below.
1. CRM integration
When it comes to executing and launching successful marketing efforts, such as website landing pages, email drip campaigns, or social media campaigns, there tend to be discrepancies between the information required by marketers and what is given by sales personnel to fit their marketing campaigns.
As a result, marketers end up blasting marketing campaigns with low visibility, low open rates, high rates of unsubscribers, and a lack of audience engagement.
By integrating marketing automation with CRM, customers gain access to an abundance of valuable data such as customer information, website traffic, and social media engagement to help decision-makers make significant improvements in revamping their marketing strategies.
By using an automation platform with integrated marketing automation and CRM capabilities, the probability of getting high-performing leads by blasting marketing campaigns is increased through personalised and segmented campaigns.
2. Project and task management
When it comes to administering general tasks and delegating projects, time management and workload capacity are important factors to ensure that employee productivity is not compromised, while also facilitating what really matters—business growth.
Using project and task management automation tools, employees save a huge chunk of their time, avoiding filing, sorting, and delegating tasks.
With the help of a central task manager, employees can add all stakeholders of a company who handle key functions and responsibilities within the organisational ecosystem. It also frees up their time which can be focused on innovative and high-value work.
Fair workload distribution among employees, especially in the case of a large-scale project, is better managed by a project and task management automation tool.
This tool also serves as a one-stop resource centre for team members to access various marketing and sales resources, which include contact forms submitted by leads, questions sent by team members, or customer complaints sent on the platform’s ticketing system.
As opposed to having to source out different avenues, this tool serves as an information and resource hub to plan your day-to-day projects.
3. Email campaigns
One of the biggest challenges faced by marketers is launching a marketing campaign that helps them secure high-performing leads, which can be nurtured for sales conversion.
While some campaigns are well-received, others fall short of a team’s marketing goals. How can marketers and sales personnel collaborate to launch more effective marketing campaigns?
Through email campaign automation, marketers and sales personnel can access data-driven insights, such as a customer’s past purchases, buying behaviour, interests, location, and age range, to create more compelling and personalised marketing campaigns. This type of campaign is better known as a segmented campaign.
Segmented campaigns are generally very successful, and could help businesses increase their email campaign revenue by 760%, according to Data & Marketing Association (DMA).
This type of campaign, which is uniquely tailored to fit a customer’s preferences, has generated a 14% increase in email open rates and a 100% increase in click-through rates—proving the magic that segmented campaigns offer small businesses.
Segmented campaigns tend to perform better as they reach out to audiences who have a particular interest in a product or service. This essentially helps businesses build deeper connections with their audience, increasing the likelihood of high-quality leads that can be nurtured and converted into sales purchasers.
4. Social media automation
As small businesses undergo expansion efforts, the world must know about it. The best way to get this message across is to create and upload more compelling social media posts that let existing and prospective customers know about their expanding business.
With the increase in social media postings and the possible creation of new company social media accounts, managing social media posts can be hectic and burdening on the employees handling them.
As marketers may not be present at all times to attend to customer inquiries or post social media content in real time, investing in a social media automation tool can help cut back the time employees spend managing social media accounts and posts.
This tool gives them the flexibility to schedule social media posts ahead of time so that they no longer have to be on standby to upload a social media post.
Marketers can also track the performance of each social media post, giving insight into which social media posts work best for them.
That’s not all; social media automation is embedded with a chatbot that can attend to all frequently asked questions or technical questions that customers may have about a social media post in real time.
This frees up time for marketers to be on standby to give a speedy response to customer inquiries. If a customer wishes to escalate their question to a human, they can opt to chat with a real-life customer service representative.
Contact a leading automation platform provider today to invest in small business automation tools
As more businesses are embracing digital transformation, automation is no longer a luxury, but a necessity to keep ahead of the curve. By investing in small business automation tools, companies can reduce their employees’ workload capacities, decrease their operational costs, and boost their ROI.
Schedule a consultation with a leading automation expert today to begin investing in automation tools that can help leverage your small business growth and thus, smoothly facilitate your expansion efforts.
