A business cannot survive without an effective marketing strategy. Regardless of how breakthrough the service is or how innovative the product may be, if it doesn’t target the right consumer, the business will never succeed.
Marketing plays a key role in bringing those products and services to the target consumer – and ensuring they try it out. Business competition today is much more cutthroat and the term “every man for himself” is the best way to describe it all.
As a business you may even find it daunting to keep up with the trends and demands. But, you know the importance of keeping your brand relevant and on the top of your consumers’ minds.
Marketing automation to the rescue! Small businesses need a competitive edge, and when you automate the process of marketing, you are giving yourself back time, saving money and improving lead management in a single breath.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation has many definitions; and at times, it can depend on who you ask. Salesforce.com defines marketing automation as a set of tools that are there to streamline the most time-consuming processes of marketing. These tools can help with everything from lead qualification to creating a digital campaign. The goal of automated marketing is to make the process much less complicated than necessary.
What Are Key Characteristics of Best Marketing Automation Platforms?
The automated marketing industry is onto something. With the demand for these services increasing, it is evident that makers of these platforms have a useful tool that you need to scoop up for yourself.
As a business owner, you can benefit from automation because:
1. Kick-Start Your CRM
CRM is a tool that is already part of your marketing strategy. When you combine marketing automation with CRM, you now have the ability to track and monitor prospect activity with your marketing campaigns. You can also focus on real-time sales alerts, ROI reports, and access customer data with enhanced metrics.
It is best to look for a marketing automation platform that pairs well with CRMs to get all of the features. Think of it like your smartphone. With the right app, your phone can do plenty of tasks (from reading text messages while driving to letting you run an entire business from your hand, literally). With the wrong app it is nothing more than a phone.
2. Productivity Gets A Boost
One of the most important features to marketing automation is that you can simplify the process of marketing. You don’t have to deal with the monotony of repetitive manual processes; instead, you have an innovative platform that does the work for you. In turn, you get a boost in your productivity, and your marketing department can put more focus on tasks that require a human being’s attention.
3. Details Designed Just For SMBs
The SMB market is highly competitive these days.
According to the Small Business Association, there are 28 million small businesses in the United States, which account for 54 percent of all United States sales. Small businesses are now accounting for 55 percent of all jobs and 66 percent of new jobs too.
More impressive, the number of small businesses is expected to continue to grow – and there has already been an increase of 49 percent since 1982.
As a small business owner, you have plenty of competition headed your way (and enough as it is already). Sales software for SMBs could bring your company a number of benefits. A service that knows what works and doesn’t work in today’s volatile SMB market is critical if you want to keep ahead of the game.
4. Improved Customer Retention
One of the biggest struggles for businesses of all sizes is customer retention.
Marketing automation through sales acceleration software for small business can be paired with email marketing to help keep customers engaged and up-to-date on your brand. You can continue to grow, while still cultivating those important client relationships and allowing your sales reps to focus on actual selling, rather than data entering activities.
Marketing automation tools will also help provide you with insight into your customers’ intent. This information will help you better predict what your customer wants, how they decide, and encourage them to act without wasting your marketing team’s time.
5. Getting A Grip On Your Leads
It is tricky as a business owner to understand your leads and have a really tight grasp on pipeline management, but with automation software, you can keep track of the website pages that a lead views, emails they are opening, landing pages that they are converting from, and more.
You are finding out what content speaks their language – so you can keep using it for higher conversation rates.
According to Software Advice, a business that uses marketing automation can receive a 451 percent increase in qualified leads. In fact, improving lead management was one of the top reasons small businesses in the United States started purchasing marketing automation software.
6. Monitoring Existing Marketing Campaigns
Whether you are engaging in drip marketing or social media marketing, you need to monitor the success (and failures) of that campaign.
Monitoring is by far one of the most tedious tasks out there for business owners, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, with automation software, you can determine the success of your campaigns with measurable data.
Marketing automation software for small business will not only help you track your expenditures (making sure you get the maximum ROI on your investment), but it helps monitor responses so that you can determine if a particular campaign is worth continuing.
It also allows your customer support to more effectively deal with incoming client’s requests.
Best Marketing Automation Software for Small Business
While automation software certainly provides benefits, the caliber of the software will play a significant role in determining your company’s outcome.
366 Degrees is setting out to change Marketing + Sales acceleration for the Small and Midsize Enterprise.
What once took days (or even months) to integrate now will only take a few hours of your valuable time. 366 Degrees is ideal for integrated campaigns that need to use other software as part of their overall marketing solution. From CRM to email marketing and more, the possibilities are endless.
Just some of the platforms 366 Degrees can integrate with include:
SalesForce.com: This marketing cloud program is a customer relationship management solution for marketing, collaboration, sales and analytics.
Nimble.com: A highly rated social sales and marketing CRM platform.
Datanyze.com: A sophisticated sales acceleration software for tech companies.
Vidyard.com: A popular video marketing for small business platform that provides analytics and tools to drive growth via video.
By connecting to some of the industry’s leading software solutions (i.e. CRM and social media marketing), 366 Degrees takes the process of automation even further and allows SMBs to streamline their marketing + sales operations. Small business marketing automation software can become the one thing that puts you above competition.
Now you can test drive 366 Degrees for yourself and see how the marketing world looks through automation. Our prices are competitive and perfect for SMBs looking for substantial growth while saving significant time. Connect with 366 Degrees online now.