Marketing automation helps you leverage data to deliver personalized experiences to your audience. But it’s much more than sending the right email at the right time. Automation can help your company generate better leads, get better data and smoothen your internal processes. Moreover, the era of CRM platforms being a treat only multinationals with paramount budgets could afford, has passed. We’ll give you 5 reasons why marketing automation is essential to SMEs.
According to McKinsey, over 30% of sales- and marketing-related activities can be automated. Marketing automation is a set of tools that automatically manages these processes across multiple channels. Quite literally, you automate your marketing using digital systems that track customer analytics, deliver content, capture leads, increase conversions, and more. Examples of these automated marketing processes are transferring leads from marketing to sales, sending reminder emails to lower shopping chart abandonment and showing personalized social media ads based on browsing activity. Marketing automation is no magic trick: you need an effort to transfer these manual processes into an automated structure, but you’ll be rewarded big time. Let’s take a look at the next five reasons why marketing automation is essential to SMEs
Whether you’re part of a startup or an established enterprise, time is any SME’s most precious resource. As you channel prospects through your marketing funnel, staying on top of your leads can quickly become a major time-sink.
Although manually managing leads is possible on a small scale, the quality and effectiveness of your efforts may quickly deteriorate as you grow and scale your business. That’s why you can use platforms like Salesforce to automate lead management. Hence, marketing teams and decision-makers can convert more leads. This is because your workflows take care of both repetitive tasks that exist within your campaigns and ROI reporting of these campaigns. Of course, you need to invest time in setting up effective workflows and training employees on how to use them. But if you do this right, you need only minimal follow-up and adjustment along the way and your workforce will use their time more efficiently. Nucleus Research, for example, states that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.
But there’s more. Using Buyer Personas, a tool that’s inherent to marketing automation solutions and CRM, you are automating the process of linking customer segments to your automated marketing efforts. Talk about hitting two birds with one stone!
People unfairly think that marketing automation is a treat only multinationals with big budgets can afford. While a platform that carries workflows can be costly in some cases, it doesn’t have to be. In 2021, a wide range of CRM platforms is available depending on your goals, budget and business size. In addition: efficient marketing automation is an investment with exceptional ROI. You don’t just save time and money ‘outsourcing’ repetitive tasks to workflows, but you can shift analysis and calculations of your ROI from employees towards your platform. This ensures effective reporting and eliminates human errors. So, these steps, however small, pave the way for SME growth. Research from Bain & Company even indicates that marketers could increase their revenue as much as 25-30% by integrating advanced marketing strategies, such as the implementation of marketing automation. Similarly, Salesforce customers report a +25% increase in marketing ROI.
For example, you can use specific criteria to determine when a particular customer may be a strong candidate for upselling. By identifying these criteria, automated marketing platforms quickly and cost-effectively increase the value of each lead.
Lead generation is a crucial part of business growth. If you’ve read our blog 4 Post Covid B2B E-Commerce Trends That Will Impact Your Business, you know that acquiring leads is no longer a one-to-many operation. Customers want personalized experiences and a seller that relates to their problem. This problem is different for every customer. Hence, marketing automation can be your best bud for two reasons:
Using marketing automation to communicate to and with leads, you unburden yourself from selecting the right leads manually. You will target people based on if, and how they fit your criteria. Consequently, this puts an end to less effective or transparent marketing efforts, like paying an external party to cold call customers based on one single touchpoint. Moreover, generating better leads gives you a higher chance of conversion. Customers using Salesforce to implement marketing automation say that it has led them to a +30% lead conversion growth. These might be one of our favorite reasons why marketing automation is essential to SMEs.
According to Nucleus Research, marketing automation drives a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead costs. Building and managing campaigns can be exhausting on your own. The solution is to hire professionals who carry that workload. However, not all SMEs have the budget to hire the right or as many people as they need, let alone consult external experts. Marketing automation can be a budget-friendly alternative to hiring new staff. Although the implementation of workflows can be a timely investment at first, you eventually avoid hiring and training costs linked to hiring and replacing employees.
You like to be on top of things, so you can control the course of your campaigns. We hear you. Workflows within marketing automation can be defined by existing templates, can be custom-built, AND they can be modified mid-campaign according to the first outcomes. Furthermore, using the Salesforce Trailhead courses, your employees can learn how to build new workflows from scratch. There’s no prior knowledge required, and you are relieved from the burden of consulting external experts for the smallest and even largest updates. Additionally, you don’t need to wait for these experts to be available and adjust your workflows. Changes can be made internally as part of your employees’ responsibilities because that’s what you need as an SME that’s prone to unforeseen operational changes. How’s that for acting fast AND cost-effective?
Marketing automation lets you automate repetitive but important marketing and sales tasks & campaigns, so your employees can focus on your companies’ growth.
Marketing automation puts SMEs in a unique position to save time & overhead costs, improve ROI, generate better leads and be more flexible.
You can implement workflows using a template, build them from scratch and adjust them along the way to meet objectives that can be as dynamic as your business.
Salesforce marketing automation saves time and costs, since your employees get all the tools they need to become automation experts.
So, these are 5 reasons why marketing automation is essential to SMEs. You know that CRM is no longer a utopian tool for big corporations with six figures marketing budgets. That even though marketing automation takes time, it’s an investment that will not only get you amazing results, but also transparent reporting about these objectives. And finally, that automating your marketing processes can save you time, overhead costs and gain you more qualified leads in the long run.
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Important Note: The minimum token amount per ticket is 100.
Estimated token costs for common ticket types
TICKET TYPE
TOKENS
Update 5 users with new configuration of access rights (permission sets, profile or public group) and update “City” on a user record
100
Add 5 new fields to a report and modify 2 filtering criteria
100
Develop automation to update the case whenever a certain condition is met and trigger notification
500
Updated Apex class and LWC to present data in a table like format
800
“My automation is breaking – I don’t know what is happening”, support agent work: Investigation or issue, correction of a SF flow, documentation of changes, presentation to a user
600