Marketing is the life blood of your business. It may actually be the single most important thing for you to get right if you want to ensure you have a stable and thriving business for years to come. You can have the most remarkable product to ever exist in it’s class, but if you don’t have customers lined up to buy it you’ll find that your balance sheets will begin to look horrifying pretty quickly.

When you’re first starting out marketing should probably be your main focus. You’ll likely be spending upwards of 80% of your time getting the word out about your product until the flywheel starts moving. At a certain point it’s going to make sense to get some help, and there are a couple of ways to go about this. Traditionally, people would hire marketers or salespeople to help make sure that new customers continue to come on board. As with so many things in this digital age though, there are new approaches available. An alternative approach for freeing up time for marketing tasks is to make use of marketing automation software.

A Bit About Marketing Automation Software

So what is marketing automation software, and what advantages can it bring to you and your business? Well, there’s actually quite a bit to it. In short, it is software that helps you organize your customer data and your marketing campaigns so that you can get insight into which tactics are working and which tactics are not. It also integrates functionalities that can allow your products or services to be sold online and collect payments. You can even automate email marketing so that different emails are sent out based on your customers’ actions. Essentially, it brings all aspects of your businesses marketing needs into one place so that you can analyze and make decisions at a glance. The end result is tons of time saved, and if implemented correctly, a significant increase in the return on investment for your marketing efforts.

Why Not Jump Right In?

With all of these great features in one central place, why aren’t business owners jumping at the opportunity to use it for their own marketing practices? Well, they are. They problem is that it is cost-prohibitive if your business is not quite at the right stage. If you look at Infusionsoft pricing, for example, you’ll see that there’s a substantial monthly recurring fee with a somewhat hefty setup cost. Their product is one of the better deals on the market too, others could be more costly. If your marketing efforts are already bringing in plenty of revenues then these costs may be insignificant compared to the payoffs you’ll get by implementing implementing the software. If you’re first starting out though, this simply might not make sense until your business and marketing have gained a bit more traction.

When Does Marketing Automation Make Sense For Your Business?

As you might imagine, while marketing automation software can take a huge amount of stress off of your marketing efforts, it still takes a little bit of manual attention to keep it running. This means that someone will still need to be in charge, managing the software to get the most out of it. When exactly it makes sense to bring marketing automation software into your business is going to vary on a case-by-case basis, but I would probably recommend at least having one marketing employee before expanding further to implementing marketing automation software. By doing so, you’ll have an employee to take the helm rather than being responsible for managing the software yourself. As a business owner there are many different hats you’ll have to wear, and you don’t want to get bogged down in any one particular area. That said, your financials are going to tell the whole story, and how one person interprets financial data may vary significantly from how someone else does. It might make sense to think of marketing automation software as a part-time employee who needs some management and guidance.