I’ve previously written about content marketing and its importance to small businesses trying to connect with customers.

An associated concept is marketing automation. It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it remains very nebulous for many entrepreneurs. What exactly gets automated? And how does it work? Well, the answer can be confusing, to say the least.

At its most basic, marketing automation refers to software tools that do marketing tasks that small businesses might otherwise do manually.

These tasks include communications with customers and prospective customers via email or social media as well as measurement and tracking of information.

Ease your workload

One example of lessening your workload might be managing social media content on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a tool like HootSuite. With it, you can schedule posts ahead of time on all your social media properties from a user‑friendly dashboard.

Another example would be sending an automatic thank‑you email when someone submits a request to you, using the “contact us” form on your website. It’s easy and respectful.

These are very simple examples, but they show how marketing automation tools and strategies can save you time in managing communications and marketing campaigns.

Generate more sales leads

The idea of streamlining tasks is very much at the heart of marketing automation, but there is much more to it. Generating sales leads (or nurturing them) is also at the core of marketing automation.

There are many tools that allow you to communicate with prospective customers when they’re making buying decisions. They help you to put the right content in front of the right people at the right time.

Consider, for example, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that allows you to identify all your customers in Vancouver who have purchased more than $1,000 in the last year. The tool also allows you to identify who in this group follows you on Facebook. Now you can use that information to target those customers with a Facebook ad offering them 10% off their next purchase.

Deliver segmented email content

Another example might be an email segmentation tool that allows you to send specific content in your email newsletter to subscribers based on what you know about their preferences.

So, let’s say a clothing retailer keeps track of the gender of his or her email recipients. The retailer can now send gender-specific content like deals on skirts and blouses to women and pants and shirts to men. Those individuals only see the things that interest them, ultimately increasing the chances that they will make a purchase.

Examples of automation tools

Here are some marketing automation companies that may be familiar to you.

• Salesforce.com (customer relationship management and marketing)
• HubSpot (inbound marketing and sales management)
• Marketo (marketing automation software)
• MailChimp (email marketing)
• Eloqua (marketing automation)
• Google AdWords (pay‑per‑click advertising)

These tools and many others like them help businesses collect better data and streamline marketing processes.

How much sophistication does your business need in its marketing automation software? That depends on the maturity of your digital marketing efforts and what kind of resources you can afford to devote to automation.

Use the right tools

Do you have a lot of social media followers and/or channels to manage? Do you have a lot of content to generate and publish in the course of a week? Do you have a lot of communication touchpoints with your customers? Are you collecting information from your customers on a regular basis?

The answers to these questions, and others like them, will help you decide what marketing automation tools you need.

Automation tools can provide awesome benefits to your business, but they don’t give you permission to take your eye off the ball. On the contrary, you always have to be reviewing your communications, customer feedback, and online data so you can continually improve your marketing efforts.

It’s not set it and forget it

For example, you have to be careful about the context in which you are automatically publishing content.

You absolutely do not want an automated tweet to go out at the same time that the Twittersphere is exploding over a major disaster or a horrific terrorist attack. Marketing on full autopilot without oversight is a bad idea.

Does your small business use marketing automation tools? Which ones? How are they working? We would love your comments.

When an entrepreneur builds a new website, starts using social media or creates a blog, the same question always comes up: “What should I talk about?”

Creating good content is a challenge for many entrepreneurs who aren’t used to talking about their business or industry in a public forum. So what is content marketing and how do you do it?

It’s all about creating great content as a highly effective way to find new customers and retain the ones you have. Entertaining email newsletters, insightful blog posts, how-to videos, and other online content help you to build an audience and position yourself as an expert in your field.

People filtering out traditional ads

That’s especially important at a time when consumers are becoming increasingly adept at tuning out advertising messages both in the traditional media and online.

And that brings us back to the question of what you should talk about in your content.

A good place to start is to think about the challenges your customers ask you about every day. What are the questions you hear again and again? How do you respond? This can be the basis for a series of blog posts, how-to videos or a short eBook.

Pull back the curtain on your business

You can also pull back the curtain and talk about what’s happening inside your business. Talk about your wins but also be honest about the issues you’re grappling with and how you’re striving to improve for the benefit of your customers. You can also promote the charities you and your staff are supporting in your community.

You might also want to zoom out and discuss some of the big challenges that your industry is facing. It’s all grist for your content mill.

Let’s face it—we collectively have very short attention spans when it comes to the Internet. So you don’t always have to generate a high-production video or an 800-word article to get the job done. Often, a photo with a caption, a quick hit on your blog, a tweet or Facebook update will do.

Knowing your audience and their habits will help you to create the right content.

Reduce, re-use, recycle

There is a huge amount of content being created on the Internet every day. Some of it relates to your business, so why not tap into it?

Sharing good content from others can be just as powerful as creating your own. So if you find a good LinkedIn post, share it and add it to other relevant social media pages.

You should also go through your archives looking for material you can use. Is there an article you wrote for the local paper or a video you made for a presentation? You can reuse these online.

Make a content calendar

Still having trouble scheduling content creation into your day?

A content calendar can help. Pick regular dates on your calendar when you will be adding certain types of content and stick to it. It will help you and your team determine how often you should be posting content and keep you disciplined in doing the work.

Another frequently asked question is: Should I post on a regular schedule, such as once a week, or should I post as often as possible?

It’s important to be consistent

Well, there is no one answer to that. But certainly being consistent trumps communicating too often, (or more likely) too infrequently. It’s important to make sure you stay active in your channels. Don’t suddenly abandon your audience simply because you get busy or, worse, bored.

No one can create stellar content all the time. You may get out of the blocks fast and create a lot of messages over a short period of time. But remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint and you will get tired.

With a little bit of organization and imagination, you’ll find content marketing is well worth your time and effort.

Follow these tips to gain additional insights about your customers

Are your customers satisfied with your products or services? Do you know what they like about your business? More importantly, do you know how you could improve what you do?

Customer surveys can provide answers to these questions as well as unique insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Unfortunately, a lot of smaller businesses think they can’t do a customer survey properly.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are a lot of online survey tools—inexpensive and sometimes even free—that make customer surveys doable for all businesses, with templates, sample questions and more.

Here are a few tips for business owners who want to get started with customer surveys or for those who want to improve what they are already doing.

1. Set clear objectives

To conduct a successful customer survey, you have to know from the get-go what kind of information you want to collect.

Start by talking to your employees, especially anyone who works directly with customers. They’ll have good insights into the kinds of people you serve, what they need or expect, and if they’ve noted any “early warning signs” of dissatisfaction that you should know about.

For example, if sales are declining in a certain area of your business, your survey could help you find out why that is. You can build your survey to see if something has changed for your customers that makes your product or service less relevant—maybe it’s a feature they no longer need or a new competitor with a better offer.

Consider having a set of core questions you ask every time you conduct a survey, with other questions that can be changed annually or semi-annually depending on specific things you want to find out.

2. Ask about overall satisfaction, then get to the details

Most customer surveys start by asking about overall satisfaction and then drill down to get to the details.

You want to get a spontaneous response off the top. Do they like you or don’t they? If you start with a lot of detailed questions, people lose that spontaneity. And if you leave questions about overall satisfaction to the end, when people just want to be done with the survey, you probably won’t get the rating you deserve.

Spontaneous responses are highly valuable because they tell you what people really think about your company.

3. Keep it short and simple

Write your survey using clear, simple words people will understand. People multitask when completing online or telephone surveys and are easily distracted. You want to make it easy for them to follow along and answer accurately.

It’s also critical to keep your survey short—it should take no longer than seven minutes to complete. Anything beyond seven minutes and you’ll see a lot of people quitting the survey before they finish.

4. Limit the number of open-ended questions

An open-ended question is any question that requires the respondent to fill in a box with free form text. An example might be, “What do you most want from your shopping experience?”

Research shows that people tend to write everything they have to say in response to the first open-ended question in a survey. Asking many open-ended questions could give you many blank fields or repetitive answers.

Open-ended questions often give you the nuggets, the actionable things you want to work on immediately. You may only need one or two to get that gold from customers.

5. Contact different customers each time

Surveys can be done on a regular basis, even once a week, but it is important not to survey any one customer more than once or twice a year. Otherwise, they get tired and possibly annoyed.

Research shows that if you survey the same customers too often, you start to get higher quit rates, as well as clients who ask to be removed from your survey list, and these are lost forever.

Look beyond your customer base

Customer surveys are just one type of market research that specifically targets your existing clientele.

Broader market research is normally done when moving into a new market or launching a new product. In those cases, you are surveying a sample of people from your target market, and only some of them may have done business with you before.

This broader type of customer survey can be expensive and often requires expert help to objectively study what you need to know.

Use this tool to improve your strategic planning

An analysis of your company’s strengths and weaknesses should be a key component of your strategic planning process. This easy-to-use tool also identifies your company’s opportunities and any threats it faces (hence the term “SWOT”).

This analysis helps you see how you stand out in the marketplace; how you can grow as a business; and where you are vulnerable. The process takes into account both internal and external factors your company must navigate.

Address issues in your planning

Don’t make the mistake of preparing a SWOT analysis and then ignoring it as you develop your strategic plan. Instead, your plan should include concrete steps to harness your company’s strengths in order to target the opportunities identified in your analysis. The plan should also include specific measures to address the weaknesses and threats you face.

Here are more details on the four elements in a SWOT analysis.

1. Strengths

Make a list of your company’s internal strengths. These are any competitive advantage, skill, proficiency, experience, talent or other internal factors that improve your company’s position in the marketplace and can’t be easily copied.

Examples include solid financing, a superior brand, valuable intellectual property, superior technology, modern equipment and/or machinery, a well-trained sales team, low staff turnover, management expertise, operational efficiency, high customer retention, good supplier relationships, etc.

2. Weaknesses

These are the factors that reduce your company’s ability to achieve its objectives. Examples include unreliable suppliers, outdated equipment and/or machinery, insufficient marketing efforts, lack of financing, management weaknesses, gaps in expertise, etc.

Be as honest as you can when identifying these deficiencies. Ignoring weaknesses means you can’t make decisions that will strengthen your company.

3. Opportunities

Opportunities are external factors that allow your business to grow and be more profitable. Examples would include new potential markets; innovations; technological advances; consumer trends; support from governments, the community or business partners; etc.

One way to identify your opportunities is to closely analyze your competitors’ weaknesses.

4. Threats

Threats are external obstacles your business must overcome. Threats may include a declining economy, a consumer shift to other products, technological change, a labour shortage, community opposition, legal or regulatory changes, etc.

It’s often useful to take a close look at your competitors’ strengths to identify external threats to your company. Again, be as honest as possible.

A SWOT analysis doesn’t have to be a long, complex document. Two or three pages of point-form notes are usually sufficient. Free templates for a SWOT analysis are easy to find on the Internet.

You can put your SWOT analysis findings in the table provided below:

It’s worth revisiting your SWOT analysis at least on an annual basis, particularly when you review your strategic plan.

Some entrepreneurs might not see the benefits of strategic planning or know how to proceed.

Here are answers to some of the most common questions and concerns raised by entrepreneurs about this important tool.

Question: My company is small. We don’t have a lot of money. Isn’t strategic planning just for bigger companies?

Answer: That’s a common misconception. All companies, large and small, can benefit from planning for the longer term. It can help you weather today’s challenging markets, diversify and proactively pursue the best opportunities.

Strategic planning doesn’t necessarily mean producing a big, highly detailed document. It can be done on a smaller scale at a reasonable cost for businesses of any size.

Question: How can I find time for strategic planning when I’m already swamped with the day-to-day business of running my company?

Answer: Taking the time to work on your business instead of in your business will pay big dividends, including helping you be less swamped day to day. A strategic plan can help you focus on important issues, make decisions, delegate, reduce errors and not waste so much time putting out fires.

Question: Won’t strategic planning cause a lot of disruption to my business?

Answer: Planning for your business may lead to changes in your company, but they will most likely be positive changes. The end result should be better decision making, wiser use of resources and improved growth and profit margins.

Also remember that change will happen anyway, regardless of whether you develop a business strategy. A plan will help you anticipate change and focus on the best opportunities, rather than reacting and letting change take you by surprise.

Question: How can I plan long term when the future is so uncertain and I have no idea what will happen next week, let alone several years out?

Answer: Planning is needed precisely because the future is uncertain. The information you have today can be used to make reasonable forecasts of what the future might hold. Thinking about the future helps us plan what to do in various scenarios so we can be more ready for whatever it brings.

Question: Everything is fine with my business, so why would I need a strategic plan?

Answer: It’s common for entrepreneurs to feel their business is doing great—until a sudden change takes place that disrupts or even imperils their company. Planning strategically can help you prepare for such changes and stop flying blind.

Question: Why should I do strategic planning when I already know I need to grow by investing more in sales and marketing?

Answer: Sales and marketing without the right strategy won’t necessarily bring you success. They could just increase your costs. And even if your sales go up, will you sell the optimal products at the best margins to the right customers? Will you have financing, operations, and distribution in place to handle the sales increase?

Question: Why do I need a plan when I already talk regularly about our business goals with my team?

Answer: Even if you discuss your goals internally, a strategic plan gives your entire team a clearly articulated line of sight to those goals.

Too many companies go into hibernation when times are tough. They cut costs, conserve cash and act as if they’re on the verge of bankruptcy when, in reality, their balance sheet is still solid enough to reposition the firm.

Whether it’s a recession or a downturn in your particular industry, don’t assume you can wait until the storm has passed before taking action. It may be too late.

Use these setbacks to get aggressive. It can be a great opportunity to build market share.

One entrepreneur’s experience

Auto parts maker Warren Industries, for example, had to endure some painful body blows at the beginning of the 2008 recession. The troubles of General Motors and Chrysler contributed to a 45% drop in sales.

Despite the slowdown, CEO David Freedman wasn’t about to start circling the wagons.

In addition to bolstering its engineering capacity and developing proprietary technologies, the company took advantage of the economic downturn to negotiate better lead times and prices with hungry suppliers.

It also purchased machinery and other equipment at bargain-basement prices.

Move up the value chain

Even before the recession, Freedman and his team realized it was no longer good enough to simply stamp out and assemble other companies’ parts. They needed to move up the value chain by adding engineering expertise that allowed them to develop their own proprietary products.

The result was transformational. Warren Industries evolved from a Tier 2 company making other companies’ products into a Tier 1 supplier developing innovative and highly engineered products that it can now sell directly to customers.

6 ways to go on the offensive during tough times

1. Reinforce relationships with clients and suppliers. Reassure clients you’re a dependable supplier who will be there for the long term and confirm that your suppliers are stable.
2. Boost operational efficiency. In times of crisis, employees are open to change and galvanized to help.
3. Rethink your business model so that the offering is truly differentiated.
4. Attend industry trade shows. They’re a great way to make new contacts, develop new markets and find out what’s happening in your industry.
5. Understand the services available from organizations like BDC and Export Development Canada. They can help grow a business in difficult times.
6. Form an advisory board. It can be a wonderful source of fresh ideas and bring skill sets that are often out of reach for many small businesses.