Why automate your marketing strategy?

Your customers are on a journey, and you are the guide helping them navigate. They need your help at critical moments to understand the challenge they’re facing, evaluate the options they have and make the right decision. They then need help working through the plan to deliver the solution they need. 

And you could do all this personally if you had only a small handful of customers. But it doesn’t take long before it becomes overwhelming and chaotic. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are three benefits of automating your marketing strategy.

1. It runs while you sleep
2. It works on your customer's schedule
3. It provides you with valuable data

It runs while you sleep

Only a year after launching my first online business, I was amazed at how global the engagement was. When I looked at the analytics, engagement was happening at all hours of the day and night. 

Your customers are expecting more interaction than you can deliver manually.

The same is true for localized services. If you run a local lawn and landscape business, you probably don’t plan to answer the phone 24 hours a day. But what about the ideal customer who, late on a Friday night, decides he’s done spending all his weekends on yard work? You're not going to answer the phone and talk with him, but what if, from your website, he could see the services you offer and schedule a consultation? Then, a prewritten text message is sent to them, letting them know their appointment is scheduled and sharing a link to a new customer FAQ. 

All this happens while you’re asleep or watching a movie with your family or really anything else you want to be doing. When set up properly, it works without your direct intervention. 

It works on your customer's schedule

Not every customer progresses in their customer journey at the same pace. 

Some move quickly from discovering the problem to buying a solution. Others want to give it time to think through, talk it over with their partner or consider other options. Most customers are a combination of the two: they move quickly, then slow down, and then want to move quickly again. 

Your business will thrive if it can be responsive to the variable pace of your customers.

Automation allows your business’s engagement to dynamically respond to your customers based on their behavior. You can set it up to continue providing valuable content, stories, insights and offers while they are considering options. But then, when they take a specific action that moves them forward in the journey, your marketing system can respond with a contextualized offer to help. 

It provides you with valuable data

I hear all the time from small business owners that marketing feels like a black box. And I get that. It can certainly seem opaque when you can’t see the connection between marketing activities, customer actions and business value. 

As a small business owner, you’re constantly making adjustments to guide your business forward. And when it comes to your marketing efforts, you need to know where you currently are to know how to navigate ahead.

How well do you know the real-time metrics of your current sales process? Do you have a dashboard you can pull up to see the current number of leads and how effectively they’re converting from one stage to another? 

But it’s not just system-wide data that’s valuable. What if, before a sales call, you could see which emails your customer read, what they clicked on and any other ways they have been engaging with your business? This insight allows you to quickly have a personal and informed conversation with your customer.

What software should I use for marketing automation?

I hate to say it, but “it depends.” 

Each small business or nonprofit has unique needs. And there are three problems I most commonly see when it comes to organizations choosing marketing automation solutions. 

1. Paying too much for functionality they don’t need.
2. Stringing together 3-4 different solutions to try and work together.
3. Choosing what seems to be an affordable solution that suddenly 10x the price when they want to add a specific feature. 

So let me walk you through some of the categories of marketing automation, some observations on pricing and guidance on how to make a good decision. 

Categories of marketing automation.

Marketing automation solutions really do come in all shapes and sizes. Some offer a comprehensive all-in-one solution. Others offer a very targeted solution. 

It really is a broad field with several categories of tools designed to automate different areas of marketing. Here are some of the main categories:

• Email Marketing Automation: Tools in this category automate the process of sending emails to subscribers or customers based on triggers, schedules, or customer behavior. Examples include Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ConvertKit and Constant Contact.
• Social Media Marketing Automation: These tools help businesses schedule posts, track engagement, and manage multiple social media accounts from a single platform. Examples include Hootsuite, Buffer and SocialPilot.
• Text Message Marketing Automation: This strategy allows businesses to send automated SMS messages to their customers or subscribers. This can be particularly effective as it reaches people directly on their mobile devices, often resulting in higher engagement rates compared to other marketing channels. Examples include Klaviyo, Twilio, ActiveCampaign and Textedly.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Automation: CRM automation tools streamline the management of customer data, lead tracking, and sales pipeline management. Salesforce and Hubspot are popular examples.
• Content Marketing Automation: These tools help with scheduling, publishing, and analyzing content across different platforms. Examples include CoSchedule and Scoop.it.
• Advertising Automation: Advertising automation tools help businesses manage and optimize their online ad campaigns across various platforms. Google Ads and Facebook's Ad Manager are examples.
• Analytics and Reporting Automation: These tools automatically collect data from various marketing activities, analyze it, and provide reports. Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics fall into this category.
• Landing Page Automation: These tools help businesses create and test landing pages to improve conversion rates. Unbounce and Instapage are examples.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Automation: SEO automation tools help businesses automate tasks such as keyword research, link building, and website audits. SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are popular examples.
• Webinar and Event Automation: These tools help with scheduling, promoting, and managing webinars and other events. GoToWebinar and Eventbrite are examples.
• Chatbots and Conversational Marketing Automation: These tools use AI to automate customer interactions on websites, social media, and messaging apps. Drift and Intercom are examples.

Are you feeling a little overwhelmed? That’s normal. 

There are a lot of options, and it can feel complicated and confusing as you try to decide what you need and differentiate between tools. 

And we haven’t even talked about price yet! 

Observations on marketing automation pricing.

So most every marketing automation software takes a similar approach.

They have a free (or almost free) solution that lets you get started. Then the price scales up based on factors like: 

• Access to more advanced features
• Number of customers 
• Number of users 

The ones that focus on a single function, like email or social media scheduling, are going to be cheaper than the ones that provide a comprehensive set of features. 

But once you start using 3 of them (like email, social media and a CRM) you’re no longer saving much. And you are likely expending a lot of effort trying to keep them all in sync. 

The challenge we see all the time for small business owners and non-profit leaders is their marketing automation costs take a significant step up before they’re ready. And because those costs are tied to the number of customers in their database or the number of people on their team, the costs keep going up. I’ve seen many small businesses get surprised when their marketing software cost went up 10x because they crossed one threshold. 

What we recommend.

Let me share some of my personal experience. 

I’ve been the primary marketing leader at multiple for-profit and non-profit startups. And I’ve tried numerous iterations of stitching together free and low-cost solutions. 

But here’s the deal. As I look back on all of them, I wish I had just found a reasonably priced solution that included all the features we would need. 

Your business will thrive if it can be responsive to the variable pace of your customers.

The closest I could find was Hubspot’s starter pack. It’s pretty good, but its price goes up so quickly when you want anything more than basic features or more than a few people in the system. 

I kept hunting for something that would help myself and other mission-driven entrepreneurs. 

Here were my criteria.

• Packaging features in the same marketing OS so I could see the big picture in one place. 
• Pricing that was affordable at the beginning, even at the highest level of features and support. 
• Pricing that stays the same price as the organization grows.

I thought if I could find something that met these criteria, it would be flexible enough to work for both small businesses and nonprofits. I was hopeful I could find a solution I could recommend to clients. 

Unfortunately, I failed. 

All the solutions I investigated took the same approach and became burdensomely expensive quickly. Many of them were great software with excellent design and helpful features. But they just weren’t ideal for a small business, solopreneur or non-profit.

That’s why I created the Better Story Marketing OS.

It’s a marketing automation platform that gives you all the essentials at an affordable price that never goes up.

Imagine your business responding to customers night and day using the same words and suggestions you would if you were doing it yourself.

When your marketing automation is set up properly, you can more effectively identify and solve bottlenecks in your customer journey.

When those bottlenecks are out of the way, a new path to scaling your small business opens up before you. 

Together, we can take your customer journey implementation to the next level by automating it. Check out the Better Story Marketing OS or schedule a Q&A session to learn more.