Basics Of Small Business Marketing Automation With Chris L. Davis

Description

Marketing automation is easy to understand and implement once you wrap your mind around it. It’s a skill you can learn like any other one and leveraging it on a basic level for your small business makes a big difference.

In this digital marketing podcast episode, we break it down so that you can understand what marketing automation is and how to use it for your business.

You’ll learn how to get started, common mistakes to avoid, best practices to apply, and how to determine what to automate in your business.

No matter how small your small business is, there is the potential to eliminate human error in your processes and make your business more efficient. Press play and listen until the end!

Transcript

Time Stamps

• 00:00
  Intro
• 05:34
  What is marketing automation?
• 07:39
  Example tasks that you can automate in a small business
• 11:30
  What's the first step?
• 15:18
  What is a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) good for?
• 24:46
  The 3 most common marketing automation mistakes to avoid
• 29:12
  Marketing automation best practices

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Resources, Links, Mentions and More

• 👉 Get started using marketing automation with the best automation platform for small businesses: ActiveCampaign.
• Marketing automation is the process of hiring technology to execute your marketing strategy for you automatically.
• The reason you want to use marketing automation in your business – no matter how small your business is – is to eliminate human error and inefficiencies. Software can execute tasks a lot more reliably, faster, cheaper, with less downtime, and on a larger scale, which increases your efficiency across your entire business.
• You can start with setting up autoresponders in the form of emails or text messages when a user completes a certain task like submitting a form.
• Over time, you can expand your automations as you learn more and identify more commonalities or repetitions in your processes and create automated sequences that consist of multiple automated actions.
• Marketing automation requires data. The best place for you to start is data collection on the front end of your lead generation. Put a form on every page on your website.
• The storage of information is just as important as the collection of information. In order to use your data for your marketing, it has to be easily accessible and stored in a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).
• A CRM keeps track of your leads, so you don't have to keep track of it in your head or chaotic notes. A sales CRM with automation stops tasks from piling up on your desk, gives you time to sell, and confidence what's going on. You can see your sales pipeline and processes visualized in it and assign tasks to people on your team, set reminders for tasks, and so much more.
• As you build automations and visualize the processes in your business, it becomes more clear to you what improvements to make and it's easier to take action.
• The 3 most common mistakes to avoid when doing marketing automation for your small business:
1. Asking the wrong person about technology.
2. Jumping into technology too fast and not taking the time to manually map out and get clear on your processes.
3. Not having and working with a strategic marketing mind, whether it be in-house or a digital marketing consultant.
• The top 3 marketing automation best practices:
1. Continue to collect information and never stop.
2. Use conditional logic to create conversational customer experiences i.e. automatically hide form fields that ask for information you've already collected from a user or pre-populate it.
3. Use progressive profiling and continuously build out your customer profiles and accounts in your CRM and use it for your marketing and sales messaging and communication.
• Learn more in our blog post: Marketing Automation For Small Businesses: The Ultimate Guide
• WordPress form plugin recommendation: Gravity Forms
• Learn how to grow your business online... automatically on automationbridge.com
• Listen to Chris' marketing automation podcast: All Systems Go
• Free resource for Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast listeners: Separate yourself from mediocre marketing and learn how to build automations that increase your customer pipeline with Chris L. Davis' 5-point automation checklist. Download yours now!
• Connect with Chris L. Davis on Twitter and LinkedIn.