Small business growth tools: Automation

How content marketing tools improve customer satisfaction and boost your bottom line

Your customers are constantly bombarded with marketing communication from all directions.

Adding your message to the melee without a content marketing strategy is like trying to shout in a hurricane.

It’s a waste of time, money and energy.

But how can small and growing businesses compete when time and attention are restricted commodities?

The answer might be marketing automation.

As a Perth content marketing agency on the leading edge of automation, we’re constantly helping our clients to boost productivity and bring in better business.

We do it with a mixture of:

• Marketing automation tools
• Ambitious content marketing strategies
• Audience insight and data analysis

If you want to cut through the noise and deliver impactful content marketing without spending millions, keep reading to find out which marketing automation tools deliver ROI.

What is marketing automation?

The most straightforward definition of marketing automation is: using software to simplify time-consuming tasks.

Some basic marketing automation tools boost productivity on everyday tasks.

For example, free email marketing tools like Mailchimp launch emails to a recipient list, so you don’t need to manually enter hundreds of addresses.

Other software packages like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot deliver a suite of email marketing, CRM, marketing automation, data analytics and sales tools to improve the customer experience.

How is marketing automation valuable?

Every good marketing automation tool increases productivity, saves time and delivers a better customer experience.

But “marketing automation” covers a broad spectrum.

Therefore, choosing the right tools, techniques and software packages to grow your business begins by understanding what your team needs from the tools.

Long-term vision

Free productivity tools can be fine in the short term if you need to win back a little time.

But they soon hit a ceiling.

You either need to pay for extra bandwidth, subscribe for features or migrate to a bigger platform.

We recommend that our clients consider the long-term usefulness of marketing automation tools before investing in a growth platform like ActiveCampaign or sticking together a few free tools to save time.

Growing into a full-service content marketing platform is more comfortable than outgrowing free tools and needing to adopt a new marketing stack during a growth spurt.

Tools and features

Automation tools enable content marketing agencies and marketing teams to track, manage and optimise communication across the digital landscape.

The goal is always to provide a better user experience.

But what does “better” mean for your audience?

The marketing automation stack for a small B2B business will differ from a growing FMCG.

So as you compare marketing automation solutions, look for tools and features that meet your needs now and in the future.

Time investment

Marketing teams are under increasing pressure to generate creative ideas, launch content marketing campaigns cut through the noise, and engage their audience on a one-to-one level.

All while marketing budgets are shrinking.

Adopting marketing technology is a learning curve that requires a time investment.

But once you learn to wield the tools to their full potential, marketing automation delivers increased productivity, time savings, more conversions and increased loyalty.

The bottom-line benefits are well worth the investment.

Know your KPIs

Automation tools remove the guesswork from content marketing.

They keep you on track and accountable because all the data is available at your fingertips.

So to get the most value from marketing automation tools as your business grows, it’s important to start with a solid strategy and clear KPIs.

That way, your team can use the content marketing tool to remain agile:

• Prioritise growth opportunities
• Assess the most effective touchpoints
• Test content marketing ideas
• Monitor results in real-time
• Provide up to date reports
• Analyse customer behaviour

As an experienced Perth content marketing agency, we know all too well that customer journeys are rarely, if ever, a straight line.

But an ambitious and agile digital marketing strategy, coupled with the right automation tools, keeps your team focused on the big picture.

Bring in better traffic

More traffic looks good on paper, but better quality traffic is what grows your business.

This is true regardless of whether you run a B2B, B2C, brick-and-mortar or eCommerce company.

Marketing automation tools perform a variety of valuable tasks to attract, nurture and convert the right customers:

• Optimising email marketing send times
• Trigger-based marketing actions
• Automatically scoring leads
• Tracking customer behaviour across your digital properties
• Segmenting audiences
• Personalises the content a customer receives

As first-party and zero-party data become more prominent in content marketing, automation tools that centralise data and streamline interactions will become increasingly valuable.

Our favourite marketing automation tools

We try not to play favourites at Fisher.

But we’ve been in the content marketing industry for a long time, and we’ve seen tools come and go.

Here are the tools we’ve seen deliver value for our clients.

Essential email marketing: Mailchimp

Mailchimp has a free plan that gets you started with basic multi-channel marketing tools for up to 2,000 contacts. The platform scales up to a full-service solution, but ActiveCampaign has better ROI for our money.

Simple audience analysis: Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a handy (and free) data visualisation tool that integrates a wide array of website analytics. Once you get the hang of Data Studio, it can be a handy SEO tool.

The best tool for small and growing businesses: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a flexible, full-spectrum customer experience platform with email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, lead nurturing and sales enablement tools.

The popular choice for bigger businesses: HubSpot

Substantially more expensive than ActiveCampaign, but significantly more powerful, HubSpot powers marketing, sales, service, CMS and operations. HubSpot grew from a Salesforce add-on to a giant in its own right.

Ready to launch into marketing automation?

We’re helping our clients see beyond the traditional horizons of email marketing.

Fisher leverages powerful productivity tools to deliver long-term growth using insightful, data-driven, and agile content marketing strategies.

In other words, we deliver ROI for ambitious marketers.

Get in touch to find out how Fisher can put your business on a path to growth.