Marketing automation platforms use software to automate monotonous marketing work. For example, are you a solopreneur, or a one man operation who spends a good portion of the day on social media?
Are you communicating with people with one on one meetings, versus reaching a group of people at once? The daily tasks that lead to the creation of leads and sales can bog business owners down, and waste a lot of time and energy.
With the tools we'll discuss today, marketers can automate repetitive tasks like email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns to get more done in less time... improving efficiency.
When done well, these marketing automation platforms can help your business run on auto-pilot. This frees small business owners up, enabling them to work on their business instead of in their business.
What Automation Does for Your Business
The last thing you need as a business owner is to become bogged down working in your business, spending the majority of your time answering phones, sending emails, and spending your day on social media.
Your goal as a business owner should be to work on your business, becoming a business leader who meets with groups, (an entire auditorium or large room) and works with other business leaders to form partnerships that will result in growth.
It's important to automate - not just for the sake of efficiency, but also to provide a more personalized experience for your customers.
One of the additional benefits of automation is to help business owners create a consistent way to earn. They do this by creating a great process that works for their customers. Consistent earning happens when business owners use A/B Testing along with their sales and marketing data to constantly streamline and improve their business.
The end goal is to have a process that runs 24/7, even at 4:00 am, when you're asleep or when you're out building relationships and growing your business.
Why Your Business Needs Automation
It also helps potential buyers quickly and easily purchase products from you. Your buying process should guide them through the beginner, intermediate and advanced stages.
It should take them from idea in their heads, to making a purchase. All the steps in between should be covered in your sales process (funnel).
Automation helps you do just that. All the education, information and solutions can be provided on your (blog, videos, podcast) marketing platform.
Automation helps you compete with major brands, walking potential buyers through a process that transitions them from someone who knows nothing about your products and services and transforms them into someone who has the information needed to make a buying decision.
There are a few steps you should take before adding automation. It only works when you place it over a great process. So it's important to create a buying process that is short and simple. You need a system that makes buying easy.
Your buying process should be streamlined as much as possible before adding automation. Potential customers should be able to make a purchase at each stage of the buying process.
Your buying process should educate, handle objections, answer questions and give the potential customer an experience that leads to a logical conclusion, the purchase of products.
Steps to Take Before Adding Automation
Before you automate your business, it's important to down with a pen and paper, and map out your buying process.
If you have a team, sit down with your team to streamline your process and make the experience a great one for your ideal customers.
Once your buying process has been established and optimized, the next step is automating that process so that it can happen, 24/7 even when you are not present. This is why automation is the key to earning truly passive income.
Automation also helps you become more efficient, and over time you will find more ways to streamline your sales and marketing process, tweaking what doesn’t work and using the data you glean to make better marketing decisions.
Our Podcast Episode on Automation
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Marketing Automation Platforms for Beginners
Start with an offer or product that is the solution to a specific problem your ideal customers are facing. Be sure to use the language and jargon used by your audience to describe their problem and solutions. It's important that you talk about their specific problems, and how your product or service solves them.
Seeing your content that talks about their specific content, sparking their curiosity, speaking their language and providing solutions, will attract your ideal customer, causing them to at least click to take a look.
Use social media to promote your offers using marketing automation platforms like Tailwind, Canva, Post Planner, Social Bee, Meet Edgar and more. Using these tools will save time involved in manually posting content to several different sites.
Your ideal customers have to know who you are and how to get in touch with you when they need your products and services. A consistent stream of sales and marketing posts are important to help accomplish this.
If you are attracting and reaching people in your niche, consumers and people who are looking for what you have to offer will become part of your audience.
These platforms mentioned above can be used to plan and schedule your social posts. Using social media scheduling tools will work to send traffic and leads to your content, while you focus on other aspects of your business.
So instead of posting on the fly, taking time with each post, to think of what to say, creating content and frantically posting to each channel, you can plan out your content, and choose a day of the week to post for a week, month or even a quarter. This generates traffic that takes consumers to the next phase of your buying process.
How to Automate Social Posting
Your consistent email marketing efforts and focusing on your niche, will send targeted traffic to your business. Your automated system will sift through people who are not interested, and attract people who want to know more about your company.
These efforts will help you build an audience of leads that you can convert to customers.
What Happens When Someone Becomes a Lead? Automate Follow-Up
The next step in the buying process is that consumers see your social posts and they click to land on your site to learn more.If they like what they see, and they are interested in learning more they will sign up to become a lead.
Using email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Aweber, Convertkit and similar products, you can plan and schedule following up with leads. Follow up needs to be immediate.
Consumers are bombarded with emails each day. If your leads don't hear from you with an immediate follow up, they may forget who you are. If it takes you a week or a month to follow up, your emails could go unread and eventually end up deleted.
Creating ongoing communications with your audience, as soon as they sign up for more information is critical. Making sure they get whatever you are offering them in exchange for their email address is also critical.
Automation is an important tool to ensure that your leads receive an email message as soon as they sign up. You can send a follow up sequence of emails to introduce your company to a new lead so that they know who you are and what you do.
Your communications could include content that starts your leads at the very beginning of the buying process, and leads them through the intermediate level of product knowledge. Finally, your content can take them to the advanced level so that they fully understand why your solution (product) is the right solution for them.
When you educate your lead about whatever problems brought them to your site to begin with… before you ask for a sale, you provide value.
And that value can go a long way to creating the know, like and trust factor, building a solid relationship between you and your audience.
How to Automate a Follow up Plan
Automate Your Cart and Checkout Process Using eCommerce Platforms
To sell products and services online, you will need a place to showcase your products. It should look similar to the rest of your site and make it easy for clients to make a purchase.
eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce can provide you with the shop and checkout functionality to provide consistent earnings.
These automation marketing platforms provide tools that are well known and trusted by consumers.
This is also important to consider. People who sign up for more information will be more likely to buy from you when you use cart and payment tools that are industry standards.
Automate Payment Processing with Various Platforms
Using tools like Paypal, Stripe, major credit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more to make it convenient for your biggest fans to make a purchase.
If you use cumbersome, unknown payment methods, you may have problems earning consistent sales. So it's important to learn as much as possible about setting these methods up on your site.
It's important to make it easy for readers to be educated, have their concerns addressed and questions answered, all the information needed to make a buying decision. Once they have made a decision, they can also buy... without you having to be physically present. This is the definition of passive income.
Automate Customer Retention Using Email Autoresponders
Once someone has made a purchase, the story in not over. In reality, it's just beginning.
It’s a lot easier to generate repeat business from someone who has bought from you, versus starting all over with a new lead and trying to convert them to a customer.
So you need a way to maintain your customer base. You need a system that helps you hold on to the customers you have and turn them into repeat customers, and brand ambassadors. You can automate customer retention with an email autoresponder.
Create messages for those who have purchased products from you and based on what they have purchased make recommendations regarding things that work well with their product. Provide educational information about the products they bought and suggest upsells that can make using their product even more beneficial.
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