Most small businesses are proudly customer-centric from a values and strategic point of view. But as a small business grows, it also needs to be customer-centric from a capabilities point of view. If you don’t have the business tools and systems to really know and connect with your customers, you’re not going to be customer centric, no matter how much you want to be.
The good news is that small and medium sized businesses now have more options than ever before when it comes to marketing technology. Sophisticated analysis, automation, and personalisation are all now within the grasp of even the smallest business. Of course, this comes with a flip side — how do you make sure that the solutions you choose fit with your existing tech stack? And how do you choose the right solution in the first place?
Our Small Business Marketing Toolkit has the answers. It looks at some of the common traps that small businesses fall into when it comes to marketing tech, and shows how you can avoid them.
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What’s your marketing return on investment?
You’ve created some great marketing content, but what is its purpose? How do you know whether it is doing its desired job? You might get the click, but how’s the conversion? What is the return on investment (ROI) of those clicks? What’s the value to the audience, and how do you measure success?
It’s easy to track clicks on a website, just as it’s easy to track attendance at a conference booth. What businesses must move towards, however, is creating a single view of the customer and measuring in real time how potential customers travel through the funnel.
Celebrity Ink – a group of Australian tattoo studios – integrates all customer data into a single source of truth, allowing it to track marketing spend through the whole funnel and accurately attribute revenue results to marketing investment.
Want to know more about calculating marketing ROI?
The Small Business Marketing Toolkit has all the insights from businesses like yours.
It’s equally important to track your customers throughout their journey with you. Of all your closed leads, what was the cross-sell or upsell revenue over the following year? What is the total lifetime value of those customers, relative to the total cost to serve?
In other words, are they good business?
If the answer is yes, double down on that lead source. If the answer is no, you should shift the spend somewhere else.
The success of this and so many other marketing processes is about measuring all of these variables in real time, so you can optimise spend based on revenue. And automation means it can all be done in the background, with very little extra effort from staff. In fact, with Customer 360, Salesforce customers have experienced an average 27% faster automation of business processes, leading to a 26% increase in employee productivity*.
Once you have this real-time data, you’re able to make smart, customer centric, data-driven decisions.
How do you make smart, data-driven marketing decisions?
Businesses today are facing a challenge. How do you achieve operational efficiency without compromising customer satisfaction? The answer lies in the efficient collection and use of data, and the power of automation.
When you capture the right data about the right customers, using a CRM, you’re able to make smart decisions. This is extremely important.
As you grow, if you don’t have data to make smart, data-driven decisions, you introduce a great deal of risk into your business. Technology is a key to being customer centric and making smart business decisions.
There are three steps you can follow to help increase the effectiveness of your data:
- Automate what you can
- Consolidate your data sources
- Ensure your systems can scale as you grow
How can automation help you scale your business?
The Small Business Marketing Toolkit supports business owners to lower costs, boost productivity, and wow their customers
How can you use personalisation to wow your customers?
While cutting costs and automating processes is important for the health of any small business, it shouldn’t happen at the expense of a great customer experience.
Integrated data, as part of a single source of truth, allows you to understand your customer and their needs, while simultaneously highlighting opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling.
According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report, the majority of customers expect every offer to be personalised. That level of messaging customisation is only possible at scale with automated systems.
This functionality helps more than just the marketing team, too. Sales teams can deploy small business software that empowers them to focus on nurtured leads who are showing buying signals. So, rather than spending time calling blindly down a lead list, they’re focusing on the leads that are showing buying behaviour. This means they’re having the right conversation at the right time and are not slowed down, for example, by manual logging activities. These activities are automated.
One example of this in practice is happening at PaySauce. It is using automated journeys to free sales reps from manually following up with prospects after events. This saves time and gives sales reps the chance to prioritise hunting new leads.
The Small Business Marketing Toolkit
The Small Business Marketing Toolkit has even more insight from businesses just like yours. You’ll find advice on the long-term strategy that will set you up for success, alongside quick wins to reimagine your marketing right now.
Sources
*2022 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights study.
Data is from a survey of 3,706 Salesforce customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of Salesforce. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
