Scaling business is a long-term goal of many SMEs and requires thinking ahead and finding new ways to streamline essential business processes.
Scaling business is a long-term goal of many SMEs and requires thinking ahead and finding new ways to streamline essential business processes.
This includes marketing.
SMEs might not have the capital to sink into huge marketing campaigns that reach global audiences, and that can leave business owners wondering how they can grow their organisation.
The answer is marketing automation. In this article, we’ll discuss how SMEs can utilise a host of marketing automation tools to scale their operations on any budget.
What does it all mean?
Let’s start by defining a few terms.
What does SME mean?
SME stands for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Small businesses typically have between 1 and 100 employees; medium-sized businesses have 100 to 1000 employees; and large enterprises have 1000+ employees.
If your business falls between 1 and 1000 employees, you’re an SME.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the process of automating repeatable marketing tasks like:
- Delivering email marketing campaigns.
- Collecting feedback.
- Making customer calls using predictive dialer software.
- Scheduling social media posts.
- Logging and analysing marketing data.
- Lead generation and nurturing.
- Customer segmentation and targeting.
If these tasks are automated, it will give SMEs the kind of reach and power traditionally wielded by large enterprises with huge marketing budgets.
4 Steps to scaling SMEs with marketing automation
SMEs can utilise marketing automation to cut down on marketing costs, streamline tasks, and free up employees for more creative thinking.
So, how can you implement it?
1. Understand what automation can do
We briefly listed some of the tasks that marketing automation can streamline, but let’s get into the details.
Scheduling social media content
Social media is a valuable marketing tool for SMEs due to its low cost and wide reach.
Consistent content is important to keeping customers engaged with your brand. That’s why you need to be posting new and interesting content on a regular schedule. This can be difficult across multiple social media accounts.
Marketing automation allows you to draft, store, and queue posts, as well as create a posting schedule. Marketing automation tools also allow you to track metrics such as replies, likes, shares, and mentions.
Customer segmentation and targeting
Personalisation is important to customers.
SMEs have the luxury of building more personal relationships with customers, and growth can often disrupt that. You don’t want to give customers the impression that you’re “too big” for them.
Marketing automation can help you scale operations without losing that personal touch.
When you utilise customer data, marketing automation tools can segment customers into demographics. From there, you can craft highly personalised marketing campaigns that target those demographics.
Capturing and nurturing leads
It’s impossible to manually support each customer through their customer journey. This is where marketing automation can help you capture and nurture leads, converting them into sales.
With behaviour tracking, marketing automation can follow a customer through each step in the buying process. With automated emails triggered at specific moments, you can deliver personalised messaging at the exact right time.
Managing email campaigns
Email campaigns are another essential tool for SMEs to boost audience engagement and improve customer loyalty.
Many businesses send out newsletters, new product information, instructional content, discounts, and requests for feedback through email. Marketing emails are often personalised, and targeted to each customer demographic within a brand’s audience.
This can take a lot of work to get right.
Marketing automation can streamline email campaigns by:
- Scheduling regular emails.
- Setting up an email autoresponder.
- Sending emails based on certain triggers. For example, a customer abandoning their cart before checkout or someone downloading a free product trial.
- Tracking metrics like sign-ups, open rates, and click-throughs.
- Allowing A/B testing.
Streamlining workflow across all departments
Marketing automation tools don’t just help you reach an audience; they support your employees, too.
When frequent, repetitive tasks are automated, it helps free up team members for more creative work, such as planning and executing marketing content.
Additionally, consider utilizing a writing assistant, which can assist in generating high-quality written content, further enhancing your marketing efforts.
To support that collaboration between teams, it’s also important to use tools like RealVNC to securely unify communications, share documents, and have screen-sharing services.,
2. Define which tasks you want to automate
Now that you understand what marketing automation can do, it’s time to decide which tasks to automate, and that decision can be greatly informed by your data collection methods.
This will depend on your business and how you intend to scale it. But in general, look for highly repetitive tasks that fill your team’s workday with monotony and are essential to running a successful marketing campaign.
Those are the tasks that need to be automated.
3. Select the automation software
There’s an intimidating amount of marketing automation software out there–so where do you start?
- Talk to your marketing and sales departments and discuss their needs
- Check for integrations with your existing infrastructure
- Research software that addresses those needs and automates the necessary tasks
- Read reviews and testimonials
- Ask industry peers for recommendations
- Look for safe, secure, and trustworthy software that passes the “what is compliance auditing” test
- Trial a few products and get feedback from team members
Once you’ve narrowed it down, it’s important to consider how well the software will scale with your business growth.
Many marketing automation services offer tiers for different budgets and needs, meaning they can scale with your organisation. Look for marketing automation software that is flexible, integrates well with other services, and is future-proof.
4. Analyse your data
Marketing automation tools collect and analyse data, offering valuable insights into how well your campaigns are doing.
This data contains everything from social media engagement to how well your cloud contact centre solution is handling customer support. You can utilise it to figure out what you’re doing right, what you can improve on, and how well marketing automation is helping you reach your goals.
Additionally, integrating digital marketing tools into your analysis can provide even deeper insights into your overall marketing strategy.
Scaling SMEs with marketing automation
Scaling your SME requires building and growing your audience to improve sales.
Customer outreach, however, is costly and time-consuming, and small and medium-sized businesses don’t always have the resources to keep up with the big guys.