Why Marketing Automation Should Be in Your 2023 Small Business Marketing Strategies

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As 2022 comes to a close, economists and investors forecast a global economic slowdown in 2023. While top United States-based CEOs prepare for a possible recession, small businesses are thinking about their prospects next year.

A recent survey of US SMBs indicates that business owners plan to focus on their customer base amid gloomy market predictions. When asked about customers, 18% only mentioned retaining current customers, 61% only mentioned growing new customers, and 21% said both. In total, 82% of respondents plan to focus efforts on acquiring new customers for their business.

This is where marketing comes in. Based on the survey, most SMBs plan to maintain their marketing budgets for next year. But how can this budget be put to good use?

Leveraging Marketing Automation

Marketing has become more complex because of evolving marketing trends. While the internet has made it easier to reach potential customers, it’s also a multi-channel environment where delivering the right offers at the right time can be hit-or-miss. 

Nevertheless, businesses have to develop a strong online presence. These could include maintaining an active social media account, an SEO-optimized website, or using email marketing to reach potential customers.

With so many ways to approach digital marketing, even the most experienced marketers would struggle to monitor all their marketing channels. To optimize marketing budgets and increase the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts, SMBs should leverage marketing automation.

Marketing automation is not only for large companies or established brands. Small business owners can also rely on marketing automation tools to efficiently handle day-to-day marketing tasks. From trigger-based email sequences to campaign tracking and live chat, SMBs can use automation to turn prospects into paying customers.

Growing Customer Base Through Automation

Marketing automation software can integrate with a CRM platform to follow up on leads and guide them through the conversion funnel. Businesses can implement efficient lead generation through forms, landing pages, and other online tools to capture customer information. They can then follow up with personalized emails or other communications to encourage potential customers to make a purchase.

They can also integrate marketing automation software with social media accounts to automatically schedule posts or interact with customers. Marketers can use automation to track user engagement and activity and to execute other tasks like generating reports and analyzing data. By automating these tasks, businesses save time and resources. Rather than wasting hours on repetitive tasks, they can focus on improving their marketing strategies based on the insights they get from their data.

When it comes to gaining new customers, personalization should be part of any marketing strategy. Automation is used in behavioral analytics for marketers to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ interests, preferences, and motivations. Businesses can hyper-personalize the customer experience and offer more appropriate products for each customer when they can see a complete picture of their customer.

Email marketing automation is another way marketing automation can help businesses gain more clients. Among US consumers, 70% said they would prefer brands to contact them via email. But managing email could be tedious and time-consuming, especially for SMBs that may not have a fully staffed marketing department.

To not miss out on opportunities from email marketing, marketers can use automation to set up email campaigns, send welcome emails to new subscribers, and send newsletters, or other emails based on user behavior and interactions.

Including marketing automation in your 2023 small business marketing strategies can save time, streamline various marketing activities, provide data-driven insights, and improve customer engagement, among others. All these can positively impact customer acquisition and retention that are crucial to survive a looming recession.