It's time to automate your marketing!

Micro, small and medium enterprises are always looking for ways to be more efficient and lower overhead costs. Smaller companies, in particular, automate invoicing, bookkeeping and anything that frees up their valuable time to focus on their product or service.

So why not consider marketing automation internally as an area to cut costs in the next financial year?

Marketing activities are no longer a periodic investment based on campaigns and sales cycles; they are ongoing operational objectives. You no longer need external agencies to constantly build you new campaign sites and one-off mobile apps. Digital is now key to day-to-day operations and should be an engine of a business that doesn't sleep.

 Why is it so hard?

It really shouldn't be, all it takes is a little planning, the right platform and getting a bit of strategic help when you need it. What are your current marketing practices and how do they help you communicate to your audience?

Think about your current marketing process, odds are it looks something like this:

• Update a few social media platforms from time to time if you remember or have new content
• Write blog posts or news items, but wish you could do more
• Get a lot of leads from the website but wish they were more qualified
• Send newsletters occasionally but know they could be better
• Have monthly subscriptions for many third-party marketing services that don't speak to each other

The above steps can be fairly labor intensive and probably demand the majority of your marketing time.
Marketers need help so they can focus on the customer strategy and not the customer journey management itself. Luckily, Kentico is a great step in the right direction in that it offers easy-to-manage and integrated marketing automation.

How Kentico can help 

It's a one stop shop including:

• Contact tracking and management- learn everything about your individual customers
• Lead scoring - identify the best leads and nurture those that aren't ready
• Email marketing - reuse your newsletter, social media and site content for your various customer databases
• Track Kentico generated campaigns and their ROI
• Create custom work flows around new content creation so that it automatically populates social media, your homepage, and all your marketing channels
• Optimize your site for mobile so you're not missing out on mobile users
• Guide buyers from abandoned shopping carts to white papers to gain their trust and interest
• Develop a clean and automatic on boarding process
• Personalize content to users based on previous actions and personas

What's next?

Choosing a platform like Kentico will increase your marketing productivity.

You're going to go further in spreading your key messages, with less effort and with more feedback and knowledge. Instead of struggling with the basics, you can unlock advanced functionality in one place and accomplish more. It isn't what you need to know to start marketing automation; you just need to do it, or you'll be left behind.