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If you’re running a small business, the likelihood is you’re doing it on a tight marketing budget —unless you’ve got a high-margin business or plenty of starting capital, which is a rare luxury.
On a shoestring budget, marketing automation might sound like a luxury — something reserved for well-funded marketing teams with fancy tech stacks. But here’s the truth: marketing automation isn’t about spending more, it’s about boxing clever with the resources at your disposal. You don’t need HubSpot or Marketo marketing engines to get started. With the right tools and a bit of upfront effort and strategic thinking, you can automate repetitive tasks, nurture leads and scale your impact — all without burning through cash.
The greatest advantage of automating a repeatable marketing process is that it positions your first marketing hire to focus on higher value and more interesting creative marketing tasks. They’re not stuck doing the boring marketing admin — that’s what the bots are for — so your first marketing hire, whether full or part-time is more likely to be effective and enjoying their role.
In this article, we look at five key steps in automating your marketing effort that will give save you time and improve your margin, giving you a solid foundation for growth.
The most common mistake that small businesses make when it comes to marketing is spending money on tools in the hope that they will prove to be a magic wand for their business. Very often it’s too late before they realise that tools alone won’t get the job done — money is wasted and the business owner is left with a sour taste, reluctant to take a second bite at the marketing cherry.
The trick is to automate what already works. If you’re using email to communicate with clients, Google Sheets for managing leads and a WordPress website as your digital shopfront, you’ve got a solid base for automation, so start there and refine what works before entertaining the idea of adding shiny new paid tools to the mix. Using form builders like WP Forms for WordPress and free e-mail and landing page tools like MailerLite (up to 1,000 subscribers) can be your next step in digitising your marketing funnel. Create a website form which captures new contacts (e.g. Subscribe to Newsletter) and connect to Google Sheets to auto-populate new leads in your spreadsheet. Understanding the basic mechanics of how the process works will help later as you introduce more automation or a new CRM platform.
Depending on what website platform you use, there are many different form builders at your disposal including WP Forms (which I currently use), Gravity Forms (excellent), Typeform, Tally.so etc. and these can be used in various ways to kick-start the lead conversion process:
Depending on the nature of your business, some of these form types above may be useful, or even a simple Contact Us form might be the most basic starting point.
My go-to is Zapier, in various in-house and consulting roles I have used Zapier to connect different tools to make the entire sales & marketing engine more efficient. The basic version is free so it won’t cost you a cent to get started. Make.com is an alternative if you want to compare to another tool, but Zapier is amazing.
Zapier is a no-code automation tool that connects different platforms. There is a bit of a learning curve, but it’s not overly technical, the tool is very intuitive with test ‘zaps’ to ensure everything is working as intended and the pay-off is enormous. It’s basically a trigger-based system, in simple terms, you configure it like this: when X happens on one platform, make Y happen on another. As a simple example, you can have someone download a price list on your website (using Gravity Forms on WordPress) and then trigger MailChimp to send them a series of emails over a few days/weeks to learn more about your services. Alternatively, you could send an automated message to a specific regional salesperson based on the location someone chooses when filling in an enquiry form on your website. The options for automation are endless — just don’t get stuck down the rabbit hole, keep it simple and automate what already works.
Doing this right takes a bit of thinking. The process for nurturing leads will differ for every business but the basic premise of creating a workflow remains the same: a customer visits your website and they are interested to some degree in what you offer e.g. they downloaded a free guide from your website or filled in an enquiry form. This can happen any time of the day — while you’re meeting an existing customer; busy negotiating with suppliers; flying back from a conference; asleep in bed. You don’t have time to engage this new opportunity — so you want to create an automated workflow to do what you would do, if you were available. You’re essentially using the tools at your disposal to build trust and gently guiding that prospect to becoming a customer and this is the foundation for your marketing effort aligning to your sales strategy. Automating this process also helps to weed out tyre kickers who are not genuinely interested in buying from you but can be a drain on valuable time for you and/or your sales team.
Here’s a very simple example of what an automation workflow might look like when someone fills in a form on your website:
In this simplistic example, a prospect has shown a basic level of interest in your product or service. They might start off with a low intention of buying anything and direct contact from a salesperson too early can scare them off. Through this automated workflow, gentle nudges via email can give them more insight into your offering e.g. you might include testimonials from recent customers in the workflow, reviews, examples of recent work, special offers etc. and then when they express an interest by clicking a call-to-action in your email, the sales person is primed to make contact and is more likely to convert given that they have had time to assess your product or service at their own pace.
If you’re not already using ChatGPT or a similar service to draft emails and social media copy, then this is another automation at your disposal at zero cost that can accelerate your marketing strategy. These tools can also help with creating image although at the moment that can be hit and miss! It’s not a complete replacement for human effort but it will enable you to get more marketing tasks done in less time and the best part about automated workflows is that they are set up once and really don’t require much ongoing effort bar tweaking here and there.
So the low-cost marketing automation is now up and running, now what? Through tools like Google Analytics and the reporting tools of platforms like MailChimp you can hone in on bottlenecks in your automation process — discover exactly where in the process customers are falling by the wayside and adjust accordingly to ensure they continue through your nurture workflow. The data from marketing automation gives a rich insight into how customers behave, how they evaluate your product or service and can give you useful prompts on making adjustments to your offering to attract more business.
Let’s face it, most new customers are not ready to buy straight away, they take a little bit of convincing — the more of this you can do without human intervention, the better for your business. Having the sales team step in when your prospective customer is warming to the idea of buying from you is ideal — the marketing engine warms the leads through a nurture process and the sales people focus on closing the deal. With an abundance of tools available to even the most cash-strapped marketing team, you can automate much of your marketing effort for a small monthly sum. There is a learning curve but take it one step at a time and a relatively small effort can prove quite effective.
