Marketing automation is essential for those in charge of marketing for small businesses. It’s not just a nice thing that adds to your productivity; it’s absolutely necessary because It takes over routine menial tasks so you can focus your time and energy on more important things, like running a profitable business!
Here are three compelling reasons to start automating your marketing right away.
Save Time for “Thinking Work”
As a small business marketer, what should you be spending your time doing on a day-to-day business? Your true role is to study your market, plan and execute strategies. In other words, it’s “thinking” work.
However, when you’re bogged down with simple routine tasks that anyone (or any machine) could do for you, you’re losing that precious thinking and organizing time. The hours you could be devoting to really careful consideration of your small business or mind mapping your overall strategy are wasted away on busy work.
Get Routine Tasks off Your Desk
In addition to planning and organizing, another important part of marketing is building relationships. You need to be actively engaged and interacting with your audience, whether on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, with online webinars, or face-to-face offline events. Networking is still important, even in this age of digital.
Relationship building – just like with planning and organizing – takes time. Also, relationship building tasks cannot be done by a software program, an outsourced worker across the planet, or a nifty gadget. This is work that you and only you can do.
If you can successfully automate routine tasks and get them off your to-do list, you can spend more time interacting with members of your target market. The benefits of one-on-one engagement are priceless.
Be Better at Marketing
The main reason you need to automate is that it gets rid of simple tasks and frees up your time. However, there is another good reason to automate your marketing. Sometimes, automated programs can do things better than you do. For example, an automated analytics program can take in a great deal of data and deliver relevant metrics to you. If you were to analyze this data yourself, it would not only take a great deal of time, but it wouldn’t be as precise as the analysis a formula or algorithm can do.
In fact, there are some tasks that you can’t do on your own. You can’t do them at all without automation. An example here would be email marketing. You simply can’t build, maintain and market to an email list all by yourself through your usual email address. You need an automated program to carry out email marketing.
Getting Started with Automation
If you’ve shied away from automation until now because of the technological barriers, don’t. It’s very easy to get started. Start by automating one task at a time, and then once you’re comfortable and seeing results, move on to the next. Soon, you’ll see how automation saves you time for more important things and makes a huge impact on your business growth.
Want more? Download my free report full of clever ways to get started with automated marketing.
