Constant, high-quality marketing is a must-have for any small business, particularly in the home improvement or home services market, where you’re constantly fighting to source new leads. But planning, running, and optimizing marketing campaigns is complex, and time-consuming. That’s why investing in marketing automation for small businesses makes sense.
With marketing automation software, or support from the right experts, you can put your promotional tactics on autopilot. No more spending hours planning and publishing social media content, or nurturing opportunities with regular updates. Instead, you get to focus on what you do best – delighting your clients (so they send new leads your way organically).
At gFour marketing, we specialize in empowering home improvement and home services companies with convenient, done-for-you marketing strategies. Today, we’re going to introduce you to the tools and solutions you can use to make effective advertising a breeze.
Let’s start with the basics. Marketing automation is all about using tools, software (and sometimes even services) to put repetitive marketing tasks on autopilot. With the right strategy, you can automate various different aspects of your marketing strategy, from sending informative emails and SMS messages to customers, to posting amazing content on social media.
Marketing automation helps to ensure you can consistently connect with your audience through every stage of the “customer journey” – whether you’re introducing them to your company for the first time, or encouraging them to make additional purchases. For home services and home improvement companies, marketing automation helps:
Put simply? Marketing automation for small businesses gives you all the tools you need for sustainable growth, without adding extra work to your plate.
Now for the tricky part: what kind of marketing automation tools and solutions should you be using? There are a lot of different types of systems out there. Some automation tools focus on automating specific digital marketing strategies: think email marketing automation, or social media automation tools. Others automate certain marketing tasks, like identifying keywords for content marketing.
Some solutions even automate processes, like sharing data between platforms, or helping you to track aspects of the customer journey more effectively. Let’s take a look at some of the top marketing automation solutions, and services for small businesses – and what they can do for your home improvement or home services brand.
Technically, gFour marketing isn’t a “marketing automation tool”. We don’t create software you can use to streamline social media marketing, for instance. Instead, what we do is give you access to experts who handle comprehensive marketing tasks for you.
Focusing specifically on the home improvement and home services industry, we can handle every aspect of your marketing campaign, and your customer relationship management strategy. For instance, we can manage customer follow-ups and engagement on behalf of your business, sending personalized gifts and cards to clients, to ensure they feel valued.
We can implement campaigns through text, email, and direct mail, encouraging customers to leave positive reviews about your business online – boosting your visibility and your brand’s reputation. We can even help you set up and optimize full referral campaigns.
Key Features:
With gFour Marketing, you get an all-in-one service that focuses entirely on building, nurturing, and activating lucrative relationships. We handle the art of facilitating powerful customer interactions, so you can focus on your core operations. Essentially, we offer the perfect way for any small business to automate their marketing efforts, without sacrificing the human touch.
If you’re looking for a convenient way to create forms you can use to collect insights from clients and potential leads, then Fluent Forms could be the perfect option. This user-friendly, drag-and-drop form builder plugin for WordPress is ideal for small businesses looking to enhance their lead generation process. With this tool, you can do a lot more than just create eye-catching forms.
You’ll also be able to automatically upload the information you collect to your email marketing automation tools, customer relationship management platforms and more. Plus, you can access in-depth analytics for unique business insights too.
The great thing about this tool for home services businesses, is that it makes it easy to create complex forms so you can gather in-depth details about a client’s project requirements, available budget, potential material requests, challenges, and more.
Key Features:
If you want to side-step the headaches of dealing with endless paper-based forms or Google Form submissions, Fluent Forms is a fantastic tool.
HubSpot essentially gives small businesses a marketing automation tool platform, and customer relationship management tool in one package. It’s one of the best marketing automation tool options for companies investing in digital inbound marketing strategies.
You can use the platform to set up automated email marketing campaigns, plan out social media strategies, create ecommerce marketing strategies, and so much more. HubSpot also has a very powerful workflow builder, with a ton of integrations for other apps, allowing you to automate things like updating your CRM when customers respond to an ad on social media.
The only downside is that the free plan does come with pretty basic automation features -and you might have to pay a lot extra to access tools for every marketing channel.
Key Features:
Although HubSpot can be pretty expensive if you want to unlock all of its marketing automation features, it is a powerful option for any business owner looking to scale inbound online marketing.
Similar to HubSpot, ActiveCampaign offers small companies a wide range of tools in a single kit. You get an integrated customer relationship management platform, access to workflow builders for a range of marketing strategies, and full solutions for email advertising too.
If you’re having trouble finding ways to streamline your marketing process, ActiveCampaign is a great solution. It includes an AI-powered “workflow” builder on all plans, which can offer businesses suggestions on tasks they can simplify and automate.
It also has some great segmentation tools for effective audience management, tools for creating content for landing pages and lead magnets, and an integrated form builder. The biggest downside of this platform is it can be complicated to use – particularly for beginners (and it’s a little costly).
Key Features:
With ActiveCampaign, home services businesses can easily deliver personalized client experiences, and manage customer relationships across channels. Just prepare to spend a little time learning how to use this tool effectively.
Mailchimp is a company focused on marketing automation for small businesses. The organization is best-known for creating easy-to-use, straightforward tools to assist with email marketing, SMS-based marketing, and customer relationship management.
While there are more advanced email marketing tools out there, Mailchimp includes all of the basics, and has a relatively cost-effective pricing structure. With this tool, you can tap into a simple customer journey builder, to help you navigate the process of nurturing and retaining customers.
Mailchimp can also be used for a wide range of other promotional tasks, from creating digital assets with AI, to building websites, and even leveraging retargeting ads.
Key Features:
One great thing about MailChimp for small home services and home improvement brands, is there’s a functional free plan that’s great for beginners. Even the premium plans are pretty affordable, with pricing scaling based on the number of contacts you have.
If you’re planning on taking advantage of social media to capture and nurture new leads, then Buffer could be the perfect tool for you. This user-friendly social media management tools helps companies to plan, create, and share content across multiple channels effortlessly.
You can use it to plan out entire social media campaigns for sites like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and even automatically adjust your posts to suit each plan’s format. There’s also a browser add-on and mobile apps, so you can post content and review campaigns anywhere, any time.
Plus, Buffer comes with some fantastic reporting capabilities, so you can keep track of how your campaigns are doing. With the social listening tool, it’s also much easier to keep track of what customers are saying about your business online.
Key Features:
Integrating Buffer into your marketing strategy makes it easy to automate various social media strategies, so you can focus on actually supporting your clients.
Zapier is a little different to most of the marketing automation tools for small businesses mentioned here. It doesn’t actively “automate” specific marketing tasks. Instead, it bridges the gaps between various tools and systems, so you can create your own automated workflows.
Basically, Zapier allows you to move data from one place to another in seconds. This means you can easily trigger the creation of a new story on Medium when you post something on your website, for instance, or trigger a post to social media when you launch a new sale.
Zapier can even help you automate how you assign marketing tasks to specific members of your team. For instance, when you decide to launch a “spring cleaning” discount, you can instantly trigger the creation of a card on Trello asking team members to create an email campaign promoting it.
Key Features:
Zapier takes a little bit of time to master, but if you can get your head around it, it does make managing a lot of digital marketing processes much easier.
When you’re handling various complex projects and tasks, it can be difficult to keep up with regular client communication. Unfortunately, that could mean you miss out on opportunities – particularly if your customers are contacting you asking for quotes.
Tidio Live Chat is the best marketing automation tool to help address that issue. The software provides businesses with a versatile platform they can use to engage website visitors and enhance customer relationships. Not only can you use this tool to enable “live chat” on your website (so customers have another way to reach your team directly), but you can create AI bots too.
These bots can answer common questions about project timelines, or costs, and capture information about leads, so you can follow up with them later.
Key Features:
For home service providers, Tidio ensures prompt communication, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing the likelihood of converting visitors into clients.
The home improvement and home services sectors are fast-paced, competitive, and reliant on strong relationships with customers. To build and nurture those relationships, you need tools and services that help you to constantly connect with your target audience.
Marketing automation solutions help companies:
On top of all that, automation minimizes human errors, helping to ensure your campaigns roll out at the right time, hit the right notes with your target audience, and deliver consistent results.
Investing in marketing automation for small businesses is one of the best ways to turbocharge the growth of your home services or home improvement business. Automation tools and solutions can help you to save time on promotional activities, nurture audiences more effectively, increase sales and even boost customer retention.
Still, there’s more to making the most of your marketing strategy than simply putting social media posts or email campaigns on autopilot. If you really want to ensure the long-term growth of your organization, you need to focus on building deeper relationships with your audience. That’s where gFour Marketing comes in.
We don’t just “automate” digital campaigns. We handle the process of building deeper, more powerful relationships with customers. We turn happy clients into life-long advocates, who drive new leads your way, reduce your customer acquisition costs and increase your sales.
Ready to automate what really matters for your home improvement or home services brand? Contact gFour Marketing, and discover the benefits of a human-first marketing service.
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