Growth is the goal of any business – but scale comes with its own price. It’s difficult and time-consuming enough to kick the business off and keep it in the black, but once you see the first signs of success, keeping up only gets more demanding.
With limited resources and manpower, entrepreneurs, along with their staff, face the challenge of cramming various operations and business functions into their already extensive to-do lists. Marketing is one of them, and it is as demanding as it is important to your overall strategy.
But thankfully, there’s a solution that will allow you to overcome your limitations and simplify processes: automation. Small businesses can use marketing automation tools to simplify the workflow, streamline collections, and nurture leads, along with various other tasks that fall within the marketing campaign. This will leave room to focus on development and the numerous business functions at hand.
Best of all, marketing automation is no longer reserved only for large companies who operate on impressive budgets. Here are the top 5 marketing automation tools that you can easily implement in your strategy on a modest budget – and they can pay off heftily.
1. HubSpot Marketing
This is undoubtedly one of the most popular marketing automation tools and it is especially convenient for small businesses that are new to marketing automation. It’s a simple platform that does a bit of everything with an inbound approach to marketing automation, strongly focusing on growing traffic and boosting conversions. It helps to create, measure, and optimize marketing campaigns, ensuring that you won’t launch a campaign until your strategy is complete. It also offers CRM along with tools for emailing, blogging, lead management, social media, ads, analytics, integration with Salesforce, and even extensive SEO management.
2. Infusionsoft
This platform is specifically focused on small businesses and fuelling their growth through automation. Their automated marketing technology provides a variety of options, from processing payments and tracking orders to dealing with your referral programs and publishing content. Along with CRM, the technology includes analytics, mobile, and various integrations for e-commerce solutions. It serves as a great campaign builder as it collects data for personalization and automates lead capture and follow-ups. Overall, it’s a trusted and highly versatile platform that will also help you optimize your campaign by using its tools and insightful analytics reports.
3. Marketo
Marketo is another platform that’s ideal for beginners. It allows businesses to drive engagement across multiple channels and to build relationships with customers by allowing real-time personalization. It provides features for B2B marketing, digital ads, social media, email campaigning and lead management, budgeting, and ROI optimization. Like Infusionsoft, it serves as a great analytics tool, even providing insight as to which leads need to be pursued urgently. It is accessible both on mobile and desktop, but best of all, Marketo uses a cloud-based infrastructure to handle insurmountably large numbers of daily activities so you don’t have to worry about outgrowing it.
4. AdRoll
This is a powerful digital marketing tool with a very simple dashboard to help you measure your marketing campaign and tweak it accordingly. It is strongly focused on retargeting, helping businesses reach their target market easily along with placing ads and monitoring their performance. It offers features for segmentation, social targeting, predictive buying, and cross-device reach, among others, which help collect, analyze, and tweak the campaign according to customer data. It’s great for integrating with other marketing apps and synchronizing your tactics.
5. Ontraport
If you’re eager to see how your marketing efforts are paying off and gain insight about customer responses, this tool is for you. Ontraport seeks to provide companies with a visualization of the customer journey so they can gain a better understanding of consumer behavior and implement this knowledge into their campaigns. It provides data that shows you how customers respond to your marketing messages as well as projections about the viability of your future attempts. It also offers a Campaign Builder which helps you customize the automation process based on the goals you set. While not wildly popular, it’s a convenient and insightful automation tool that can work well with others.
These are five tools we’ve picked for their effectiveness and ability to help you tweak your marketing campaign. Now, each one is different, so finding the right one for you will take some further research as well as experimentation. Nevertheless, once you find the automation tool that suits your needs and appeals to you, you can be sure a heavy load will be taken off your back – and you can improve your strategy exponentially.
