Can you afford to invest $50 or so each month in marketing for your business? Can you afford not to? Marketing is a hugely important business function—how else can your future customers know what you do and know where to find you? You may struggle to keep up with your marketing aspirations—it’s a common problem. Small businesses owners and Freelancers are often too busy to fully implement the marketing campaigns that they devise. Today, let’s talk about how marketing automation can create a great leap forward for your LeadGen strategy and deliver a nice increase to your sales revenue.

The most successful marketers know that automating routine marketing functions will enhance your ability to provide the most effective marketing campaign outreach and as well the best possible buyer’s journey experience for prospective customers. When marketing automation software is in place, all prospect requests for information about your products or services will receive timely follow-up. You, your team and your company will look good as a result —professional, responsive, trustworthy and reliable, all brand enhancing qualities.

As you know, marketing automation is the process of using technology and software to automate your company’s marketing activities across all of your digital channels—website and social media platforms. By using automation, you can target prospective customers easily and efficiently and launch special outreach campaigns by using automated email messaging that is peronalized to reflect the customer’s buying history or interest. BTW, according to a recent survey, 80% of prospects reported that they were more likely to do business with companies that offer a personalized buyer’s journey experience. Data from consulting giant McKinsey revealed that personalized emails sent to prospects can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50 % and increase sales revenues by 5–15 %.

Consider trying these four digital marketing automation strategies. Doing so can potentially free up 10 hours/week of your valuable time and allow you to focus on other aspects of your business. Marketing automation service packages and pricing vary widely, but a basic plan offered by most companies is unlikely to take a big bite from an inflation impacted budget. Plugs, there is reason to be optimistic about adding to top line sales revenue. Spend a little money, make more back.

Build targeted email campaign lists

Despite the obituaries that have been written over the years, email marketing has shown us all that like a cat, it has nine lives. Email marketing automation is very useful for LeadGen, helping to generate sales from prospects in your sales funnel. Marketing is all about providing the right information at the right time in the buyer’s journey. Automating email outreach enables you to send that correct message to the right person at the right time and simultaneously save time and increase efficiency as you communicate with prospects.

Nurture warm leads

Encourage the process of converting prospects into clients by personalization—from correct names to accurate buying history data — and enhance prospect engagement. Help yourself and your team to respond quickly to contact forms that prospects submit when they’d like to schedule a call or meeting with you or someone from your team. Follow-up fast on calls-to-action from prospects who’d like to receive your newsletters or attend a talk that you’ll give. Marketing automation will guarantee that you’ll avoid the embarrassing occurrence of leads that get lost in the shuffle and drop off your radar screen.

Your goal is to move prospective customers through the buyer’s journey, AKA the sales funnel, to become a paying customer, Your marketing automation system can monitor consumer activity and assist you in determining where in the sales funnel your prospects are. You can select the info that your leads will receive and the frequency of emailing at each step of the buyer’s journey to help you execute an effective lead-generating strategy.

Automate social media posting

At the beginning of each month, help yourself and create a calendar by planning 30 days worth of social media content ideas. For example, every week, vary your content by type (i.e., educational, entertaining, inspiring, tips and tricks, behind-the-scenes, etc.). This will help keep your social media audiences engaged and interested in your posts while making it easier for you and your team to create the content.

Furthermore, when filming videos or taking photos for social media accounts, aim to capture a variety of content that can be reused and repurposed for various posts. This will cut down on the content creation time, as you’ll utilize one shoot for multiple pieces of content.

Analyze campaign performance

Measuring the success (or not-so-much) of marketing campaigns is often guess work. Especially for Freelancers, following the rate of client acquisition, that is, the bottom line represented by the clients you bring in or bring back, is what many of you do. More ambitious types, or those responsible for marketing in larger organizations, most likely work with spreadsheets to monitor the performance of marketing initiatives. I’ve done it before and I find spreadsheets to be very time-consuming. Plus, not everyone on the team who should regularly post updates will do that without prompting fom the team leader, which takes time.

The beauty of marketing automation is that when you program the software to perform certain functions, the results will always be accurately reported. Once you’ve categorized your leads and customers according to where they are in the buyer’s journey, you can email targeted content that’s specific to each lead, increasing your marketing and sales effectiveness. Next, the lead tracking function will automatically update the system if that lead becomes a customer or makes an important action that might signal a movement toward becoming a customer, such as downloading a price sheet or requesting a copy of a case study.

Once you customize your system, all you’ll have to do is log in, view the results and evaluate what the information tells you. Appropriate follow-up and other trust-building actions can take place every time. Potential customers do not get lost in the shuffle. You make more money!

See the best marketing automation options for 2023 here: https://www.g2.com/categories/marketing-automation

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Walter Nurnberg/Getty Images. 1960s computer technology