These days, it's getting harder to find businesses that don't recognize that digital marketing is the key to their ultimate success or failure. And the numbers back that up. In 2020 alone, global businesses spent a reported $340 billion on digital marketing. But beneath the topline figures lies a complex picture of digital marketing haves and have-nots.

Big businesses, for example, lavish massive budgets on their digital marketing activities. Amazon alone spent an estimated $22 billion by itself in 2020. But small businesses are scraping by on more threadbare spending. For more than half of small businesses, that translates into a digital marketing budget of $50,000 or less for the whole year.

For them, finding ways to maximize the impact of every dollar spent is a mission-critical exercise. And one of the primary ways to accomplish the feat is to deploy automation everywhere that makes sense. To help, here are three digital marketing processes every small business should automate right now.

1. Social Media Posting and Management

One of the digital marketing luxuries big businesses have is the ability to hire a social media manager (or a whole team) to represent their brand online. But small businesses can't spare the resources for that. And it usually means relying on an overstretched marketing staff to keep making branded posts according to a predetermined schedule.

But that's a task best left to an automation suite instead. All the marketers have to do is line up a week's (or more) worth of posts and schedule them in advance using a platform like Buffer. It can turn an inefficient week-long process into one that takes an hour or less each week. And when used in combination with an automated social listening platform to keep tabs on customer interactions and stay on top of responding to inquiries, social media marketing becomes far less labor-intensive.

2. Audience Targeting and Segmentation

Deciding on which audience to target with a campaign is one of the most time-consuming parts of the typical small business digital marketing process. And beyond that, breaking that target audience down into segments takes even longer. But it is possible to automate a big chunk of that work using platforms like IBM's Watson Campaign Automation.

When given the right customer data to work with, such solutions can decide on which potential customers to target for a given product, and even manage the marketing campaign designed to reach them. It shaves countless hours off of the planning and execution of marketing campaigns and lowers their overall cost, too. Campaign automation is a game-changer for small businesses, particularly in crowded markets.

According to Joy Smith of Joy Organics, it was the key to helping her business carve out a niche in its highly competitive market. "Ours is an industry with plenty of product overlap, and getting the right messaging in front of the right people is critical," says Joy. "Without the ability to leave some of the audience targeting heavy-lifting up to automation, we'd be spending all of our time on marketing and have no time left to operate our business."

3. Customer Re-Engagement

Big brands spend a lot of their digital marketing budgets on finding ways to keep consumers engaged so they'll keep moving through the sales funnel. And when it doesn't work, it's like a double loss. Evert time a customer abandons a cart or fails to make a purchase at the end of the funnel, the business loses the sale and all of the marketing money they spent getting the customer that far. And it's an issue that now costs businesses $4.6 trillion in lost sales every year.

For big businesses, lost sales hurt, but typically aren't fatal. For small businesses, though, they can be. That's why SMBs should deploy automation to step up their customer re-engagement processes. They can do it via a simple automated email sequence through platforms like MailChimp. Or, they can opt to go further by using automation to drive personalized marketing campaigns built to get customers back into the sales funnel.

Today, it's possible to run multichannel re-engagement campaigns that use email, SMS, and even targeted advertising for this purpose. And automation can make all of it happen without the business needing to manually intervene in the process. And even when marginally successful, such efforts frequently pay for themselves and then some. From an SMB marketing automation standpoint, it's an absolute no-brainer.

The Bottom Line

These three types of digital marketing automation alone can help small businesses stretch their budgets further than they ever thought possible. And, they do it without adding significant overhead and without the need for additional staff to get everything done. It's a true force multiplier in an area where every dollar counts.

And given how little the average small business has allocated to their digital marketing, automation can mean the difference between growth, stagnation, or outright failure. They have everything to gain by exploring it and so much to potentially lose without it. So the bottom line is simple: small businesses should automate these three digital marketing processes right now so they can start doing more with less and begin building momentum toward a growth-filled future.