15 Benefits of Using Content Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Marketing automation is a buzz word in the digital marketing industry. The rapid breakthroughs in Artificial intelligence(AI) technologies have led to sweeping changes in the way businesses handle their digital marketing endeavors.

Choosing what parts of your content marketing tasks can be automated is critical to increasing the efficiency of marketing automation for small businesses. However, it is noteworthy to remember that not every aspect of content marketing can be automated. For example, though there are many advanced tools available to create blog posts, readers can easily differentiate between a piece of content written by AI and a human. 

Though automated content marketing helps to save time and money, most of the small business owners are clueless about what is marketing automation, how to automate marketing, and what are the benefits of marketing automation. 

If you are still not convinced about the need for content marketing automation for small businesses, here are some benefits of marketing automation for small businesses.   Towards 90 can help you to automate your content marketing systems. Schedule a call with us to get detailed insights about content marketing automation for small businesses and how it can benefit your organization. 

15 Benefits of Content Marketing Automation

Most small business owners think that marketing automation is for large corporations and big brands. But on the contrary, marketing automation for small businesses helps to optimize their manpower and resources. It also helps to improve functionality and boost productivity. 

1. Reduce Employment Costs

Marketing automation for small businesses helps to achieve more productivity with less manpower and budget. With the best content marketing automation software, a single employee can handle multiple tasks effectively. You can maintain a lean marketing team and get incredible results. 

For example, an employee can send thousands of personalized emails or messages to your target audience by using a lead nurturing campaign that is triggered automatically based on preset criteria. You can send messages that suit the stage of the individual customer in the sales funnel. 

2. Get Crucial Data

Analytics and reporting is one of the most useful features of content marketing automation tools. You can easily track and monitor the data related to a campaign’s effectiveness and measure its ROI. This helps to identify the campaigns that are performing well and optimize them for increased effectiveness, while you can rework the ones that are lagging behind.

You can also get other relevant data that is required to plan and execute different marketing campaigns. Moreover, with the wealth of data provided by these tools, you can also identify the bottlenecks in your sales and marketing and rectify them to improve the results of your marketing endeavours. 

3. Enhance Creativity of Your Team

By automating the repetitive tasks, your marketing team will have lots of free time on their hands to come up with innovative campaigns to boost your brand awareness and increase sales. 

For example, with the routine tasks automated, your content writers can concentrate on writing well-researched content pieces that establish your brand credibility instead of manually writing and sending emails to individual customers. 

4. Optimize Your Lead Nurturing Process

 No more abandoned shopping carts and fallen leads as automation enables you to visualize your audiences’ journey through the sales funnel and create your marketing campaigns according to their stage in the funnel. This helps to refine your lead generation and nurturing process by taking care of the areas where your leads are falling. You can refine those areas to boost the number of sales-ready leads that can be converted into paying customers. 

For example, this chart from Infusionsoft alerts users on the type of action to be taken depending on the stage of the lead in the sales funnel. 

5. Reach Your Target Audience Across Different Channels

One of the powerful features of the best content marketing automation tools is that they allow you to reach out to your target audience at the right time through the right channel. This helps to create a rapport with the audience and build brand awareness. 

Increase your brand awareness and attract loads of quality traffic to your website with content marketing automation for small businesses from Towards 90. Our automation professionals have expertise in choosing the right automation tools that match your business objectives and audience demands. 

6. A/B Test All Your Campaigns

Split testing is a critical practice that helps you to test your marketing campaigns and choose the best-performing ones. Marketing automation tools help you to A/B test all of your marketing campaigns on a continuous basis. You can choose the type of test to be performed and enjoy the benefits of A/B testing on your marketing efficiency. 

7. Increase Revenue By Up-sells and Cross-sells

One of the best benefits of digital marketing automation for small businesses is the ability to automate the process of upselling and cross-selling products to your customers to boost your revenues. You can set up personalized campaigns to upsell products to customers, who have just bought from your business. 

For example, if you have sold a phone to a customer, you can set up an automatic upsell campaign to remind them to upgrade their phone during special promo offers, or before a special event like their birthday or anniversary. 

8. Plan and Execute Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Marketing experts opine that the more relevant an offer is to the viewer, the more likely he is likely to convert. One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation for small businesses is that you can impress your customers with laser-targeted offers and promotions and convert them easily. 

For example, you can design multiple campaigns to appeal to your target audience spread across different locations, and demographics. 

9. Manage Your Social Media Campaigns Effectively

You can easily identify the apt social media platforms for your target audience, create amazing campaigns, and post them on your pages in a short span of time. Most of the modern tools for marketing automation for small businesses such as Hootsuite have dashboards to effectively manage all your social media accounts and track lead generation from each one. 

10. Schedule Your Posts and Campaigns

The ability to schedule your posts and marketing campaigns well ahead of time is one of the major benefits of marketing automation for small businesses with a small team. You can create valuable content and targeted marketing campaigns by making use of the data from the CRM systems. 

These tools allow you to choose the day and time of publishing your social media posts, and blog posts. You can choose the time when your audience is the most active and schedule your posts accordingly. You can also reinforce important information by repeating your posts at regular intervals. 

11. Create Marketing Campaigns Easily

Most of the digital marketing automation tools have features that allow users to create content marketing campaigns such as email campaigns, social media marketing campaigns, etc. You do not require much training to use these features. 

This helps you to save time and execute marketing campaigns in an efficient manner. On the other hand, your web design teams and graphics teams can concentrate on other strategic aspects of your website instead of taking time to create marketing campaigns. 

12. Maintain The Quality of Your Marketing Campaigns

Digital marketing automation tools help you to standardize the content creation and promotion processes. Thereby, they help you to maintain the quality of your content marketing campaigns. Every aspect of content creation such as posting articles, choosing the right images, formatting texts, etc. can be automated using the best marketing automation tools for small businesses. Moreover,  automation also helps to synchronize your campaigns and saves a lot of operational time.  

13. Repurpose Your Existing Content

A majority of the content marketing automation software feature tools that recommend the content that can be repurposed to educate leads and nurture them. This eliminates the need to create new content every time and gives a fresh lease of life to your existing content. You can increase the ROI on your content marketing investment and generate return visitors to your blogs or website. 

For example, you can take the relevant content from your old blog posts and create guest posts, take educational information from your ebooks or white papers and repurpose them as blog posts or make a collection of your viral blog posts into an e-book, etc. 

14. Reduce the Conversion Time

Marketing automation tools help to increase the efficiency of your sales teams. It standardizes your lead generation and lead scoring process, and aids the sales team to identity sales qualified leads based on their actions. Moreover, integrating a marketing automation system with CRM helps to get more information about your leads and keep the CRM database up-to-date. 

Automation tools also alert the sales teams when the potential customers are searching for your products or services. This allows you to contact the leads at the right time and convert them into customers. 

15. Benefit From  a Centralized Strategy 

A well-documented and centralized marketing strategy is essential for the success of your digital marketing campaigns. Using the best content marketing automation tools available in the market aids you to document and centralize your marketing strategy in a safe place. 

Centralization helps your marketing team review the strategy once in a while and make the necessary changes whenever required. Moreover, they can also refer to the strategy to monitor the direction of your marketing efforts. 

Marketing automation is a boon for small businesses. It helps you to optimize your content marketing campaigns and get the maximum ROI. There are many benefits of marketing automation for small businesses which help to reduce costs and gain a footing in the market. Automation tools aid to connect with the customers through multiple platforms and engage them with personalized content that informs, educates, and converts them. 

Though most of the small business owners are aware of the need for content marketing automation, they fail to bite the bullet because they do not know how to automate marketing. 

 How to Automate Your Content Marketing? 

You can automate any part of your content marketing process starting from strategy formulation and planning, to content creation, distribution, and performance analysis. Content marketing automation involves a 7 step process.