How to Elevate Professional Services Marketing with Mautic

Small business owners are the dreamers of the world. They are the individuals who fervently follow a lifelong passion. They know their service inside and out. They understand their target audience. They have a drive that is unmatchable.

But it's difficult to be a jack of all trades in this day and age.

This is especially true when it comes to professional services marketing. Consumers expect to connect with companies anytime and anywhere, and they expect a personalized experience from architecture and engineering, consulting and accounting firms.

For a small business owner, this is challenging to keep up with.

Fortunately, marketing automation presents itself as a great solution for professional services firms, and it allows small business owners to save time, create more effective marketing campaigns, and ultimately take their marketing to the next level.

Why Is Marketing Automation Important for Professional Services?

According to VB Insight, not only do 80% of marketing automation users see their number of leads increase, but 77% of users also experience an increase in conversions.

DemandGen also did a study showing that roughly three-quarters of users see between a 10 and 30% increase in sales opportunities. But there are more benefits to marketing automation for professional services than leads and sales:

• Better lead management
• More effective multichannel marketing
• Fewer campaign human errors
• Improved email marketing
• More accurate targeting of prospects and customers
• A lessening of time-wasting, repetitive tasks

How Can Marketing Automation Benefit Professional Services Firms (PSF)?

The above benefits of marketing automation absolutely apply to PSFs such as accountants, lawyers, physicians and consultants, but there are more specific aspects of automation these businesses can profit from.

Data

Small businesses often do not have the time or the funds to go out and collect data on their target audience. And in the past, only big companies had the ability to gather comprehensive consumer information. This is no longer the case.

Marketing automation collects tons of data, and the data has more efficacy.

No longer are you relying on self-reporting, which is notoriously fallible. The data marketing automation collects is the real amount of time leads spend on web pages, their true feelings expressed on social media and their journey through the sales funnel.

This information allows small business owners to improve conversions, boost engagement, build customer loyalty and increase sales.

Marketing Automation Makes Small Businesses Competitive

And not just with other small businesses.

Gone are the days of needing a large staff and big budget to run your marketing.

Marketing automation affords small business owners the opportunity to nurture their leads, effectively follow-up, and provide excellent customer service — putting them on a level playing field with large corporations — while at the same time reducing the time spent on these necessary tasks.

And for the small to mid-market PSF, time is often more valuable than money.

Invest a little bit of time upfront creating campaigns, setting up processes and organizing your automation, to gain a lot of time in the future. No more spending precious minutes and hours on social media management, promotional and follow-up emails, appointment reminders, or initial cold-calls.

Instead, spend your time where it’s most valuable — making key business and service decisions.

Finding a Marketing Automation Solution That Makes Sense

While the benefits are clear, small firms often struggle to find a solution that works for their business.

In terms of price point, most of the large players in the marketing automation industry sit out of reach, and many of them are too cumbersome for the average user to learn quickly.

As a small company ourselves, we found Mautic as a solution with almost no overhead and an interface that was very easy to use.

What Is Mautic?

Mautic is an open-source marketing automation platform.

You can either create a free hosted account or download it onto your own website. The platform allows users to grow their business by sending emails, creating landing pages and monitoring their website. But it is a little bit more robust than that.

1. Customizable Form Builder and Comprehensive Analytics

Mautic has a page builder integrated into their platform. This program allows users to create customized landing pages that monitor site traffic and downloads, as well as collecting key information from leads. The gathered information is then used to develop a profile for every site visitor that can include their needs, interests and habits.

2. Social Media Marketing

Mautic also understands the value of social media. The platform allows users to integrate any API-equipped social network into Mautic. Not only are businesses able to connect with their various social media platform followings from one place, but Mautic also uses social mentions, keywords and hashtags to build customers' profiles and to build a more comprehensive leads list.

3. Campaign Management And Email Marketing

The Mautic platform offers an extremely user-friendly way to manage and create drip campaigns. Users create a campaign and then work their way through the actions and events that they want contacts to follow. These actions can be both activity triggered and date triggered, and the processes allow for multiple outcomes.

4. Contact Management

Finally, Mautic helps businesses to track their contacts and nurture them with various tools. To enrich your contact list, users can also integrate CRM fields and add any additional custom fields they desire. The platform adds to the contact information by tracking visitor's site interests, time spent on site and page views. This information is then prioritized so businesses know which leads to contact and when.

Why Is Mautic A Great Solution for Professional Services Marketing?

When you invest in a solution for your company, whether it's for marketing or accounting, you want it to be all-inclusive. There is nothing more frustrating than implementing a system only to realize you need another program or two for it to run effectively.

Mautic is robust enough to cover your needs.

Once you download the platform and set it up, you're ready to go. You have all you need in order to run an effective automated marketing campaign — aside from, perhaps, some great content.

Mautic is user-friendly and offers support.

The platform guides you through the development of campaigns, it breaks down what all of the analytics really mean, and it works through enriching your contact list with you. The software is as user-friendly as it gets.

And, Mautic’s community is filled experienced users ready to help answer any questions.

Mautic is completely free.

For those who have tight business budgets or are worried about whether investment in expensive marketing automation will pay off, you can let go of your anxiety. Mautic is open-source and available to everyone for download.

While other marketing automation platforms charge you based on contact limits — increasing the price as you add more contacts to your lists — Mautic offers you unlimited contacts. This alone is a huge draw for many small businesses with large lists.

How Can Mautic Be Used By Professional Services Firms?

So what could Mautic look like in a real-world scenario? Well, as soon as you've downloaded the program and run through the easy set-up process, you can already begin to reap the benefits.

1. Create a landing page

Maybe you have a free tool or e-book you want to give away to potential customers. Develop the landing page with the download built in, ask for a name and email from your visitors in exchange for your content and monitor analytics to see how many people download and if they continue to engage with your company after the fact .

Mautic will build your contact list with those who downloaded the material and will show you where else on the website they explored.

2. Develop a drip campaign

After an individual downloads the material, they can receive an email with more information about your service.

If they open the email, one process can occur, and if they don't open the email, you can set up an alternative process — try sending other information they might find interesting.

3. Connect your social media presence with your contacts

You can learn more about your customers through the hashtags they use and the keywords they search.

For the leads that have been prioritized through Mautic's lead point system, you can begin to connect on social media and slowly lead them further through the sales funnel.

4. Follow-up with and nurture leads and customers

Once a lead has become a customer, small businesses can then utilize Mautic to continue a relationship with them and encourage their continued patronage through valuable content and conversations.

Over the past decade, it’s become harder and harder for professional services firms to make a name for themselves. But with marketing automation, small and mid-market firms can make a comeback, regain control of the market and take professional services marketing to the next level.

Eliminate wasted time on marketing efforts that have no attributable ROI, and marketing efforts that simply don’t work. Instead, use that time to have personal conversations with leads that actually convert.