Marketing automation helps small businesses compete effectively with larger companies. By automating tasks like social media and lead generation, small teams can achieve what bigger organizations do. Recent statistics show that 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for the last two years.
Marketing automation need not be expensive, with the availability of SaaS-based platforms that automate everything from lead generation, engagement, and even after-sales support. Here are a few solutions worth looking into.
Socedo
Socedo is an automated social media lead generation tool that enables you to find your target audience and engage them, in order to fill your funnel with qualified leads. It works by looking up social profiles and engaging prospects on Twitter with a completely customizable workflow. With reporting tools built right in, you can learn more about your criteria and engagement workflows so that over time, you can tweak your workflow to get with even higher quality leads. Pricing ranges from $100-$1,000 per month, and a free trial is available.
Oktopost
About 64% of marketers who spend as little as six hours per week on social media marketing see lead generation benefits. Nearly half of them say their marketing expenses have decreased.
A B2B social media management platform, Oktopost allows you to automate posting across multiple social media networks including Facebook and Twitter. It includes a reporting dashboard that you can use to create and manage social campaigns to promote any kind of content. You’ll see the leads you generate and gain insight into which networks, profiles and posts are the most effective in generating leads.
Oktopost integrates with the number of third-party platforms including salesforce.com and Marketo to automatically sync your data. Plans start at $65 a month billed monthly, and $55 a month billed annually. A free trial is available.
Fanplayr
At least 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement. Fanplayr is a customer analysis tool that generates tailored content to enhance user experience with the intent of improving the sales funnel. It basically adds intelligence all your marketing campaigns by analyzing and segmenting visitor traffic. The platform then displays targeted messages or coupon offers. As customer behavior changes, so will the customized offers. Pricing information is not publicly available. However, those who are interested may schedule a free demo.
Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is a comprehensive sales and marketing solution for small business owners. It provides a central platform for creating and executing strategy, allowing users to capture new leads, and automate a number of repetitive tasks, including contact management, billing and payment, and follow-up.
Various pricing plans are available, with the base plan including only contact management and marketing automation for $199/month for three users, 2,500 contacts and 12,500 emails per month. A plan that includes contact management and marketing automation, with your choice of sales automation or e-commerce costs $299/month and includes four users, 5,000 contacts, and 25,000 emails per month. Additional plans start at $379 a month and include all services with additional user, contact, and email allocations. A demo is available.
Ambassador
Ambassador is a completely automated referral tracking and management system. It aims to turn your customers into brand ambassadors with custom campaigns and incentives. You’ll get a simple campaign builder with event tracking for each campaign along with prebuilt widgets, automated emails and triggers. Automatic payout and channel specific metrics with a single dashboard for reporting are included. Plans start at $99 a month for 250 ambassadors.
Insightly
Insightly is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. With it, you can manage leads, contacts, vendors, partners, and supplies. You can keep track of email, and phone conversations. You can manage projects, find social media profiles for all your contacts, and give insight with a number of reports. It comes with a mobile app so your sales team has access to everything they need to matter where they are. It integrates with the number of apps including Dropbox, Google apps, QuickBooks, and more. Being a CRM, the app can serve as an end-to-end solution for customer contact needs, which can increase sales by 29%, according to surveyed business users.
The platform offers a free plan for up to two users. Additional plans start at $12 per user per month billed annually, or $15 per user per month billed monthly.
Research shows that B2B marketers who implement marketing automation increase their sales pipeline contributions by 10%. Additionally, companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates and an annualized growth rate of 31% higher than businesses that do not employ marketing automation platforms. No matter how you choose to implement marketing and automation in your business, growth is on the horizon.