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Why I Love Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Before we jump into how to make marketing automation for small businesses work and what’s involved, I want to tell you why I love marketing automation. 

We are a small business and have purposely kept our team small, so it’s important that we are all focused on the jobs we need to do. This is because many small businesses can quite easily get crippled by all the administration that is involved in running a business – like making sure everyone is across the things they need to be, that everything is prepped for onboarding, all contracts are signed etc. And for us, automating some of those tasks have significantly helped to reduce overheads and time.  

Some of the things we have used in marketing automation have seriously cut down my personal time on a task by up to five, six or even seven hours. This was something I was doing every week just to manage that one job on my list! And every time I have been able to automate a task, I have been able to replace it with other things – like free time! But to be real – it’s more likely replaced with meaningful tasks that help can the business grow and work better. 

Marketing automation for small businesses enables us to stay in touch with our prospects and leads, helps us to build relationships with our new clients and means we can deepen our  relationships and improve communication with our existing clients. We also like to stay in touch with past clients too, and marketing automation allows us to do this without too much burden on our time.  

I want my customers and people experiencing Identify Marketing to feel like they are connected to a community that is bigger than just a transactional relationship. And done well, marketing automation is something that draws people closer and it means they can learn more about who we are.  

It ISN’T about creating something that causes people to feel like it is just hastily ripped off and sent – and ironically, the only time I have been ‘accused’ of having marketing automation that is just a ‘cut and paste’ was actually when I had written the email myself! (Which may say a little bit about how I write my emails). 

But our communications generally present a warm and welcoming way of relating, and the emails are far more regular than I, as a small business owner, could achieve on my own with all the people we need to communicate with. 

And that is why I love marketing automation. 

What Marking Automation for Small Businesses Can Include

Marketing automation for small businesses can include a range of things, but in this particular blog, we are covering two key areas. 

The first is a CRM (a customer relationship management system). To be honest, I always forget what it means, so don’t freak out if you do too. And I work with them – so I have no excuse! 

So CRMs mainly help us to look after the people who are interested in working with us. But they can also assist us to look after and nurture those who we have worked with in the past. A good CRM can also have marketing automation in it, to work alongside the sales process, and can help with the onboarding of new customers (like ensuring people have signed terms and conditions and things like that).   

Secondly, email marketing. Email marketing provides us an amazing opportunity to build a relationship with people. Yet, so many people do it wrong. They use it to ‘spam’ (and I use the word spam in terms of just throwing content out there that people don’t actually care about). Me? I like to think of email marketing as though every email is a love letter to the people I am writing to. I want it to be something that they feel is really me talking directly to them. Here at Identify, we create templates that have all the information required, but we also work through it and check it as a team to make sure that our emails are related to the voice of who we are and our values. 

So done right, email marketing shouldn’t feel like marketing automation. It should feel like a conversation. And that is the beauty of marketing automation for small businesses – you can have many more conversations than is statistically possible for one person to have with a huge number of people. 

Want to know more? Check out some real life case studies below of some of the people we have worked with when it comes to marketing automation.

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