Owning and managing a small business or startup is tough. You’re the marketer, the strategist, the designer, and the janitor. As a jack of all trades the burdens of growth, though exciting, can certainly take a toll on your mental and physical well-being.

I mean, you built your enterprise from the ground-up. And you would hate for all that extra responsibility to destroy you from the inside. Like a mother watching her children come of age, there comes a time when your business becomes a bit too large to manage on your own.  

Well, there is one solution that can help lessen the burden of marketing responsibilities...marketing automation! Tools such as the ones below can reduce your manual labor.  While hiring the right marketing agency is always a recommended move, here's some great marketing software that can help business owners remain relevant in the digital age of marketing. 

This blog post is part of "Your Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation" blog series.

marketo

Marketo makes it easy to launch and manage marketing campaigns. The software offers marketing automation tools for inbound marketing, lead management, social media marketing, management dashboards and analytics.

Tools provided by Marketo can help you acquire new leads and customers by getting the right content out there, and it can help you nurture those leads by through automated marketing campaigns that keep your brand in people's minds.  Additonally, Marketo's analytics will tell you how your campaigns are performing with your audience, sparing you the manual work of figuring this out. Recently registered on the NASDAQ, Marketo generates annual revenue of around $50 million.

cision

A leading cloud-based marketing platform, Cision helps with customer acquisition and retention by making it easy for you to reach out through social media and other online media networks. Tools within the program integrate social media and email marketing as well as effective public relations. Automation tools such as this will keep marketing campaigns running while giving you extra time to come up with new, creative ideas!

hubspot

Hubspot is a powerful inbound marketing solution that offers marketers a more personalized and effective alternative to traditional marketing strategies, notorious for harassing customers.  Hubspot has a remarkable number of available functions within the website. It includes tools for blogging, social media automation and scheduling, lead management, and marketing analytics.

Using such a software which has in-site social media and blogging can also help you implement these elements if they were previously missing.

See which essential elements your digital marketing plan is missing with a free self-assessment 

sailthru

With Sailthru, increase user engagement and conversion through their smart data that enhances user transparency for marketers and lets them respond in real time. The methods result in a personalized user experience that takes the form of targeted emails and homepages tailored to a user’s interests.  Sailthru automates marketing campaigns, allows you to create customer journeys, and enables personalization for each customer.

thrivehive

This smaller startup, ThriveHive, provides businesses with the necessary tools to improve conversation rates turning website traffic into sales. The software identifies a website’s traffic and tailors the site’s content to those visitors. It provides an experience that is personalized and relevant to the audience.

Using marketing automation features on softwares such as the ones above can spare the manual work, freeing you up to focus on better things. With automation tools in hand and actively working, you're sure to be present in the digital world, very important with the growing use of technology.

Now, you have time to get to the elements that might be missing or lacking! Evaluate your current digital marketing strategy and recieve recommendations to improve it with our Digital Marketing Strategy Assessment.

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Originally published July 6, 2017, updated August 8, 2017
Tags: Inbound Inbound Marketing small business marketing automation marketing technology inbound marketing