Marketing Automation Can Help Startups Sell Like Big Brands

Let’s begin with a simple question: What goes into the making of a Big Brand? The answer is, there’s nothing extraordinary that builds a super brand. This is because any branding process fundamentally involves the creation of some excellent branded content and its timely communication to a targeted audience as per the brand guidelines. If you can follow this rule, success is sure to be yours.

The problem, however, is that most of the smaller players feel that they lack the technology and/or resources to deliver that level of finesse that the big guys do. How then do they overcome these hurdles? This is exactly where marketing automation makes a world of difference to their performances and puts them in the big league gradually.

The best thing about marketing automation is that it helps deliver digitized content to the audience and ensures that there are no delays, plus it ensures strict compliance to brand guidelines. Big brands are also known to respond to lead enquiries in no time due to their investment in large teams. Marketing Automation can ensure leads are responded in real time by sending out reply emails automatically in spite of the resources crunch.

A study conducted by Harvard University reveals that lead response time is vastly improved when appropriate marketing automation software is used by the smaller businesses. It was seen that a business was most likely to qualify a lead by 700 per cent if it responded to a customer enquiry within 60 minutes! This was likely to be 60 times faster if it waited for 24 hours or more. 

On an average, most companies take a minimum of twelve hours to answer a query, the study added. With the use of the right marketing automation tools, a new business can create its own automated email response that ensures that any lead gets a response within an hour or even within seconds!

As a small business owner, you have a great chance to vastly improve upon your process for lead qualification as well if you use marketing automation correctly. In fact, businesses implementing marketing automation have seen a 451% rise in terms of qualified leads. This was more so because of better and focused targeting as also personalized marketing that is greatly aided and enhanced by customized marketing automation that improves the process of lead qualification. 

Lead scoring automatically updates itself when a particular lead finishes certain actions like viewing the pricing page or schedules a call. This enables the marketer to more accurately qualify leads, while also ensuring that he focuses on the most valuable among the prospective clients.

You also get to reduce your marketing and sales overheads considerably when you resort to marketing automation. It also empowers you to reduce unnecessary or even redundant manpower as one individual gets to develop an automation sequence which enables communication with thousands of leads. In fact, marketing automation helps you reduce your marketing overheads by 12.2%. Additionally, it also enables your staff to focus on more creative and productive work, while doing away with repetitive and unnecessary work.

The business’ sales productivity too, gets a boost when implementation of marketing automation leads to a changed environment that actually nudges the sales team. Since it takes care of all the data entry, lead prioritization and nurturing, the scope of human error and inconsistency is also eliminated. This undoubtedly leads to a more productive sales unit. It actually encourages companies to follow up on their leads more efficiently as 23% of companies don’t actually respond to initial customer enquiries.

Another advantage is that marketing automation multiplies the number of leads generated by reactivating and nurturing them constantly till the time they actually turn customers. You also get to eliminate manual lead contacting completely.

However, marketing automation is not a panacea to bad marketing. Since the main purpose of technology applied to any business is to magnify both its efficiencies and inefficiencies, pulling the trigger and implementing marketing automation in a business creates a customer journey which may either be good or bad and keeps repeating itself till the right adjustments are made. That’s why crafting the right customer journey is mandatory for all businesses. It is always seen that the top notch marketers override the hurdles and decisions that a lead faces while evaluating a service or product and guides them all the way.

A more efficient business model is created when marketing automation enhances efficiency and lowers overhead costs. These are imperative to small businesses which need to earn their profits by way of enhanced efficiency first. Lower overheads lead to increased profit margins and create more capital that may be ploughed back to the business for its growth. You get to reduce marketing budgets and improve substantially upon lead generation. 

Moreover, reaching out to new customers becomes easier as marketing automation provides the right data on consumer behavior on which the practical and right decisions can be taken for growth, expansion and customer retention.

Remember that a lot depends on your customer service, which the big leaguers have always focused upon. Here smaller businesses have an advantage because of their enhanced customer services. Marketing automation fosters greater customer relations by studying their consumer patterns and behavior. This leads to the creation of customized shopping experiences that make customers feel more at home. This again in turn, calls for using a marketing automation software that easily integrates with the business’ current CRM and tools leading to minimized expenses and labor required for its implementation.  

At Esanosys, we work with companies of all sizes and help them succeed with marketing automation.

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