How to Grow and Scale Your Business With Marketing Automation

Every day the question is asked: How can our business grow?

Business owners and executives are constantly trying to find the secret answer that will take their business to the next level.

What territories can we expand into? What products or services can we offer?

Growing and scaling a business takes a lot of time, money, and effort. This is why it’s becoming increasingly important for a business to run as efficiently as possible.

Customers are an organization’s most valuable and most important asset. 

When it comes to growth, more often than not businesses focus on new customers or new business and constantly overlook their existing customer base.

So how can your business acquire new customers while at the same time cross-sell or upsell existing customers?

The answer is Marketing Automation

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation utilizes technologies, systems and communication tools to alleviate you or your staff from doing all of the work by hand. By setting up workflows and triggers customers can receive what feels like a completely catered experience from your brand. 

For example, if someone fills out a contact form on your website, it might trigger an email workflow. Sending a thank you and confirmation email to the person who filled out the form and a second email to your team of sales reps with the contact info. This workflow can also add the contact as a customer in your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) and assign a lead score based on their answers.

Here’s a few examples of marketing automation you might already be utilizing

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• Email Marketing
• Website Chat Bots
• Content Scheduling Platforms

It all starts with an effective CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool

Here’s 5 effective CRM’s 

• SharpSpring
• Jobber
• Hubspot
• Service Master
• Salesforce 

CRM’s are used to store customer information. Instead of your client’s success depending on what’s in your sales reps head, you store the information and notes on your customers in your CRM. 

Different CRM’s provide different benefits but one of the key benefits being segmentation of your existing and potential customers. 

When you can break these audiences into different categories it allows you to serve them the specific content that will allow you to nurture a potential customer or cross-sell and upsell an existing customer. 

The majority of the time by using Email Marketing, which your business might already be utilizing, but the question should be, is it producing the results you need for growth.

How will your business get to the next level? 

Marketing Automation is all about workflows.  Workflows take a significant amount of work upfront but will save you that time x 100% over the course of the year.   

Some questions to help you think through a good workflow would be:

• What happens when a lead comes in
• Who is going to communicate with that new lead
• How often do you communicate with the lead
• What happens if the lead doesn’t take immediate action
• How long do you attempt to stay in touch
• How do you stay in touch
• What do you say when you try to get in touch

There are literally hundreds of steps in a good workflow, but if you get this right, marketing automation will literally transform your business sales.

Now we would be remiss if we didn’t put an asterisk beside Marketing Automation. Despite the helpfulness of marketing automation, there is a growing misconception in the marketing industry that automation software can solve any marketing crunch, including the need to generate new leads. 

In reality, this misconception leaves marketers with sophisticated tools to automate the middle of their sales funnels, but no way to generate new leads through their new software. While marketing automation can certainly help a smaller team hit above their weight class, it is all for nothing without a cohesive marketing strategy that includes a lead generator.