5 Marketing Automations Worth Setting Up Before You Hire a Marketing Person
TL;DR
You don't need a marketing hire to stop losing leads to slow follow-up. Five automated sequences — lead welcome and follow-up, abandoned quote or cart recovery, review requests, re-engagement for cold leads, and appointment reminders — cover most of what an inconsistently-staffed marketing effort does, without the salary.
Most small businesses don't need a marketing hire before they need marketing automation. A good hire is expensive, takes months to ramp up, and still can't work at 2am when a lead fills out your contact form. A handful of automated sequences can cover a lot of that ground first — and they don't call in sick.
Here are five worth setting up before you go looking for a person to run marketing full-time.
1. A new lead welcome and follow-up sequence
The single highest-leverage automation most businesses don't have. Someone fills out a form or books a call, and nothing happens for hours or days. An automated welcome message that goes out within minutes, followed by two or three spaced-out check-ins, catches leads while they're still actually interested.
2. Abandoned quote or cart follow-up
If you send quotes or estimates, how many go unanswered because nobody followed up? An automation that checks in 2-3 days after a quote goes out, with no manual work required, recovers deals that would otherwise just die from silence.
3. A review request after a completed job or sale
Reviews compound — more reviews lead to more trust, which leads to more business. But asking manually means it happens inconsistently, if at all. Automating a review request a few days after delivery turns something that used to depend on someone remembering into something that just happens every time.
4. Re-engagement for old, cold leads
Most businesses have a graveyard of leads who went quiet six months ago and were never followed up with again. A simple "checking back in" automation, run periodically against that list, regularly turns up deals that were assumed dead.
5. Appointment and booking reminders
No-shows cost real money, and most of them come down to a simple forgotten appointment, not an actual change of mind. An automated reminder 24 hours out, and again an hour before, cuts no-shows without anyone having to manually track a calendar.
None of these require a full marketing hire to set up — most CRM and marketing automation platforms handle all five with templates you customize once. Get these running first, and a future marketing hire starts from a system that's already doing real work, instead of building one from nothing.