In order for a business to succeed in the current competitive global economy, digital promotion is very important. But, it isn’t that easy for some small businesses to adapt to it. In order to build a loyal customer base you’ll be required to do repetitive, labor intensive tasks such as email communication. You must also be creative with your messages.

In this article we are going to share some tips about marketing automation tools for small businesses. Now that you are already here, why don’t you quickly give a read to these informative articles about salesforce cloud certification and B2B marketing automation. 

Marketing Automation

It is all about using various software to automate tasks related marketing. Its main purpose is to help your small business prosper and grow. To automate a marketing related task, you have to define some actions that are performed by the software when a set of conditions are met.  

You can either set these conditions from scratch or use ready-made templates. Various companies have reported increase in their sales productivity and marketing team productivity using marketing automation. 

Advantages

• Marketing automation helps you understand how your customers interact online with your business. You can take that information to improve your strategy. 
• You can rely on the automation software to do all the hard work and identify what the customers want with the help of algorithms. That’s how you can align your content strategy with the customer’s wishes. 
• These software programs provide a complete solutions for small businesses. You get a unified platform for managing, storing, analyzing and reporting all the data for making fact based, rational decisions.  
• Marketing automation helps the marketing and sales team access the same kind of information, which is important for making a sustainable conversion pipeline. 
• Automation tools help you get more information about your customers, which is essential for making products that appeal to them.

Selecting Automation Tools

 You will have to use multiple software programs for marketing automation. Because usually they are made for automating one type of task. However, you may find exceptions. The following are a few examples.

Marketing Automation with CRM

Salesforce

If you have the skill to use it, this is perhaps the most powerful marketing automation tool on the market. This cloud-based automation tool offers multiple features. It can assist you with streamlining marketing workflow and sales. It brings together all the customers, commerce and sales. 

Its smart AI and drag and drop features will help you can come up with creative content for emails and your social media platforms. This software is ideal for B2B and B2C businesses. However, since it’s modern technology most users get confused with its features and find it challenging to use. 

Then comes marketing analytics dashboards, which is a visual representation of the most relevant company/business information you need in a virtual format, in the shape of pie-charts and graphs. You can now create your marketing dashboards in a way, wherein you view only those metrics that matter to your business. And, it is a specialist like “Marketing Reports” that can easily help design a personalized dashboard for running reports and measuring KPIs, for having an effective control over your marketing initiatives.

Besides this one, you can also check out Hubspot and Dynamic 365.

Specialized Automation Tools

Marketo

This software assists businesses measure the marketing activity, automate workflows and tasks. It makes the job of digital marketers much easier by helping them execute marketing campaigns, nurturing leads and finding up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

Among the many features that it offers, email marketing automation, tracking of web activity, managing leads, social media marketing automation and bi-directional CRM synchronization are few that are famous. Getresponse is another affordable specialized automation tool. 

Conclusion

Competition in the global economy is fierce. Marketing automation tools help small businesses a chance to not just survive but thrive in these harsh conditions. The time consuming, labor intensive and repetitive but important tasks are offloaded to automation software programs while the team members focus on creativity.