Most small businesses rely on word of mouth to get the next lead or sale.
There is no downtime for a small business: Every moment of your day requires all hands on deck. With everything you have to accomplish—emails, phone calls, keeping track of your social media engagement, chasing leads—it never seems like your to-do list gets any smaller!
The worst feeling is when you find that more hires don’t lead to generating more revenue. So, what’s the solution? When thinking about your digital marketing strategy, many small businesses skip over the power of effective website marketing automation.
Your website can actually be your hardest-working employee!
Effective Small Business Marketing Starts With Your Website
While your social media presence does matter, it all leads back to your website. This is why your automation efforts should be targeted here first to maximize your spend. Embracing website automation means having a 24/7 presence that can field client needs at any time.
When implemented correctly, small business marketing can benefit from automated follow-up emails, scheduled content posting, task management, and even lead development—all housed on your digital storefront. While automation can’t replace the “human element” of your business, what it can do is guide your workflows to a point of purchase or, in a services industry, to a point where leads are qualified (or warmed up) for a sales team to step in with a personal touch and make the most impact.
Email Marketing Automation Should Be Your First Step
Your website is a tremendous lead-gathering device, and one of the most effective ways to leverage that power is through email marketing automation.
- Manual marketing emails can devour a significant portion of your employees’ working hours.
- Shifting to automated emails activated by triggered actions allows your talent to do what they do best by focusing their efforts on qualified leads.
- The most popular forms of email marketing automation are autoresponders that are set up when a website visitor completes a form, or workflow automation that segments messaging and your audience based on interests, past purchases, website behavior, etc.
With all this in mind, it’s worth pointing out that your automations will only be as effective as you design them to be. That’s why you need to understand what you’re building before you ever begin.
Building Your Small Business Marketing Strategy
While your suite of marketing tools can vary tremendously depending on your needs as a business, there are a few fundamental truths about any marketing strategy that also apply to building effective website marketing automation.
- Understand your audience: What are the pain points your clients (and potential clients) have? How can your services address them? Developing an understanding of your ideal client will help you build better automation pipelines to meet their needs and deliver better leads.
- Meet your leads where they are: Mastering this concept requires a keen understanding of “the buyer’s journey” and how to build automations that nurture a client at each stage of this journey. The right automations can guide qualified leads to your team regardless of where they enter your funnel.
- Review, refresh and reinvent as needed: When your website marketing automations function as intended, they’re designed to be a hands-off process until a human presence is needed most. That said, a business is always evolving to meet shifting customer preferences. Your automation will need some level of oversight to have the kind of awareness that helps it adapt to these changes.
Your Digital Marketing Strategy Doesn’t Have to Be Daunting
With everything else you have to manage, it can seem overwhelming to get started down the path to marketing automation—even when you know the outcome is more revenue! The marketing landscape seems to change daily: It’s a challenge to even tackle the research you need to build successful automations. That’s where STL Marketing Department has your back.
We know the struggles of running a small business these days. It’s exactly why we offer tailored marketing solutions designed to help you keep your focus on what matters most: Your business!
Let’s talk about your current needs, and we’ll do an in-depth analysis of where your business can benefit most from website marketing automation!
