Your Startup Is Already Big Enough to Begin Using Marketing Automation The time and money saved on certain tasks are vital for busy, resource-strapped startups. Here's why you should look at automation as a force-multipier for your marketing efforts.
By Albizu Garcia •
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Startups have an overabundance of information and tools at their fingertips. Ignoring what's on offer, though, can mean missing out on something hugely beneficial. Marketing automation is often a prime example.
The time and money saved on certain tasks are vital for busy and resource-strapped startups. There are many reasons why you should look at automation as a boost for your startup's marketing efforts.
Automation saves time and money.
In the early days of startups, the right hires can make or break the company. Hiring can be expensive, and even without a new salary taken into account, it is also a drain on time and resources. Automating some of your tasks gives you back the budget that could have been spent on hiring someone new.
A Lightspeed hiring report for 2018 showed that half of startups reported missing their hiring goal for 2017 due to the lack of a recruitment team. Startups simply don't have dedicated HR professionals helping them bring talent onboard. Therefore, being able to automate tasks rather than recruit a new person can save a significant amount of time and money for a cash-conscious startup.
Related: 12 Ways to Automate Your Business and Boost Efficiency
Even with bringing a marketing strategy from outside in-house, marketing automation allows your existing team members to save time, as well. Social media campaigns, for instance, take time and skill, but there are a number of tasks that go into a successful campaign that can be automated to relieve time constraints.
Take posting, for example. To ensure the best time zone or demographic for a post requires time and research on the part of your employees. Once they've worked this out, they then need to write the copy, create the image, add a link, etc. before they can call the task complete. Only this is one post for one particular channel, and each subsequent post can require the same work. Marketing automation tools can take away this drain on time and resources.
Automation can help boost lead generation efforts.
Prospects are hugely important for any startup, but do you have enough time to nurture them? Having enough time to dedicate to potential customers or users is crucial for growing startups. With more time comes the ability to reach out to a bigger audience and move potential clients through your sales journey more easily.
Related: What Is a Sales Funnel? The Guide to Building an Automated Selling Machine.
Instead of hiring someone to do this, marketing automation is ready and waiting. Automation can help you create a valuable database of leads by automatically gathering information about potential clients. Having this data at hand can be a huge benefit for your startup as well as tell you a lot about your marketing strategies. Whether it's your audience's interaction with your brand, how to segment your audience for future marketing plans, or the style of your posts, being able to collect all of this data and use it is hugely beneficial for marketing at an early stage.
Automation levels the playing field.
Your startup may be agile and innovative, but often you are up against massive leaders in your industry. Employing marketing automation can help bring your competitors down a peg or two, putting your startup closer to a more level playing field.
One survey showed that half of small businesses are doing their own marketing. Therefore, a marketing automation tool can relieve a lot of the pressure and make up for a lack of skills that make running your marketing internally a time-consuming endeavor. Most modern marketing automation tools are responsive, easy to use, and highly accessible. This means that once set up correctly, to your specific needs, your startup won't have to worry about not having its best chance at a successful marketing campaign.
Related: 4 Ways to Automate Your Sales Team's Pipeline
Marketing automation holds a number of potentials for startups. Ultimately, time and money are the real life-savers for startups, with time or money spent on marketing activities or onboarding new hires being saved by a sophisticated software set up specifically for your business's needs. These two common pain points, once solved, can open up a wider world of marketing opportunities for your startup as you grow.
