Marketing automation brings a host of potential rewards for small businesses, including increased lead generation, a shorter sales cycle, better sales revenues, and a lower cost per sale. However, implementing the infrastructure required for marketing automation requires a capital outlay that is enough to give many start-ups pause for thought. In this article, we explain why marketing automation is a superb investment in your business’s future, even if you’re just embarking on your venture and have limited capital to spend.
Marketing automation can give your start-up the positive boost it needs to get customers through the door and make your new business profitable, and can help you maximise your limited resources in the crucial first 12 to 24 months of trading.
1) Level the playing field with more established companies
The challenge faced by all start-ups is finding enough time and money to do everything that needs to be done – and to compete with businesses that are five steps ahead of you in this regard, with the staff and systems in place to act more productively. Marketing automation levels the playing field by allowing you to implement complex and multi-tier marketing campaigns targeting hundreds or even thousands of leads, even when operating with a skeleton team.
By investing in a marketing automation platform and good marketing content, you can leverage the efforts of your team, so you are free to focus on closing deals and growing your business without taking on all the routine admin roles yourself. This lets you compete on more even terms with established SMEs in your sector.
2) Save money and time
The law of marketing is that you have to put out to get back, and for start-ups strapped for time and cash, this is a tricky proposition. It’s tempting to put marketing spend – and especially an investment in specialist marketing automation software – to the bottom of the priority list when establishing a new business. However, investing in marketing automation at an early stage is actually an excellent way of saving time and money – not just long-term, but immediate-term, too. Marketing automation takes on many of the most labour-intensive tasks associated with sales, including updating social media platforms, analysing data, and sending routine emails. With a ‘to do list’ the length of the M1, these are the last things that a start-up owner wants to concentrate on.
But marketing automation strategies not only save hours in the day, so you can spend time making money and delivering service, but they also streamline your marketing strategies to take a lot of the guesswork out of marketing and make it more predictable and successful. You’ll find that for every pound you spend with marketing automation, you get a better return on investment than you would with manual processes. This is great news if your marketing budget is small and precious, because it gives you more flexibility to achieve more while spending less.
3) Reduce spend on outsourcing
Outsourcing is a cost-effective solution for start-ups, and there is a strong case for working with a specialist marketing agency to deliver some or all of your strategy, even at an early stage. However, working with third parties costs money, and so having more time available for value-driven tasks, and many of your manual tasks accounted for, means you don’t have to spend as much on outsourcing. You’ll have more flexibility to choose the functions you outsource, and won’t have to outsource core functions because you’re too tied up with sales admin to find time for them.
Find out more
At JDR, we provide a range of tailored marketing solutions for small businesses in all sectors, so whether you are an established company or a brand-new start-up, we can help you maximise your marketing budget and get the best returns from your spend. To find out more, please call 01332 215152 today.
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