4 Objectives to Set for Your Small Business Marketing Strategy

In order for any business to develop and grow, it needs to be equipped with the right tools to succeed. For eCommerce websites especially, a marketing automation strategy is vital for improving sales opportunities. And building and implementing this kind of strategy has never been easier than without the aid of web sales marketing automation solutions.

When devising any strategy to follow, you should set certain goals that need to be achieved and be able to measure your progress towards completing these objectives. This holds true for web sales automation strategies as well – setting clearly defined goals is the first step towards success:

1) Increasing the number of inbound leads.

With the help of a good web-sales automation solution, you can expand your opportunities for attracting inbound leads. This is how you can fuel your lead generation through marketing automation:

• You can identify your anonymous site visitors and gather a wide range of data about them.
• Real-time reports allow you to track each one of your leads individually.
• You can set up notifications to inform you when a visitor completes a certain action
• Gathered data allows you to optimize your landing pages, audit your website for a better user experience and add identified leads for lead nurturing.
• You can also prioritize your inbound leads and group them into categories based on their preferences.

2) Empowering your sales team.

The sales department can and should take advantage of these tools as well since web sales automation benefits them in the following ways:

• They can get a constant supply of quality leads nurtured well.
• They can review the entire history of the lead and all the information gathered about it by the tracking tools.
• They can target sales campaigns at specific potential customers.
• They can receive daily notifications about hot leads and their actions.

Set the objective to include your sales team in your marketing automation strategy and streamline their tasks for them.

3) Optimizing your campaigns on the basis of the collected lead data.

Reports are one of the most essential and beneficial parts of web-based marketing automation solutions. You should monitor the following elements:

• The source the lead came from: website, referral, paid ads, organic search, etc.
• The pages visited and how much time they spent there.
• Which videos, eBooks or webinars they viewed.
• Which email campaigns they opened, clicked through, and forwarded.

When you track the information a few months back, you can get insights into what types of content, assets, and campaigns lead to the maximum percentage of conversions and optimize your campaigns for better results. Measure the ROI for each campaign and eliminate the ones that don’t bring you adequate returns.

4) Increasing the percentage of conversions.

Every business is interested in increasing sales and profit, so the more desired actions customers complete the higher the profit is. The desired actions completed by customers are called conversions and improving their percentage should be your main goal. Even if you cannot reach high figures in a short period, you should continuously strive to improve your conversion percentages.

By using marketing automation tools to reach the above three goals, however, this will automatically lead to an increase in conversion rates too.

• Increasing the inbound leads will lead to an increase in the overall lead quantity,
• Empowering your sales team will lead to an increase in the lead velocity.
• Optimizing your campaigns will lead to an improvement in the lead quality.

If you successfully achieve the objectives you have set for your marketing automation campaign you will soon notice the results – significantly improved sales volumes and better visitor engagement. Never assume that your work is done though and always strive to build upon what you have achieved.

Daniel Hristov is the CEO of Deskgod Inc., a company that offers a web-based marketing automation solution for medium and small business owners. He really enjoys travelling and sharing tips on marketing automation, conversion optimization and leads management. Find him on Twitter @daniel_hristov.