What to Look for in a Simple All-in-One Marketing Platform

Marketing seems simple on the surface. Just connect with customers to persuade them to choose your business, right?

In reality, marketing your small business involves several different channels and endless tasks to complete for each. You’re constantly pulled in opposite directions while you try to stay on top of it all.

You don’t need to constantly switch between marketing software and results dashboards, though. An all-in-one marketing automation platform brings all your campaigns together so they’re much easier to manage. You’ll get better results with less stress.

Learn how to select an all-in-one marketing platform to help you grow your small business.

The Fast Track To Marketing Sanity: Why Simple Is Better

When you’re marketing your business, you should keep coming back to the customer journey. Every touchpoint between your business and potential customers along that journey is an opportunity to move them further along.

Customers don’t just stick to one channel anymore, though. They visit your website, view your social media posts, and click through your PPC ads. You need a presence on multiple channels to reach customers with the right messages at the right times, but that creates a lot of work. Centralizing everything in one marketing platform is the solution.

Using a unified marketing tool lets you manage all your customer touchpoints from one place. You won’t need to constantly hop between different marketing tools manually, losing time and possibly missing the big picture.

The switch to an all-in-one platform consolidates your marketing and offers benefits like:

• Lower costs: Eliminate lots of separate marketing tool subscriptions and pay just one, typically lower, software fee instead.
• No data silos: When all of your marketing tools are independent, it’s hard to track customer data across channels to get the deepest insights. A unified tool eliminates this problem.
• Better productivity: By not having to switch from one marketing tool to another, you save time you can put toward strengthening your campaigns.
• More cohesive marketing: It’s easier to keep your strategies and messaging consistent across channels when you can see it all in one place.

You’ll also be able to identify gaps in your marketing plan by using a central platform. For example, many small businesses overlook the importance of Yelp. Yet, almost 80% of users say Yelp is the best place for finding trustworthy service professionals. Creating and managing profiles on sites like Yelp is a key component of small business marketing, and a unified platform can help you stay on top of that.

Centralized CRM: Keeping All Your Customer Info In One Garage

Small businesses are sitting on goldmines of information about who their current customers are, what they purchase, and how they interact with brands across channels. Too often, though, you can’t make the most of this valuable information because it’s scattered all over the place. You need a centralized customer relationship management (CRM) tool to bring everything together.

CRM software centralizes all your customer data. Once it’s in place, team members from any department can check the CRM for up-to-date customer details. Your CRM becomes a single source of truth that everyone on your team can rely on. 

Say the first interaction a customer has with your business is visiting your website. Then, they sign up for your email list, open some emails, and eventually book an appointment at your business. The CRM tracks all those interactions and displays the data for you to analyze. You gain insights into individual customers and your business’s customer journey as a whole, which you can use to strengthen your marketing efforts.

Smart Automation That Does The Heavy Lifting For You

One of the things that prevents many small businesses from truly scaling their marketing efforts is the number of tedious tasks. Looking up customer data, sending messages at the right moments, and posting content across channels can quickly eat up a lot of your time. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.

Marketing automation takes tedious tasks like these off your plate. You set up the system the way you want, and then it runs in the background and automatically follows your instructions. The best marketing automation systems offer features like:

• Follow-ups: Automatically get in touch with customers a set period (like three days) after they complete a purchase to check in and ask for feedback.
• Appointment reminders: Send customers a message before their appointment to reduce no-shows and keep your business schedule running smoothly.
• Birthday perks: Rather than trying to remember to look up customers’ birthdays, use the CRM to send automatic birthday messages with a special reward or promotion.
• Re-engagement campaigns: Specifically reach out to customers who have been inactive for a set period (like 60+ days) to draw them back in.
• Social media scheduling: Plan your social media content in advance and have your automated marketing tool post it for you across social media platforms at times you specify.

Analytics Dashboards That Actually Make Sense

Marketing is all about evolving. You try something, see what works and what doesn’t, then apply those insights moving forward. The only way to fix something that’s not going well in your campaigns is to measure it. Otherwise, you’re just flying blind.

Analytics dashboards provide all the key details about your campaigns so you can dig deeper. They’re not all created equal, though. Look for marketing tools for small businesses that include readable, user-friendly dashboards. There are some dashboards that require a math degree to actually understand and use, which is not what you want for streamlining your marketing efforts.

Look for reports on key performance metrics like:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates
• Traffic sources
• Social media engagement

Tracking metrics like conversions and sales will help you determine your return on investment from your marketing campaigns. It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics like social media likes, but having concrete data on cost per lead and cost per acquisition is more important.

Lead Management Features To Help You Close More Deals

If your marketing tools aren’t linked, you may end up with a “leak” in the sales funnel. You capture customers at the top of the funnel and move them to the middle, but when they get to the end, you lose them.

Without a centralized tool tracking customers from the first interaction and properly intaking leads, it’s incredibly difficult to close sales. You need visibility and personalization through every stage of the customer journey—exactly what a centralized marketing platform offers.

Your all-in-one marketing platform should also include features for online reputation management for small businesses. Your online reviews are often a deciding factor in how your business ranks in search results and whether customers choose you, so you have to manage them properly. Look for a platform that helps you track and respond to your online reviews.

Is An All-In-One Marketing Platform Right For Your Business?

If you’ve been struggling to keep up with all your different marketing channels, tools, and analysis, an all-in-one marketing platform may be just what you need. You’ll go from having many separate bills for different tools to just one—saving you money. You can invest those funds back into your business to fuel your growth.

Learning how to use one platform is much easier than learning five new ones, too, especially for small teams trying to do it all.

At Optimize Digital Marketing, we’ve seen firsthand how much businesses benefit from centralizing their marketing efforts. Contact us for a demo of our unified marketing platform to see how you can upgrade your marketing with one simple switch.