Marketing Automation :: Small Business Marketing Consultant

Archive for Marketing Automation

The PB&J of Small Business Marketing

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

You can’t automate a marketing process that doesn’t exist.

I’ve spent most of my career automating business systems and one thing I learned early on is you have to a system before you try to automate it.

If you start with the tool (rather than a system), the tendency is to focus on the bells and whistles of the tool. You might end up building a lot of cool stuff, but the project falls short of the expectations you had when you began.

Put more bluntly – automating chaos still leaves you with chaos.

Subscribing to LinkedIn won’t automatically bring you a flood of new business. You need a system for generating new referrals and converting them into customers.

Buying a CRM system, on it’s own, won’t make a more productive salesperson. A CRM system that has been designed to support your sales [business] system could double or triple your sales.

Once you have a marketing system in place, marketing software can help you scale that system, allowing you do more with the same amount of people.

This reality of needing to have a business system before you try to automate it is why the two main tools we use to help our customers grow their business is Duct Tape Marketing and Infusionsoft.

Duct Tape Marketing is a turn-key system for small business marketing. It provides a step-by-step approach for building a simple, effective, and affordable small business marketing system.

Infusionsoft provides an all-in-one sales and marketing software solution specifically designed for small businesses.

Duct Tape Marketing helps you define your marketing system. Infusionsoft helps you automate processes in your system.

Duct Tape Marketing gives you a systematic approach for moving people through the stages of the marketing hourglass – Know –> Like –> Trust –> Try –> Buy –> Repeat –> Refer. Infusionsoft helps you scale your hourglass, so you can market to more people without having any of them fall through the cracks.

Duct Tape Marketers know that marketing doesn’t stop at the sale. Infusionsoft helps them automate their on-boarding and follow up so the can consistently WOW! their customers.

Duct Tape Marketers build systems to ensure they deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Infusionsoft helps them scale that personal attention.

Those are just a few reasons I like to refer to Duct Tape Marketing and Infusionsoft as the Peanut Butter & Jelly of small business marketing.

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Categories : Marketing Automation, Small Business Marketing

Tags : duct tape marekting, infusionsoft

How to Fix Your Marketing Follow Up

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, April 18th, 2013

Marketing automation is a popular topic in 2013. While the industry experts like to focus on the “sexy” features like lead scoring, prospect tracking, and the ability to retrieve company data from third party sources, I believe the most important feature for small business marketers is the ability to automate your follow up.

Following up is the blocking and tackling of marketing and growing your business. We may dream of creating that perfect blog post or advertisement that will bring a flood of prospects to our door, credit cards in hand, asking to where they get in line for the register. But, like most things, building your business takes more effort than that.

The key to creating a predictable and profitable stream of customers is consistent follow up. Small businesses that follow-up on the leads they capture enjoy higher conversion rates and a more referrals than those that don’t.

Consistent follow up is the key to predictable revenue and the key to consistent follow up is creating a systematic approach. Every business owner I’ve ever met understands, on an intellectual basis, the importance of following up with prospects, customers, referrals, etc. The problem usually lies in the ability to execute on following up when all of the other day to day pressures are bearing down on us. If you don’t have a system in place that makes is as easy as possible perform your follow up tasks, chances are those tasks will get squeezed out of your day when other fires arise.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. In the professional services world, and many other B2B companies, it is common for the same person to responsible both selling the and delivering the service. Many accountants, lawyers, architects, etc., are responsible for going out and finding new business. Once they make a sale, they must also “do the work” and deliver the service. I hear from folks like this all the time who describe their pipeline as “feast or famine” or “like a roller coaster”. When they don’t have a lot of work, they are busy hunting for new business. Then they make some sales and become very busy working and meeting their deadlines. Following up with prospects and referrals takes a lower priority – without a system in place, opportunities may fall through the cracks. When the current work is done, the cycle starts over.

The first step in breaking this cycle and taking your business to the next level is to map out your follow up sequences. Think of following up (and all of your other marketing activities) as a business system. It is important to map out your goals along with the people, processes, messages, and other tools you will use to achieve those goals before you jump into using marketing automation software. Marketing automation can be a big help, but you have to have a system before you can automate it.

Once you start mapping out your follow up sequences, you will discover that there are many areas of your business that require follow up. Don’t try to automate them all at once. Pick one area, create a follow up system, automate it if appropriate, take what you have learned and then move to the next.

Marketing automation is often associated with online marketing, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to only online activities. There are still many offline or person-to-person interactions that need strong follow up as well. If you are having trouble thinking of a place to start, here are a few example scenarios requiring follow up:

Meeting a potential referral partner at a networking event
On-boarding a new customer
A request for a free consultation
Receiving a referral from your BNI group
Registration for your event or webinar
Attendance of your event or webinar
Download of an eBook from your website
Conversation at your trade show booth
Giving a referral to someone in your network

Another way to review opportunities for systematizing your follow up is to examine your Marketing Hourglass or sales funnel, and ask yourself what type of follow up is necessary to help a prospect move to the next stage in the process. Illustrations of sales funnels often make it look like gravity does the work; in reality, it takes effort to help a prospect get to the point where they feel comfortable making a purchasing decision.

Lead generation is an important part of marketing and is often the most expensive and/or time consuming. Make sure you’re not throwing that money away by putting strong follow up systems into place.

P.S. – If you would like to see an example of marketing automation software, check out this demo of Infusionsoft, my favorite solution for small business owners.

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Categories : Marketing Automation

Tags : infusionsoft

Two Types of Marketing Automation

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Marketing automation tools can be a great way for small business owners to get more done in less time. These tools are not a silver bullet. If you are considering implementing a marketing automation solution, one of the first questions to ask yourself is what will you be automating?

For many small businesses, marketing automation isn’t just about a new set of tools; it often requires a new approach to marketing and sales. Automating an ineffective process won’t lead to success.

In my experience, those businesses that use automation to bombard people with information are typically frustrated with their automation efforts while those who use automation tools to improve their ability to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time enjoy much greater success.

Automating the Process of Bombarding Prospects

This is the easier (but less effective) way of implementing a marketing automation system. This method is the modern day equivalent of dropping by to deliver brochures and other materials without ever asking for feedback or engaging in a meaningful conversation about their business.

Systems set up this way pretend to have a conversation, but it’s the type of conversation where the seller does all the talking. Too be fair, many consultants and vendors exacerbate this problem by describing scenarios where a visitor fills out a form on your website and they are automatically sent 7 messages over the next 12 days culminating with an invitation to have a sales conversation.

Automation of this type makes you feel like you are being more efficient, but is often not very effective.

Automating the Delivery of Personal Attention

A different approach is to use marketing automation tools to help you emulate an in person conversation by discovering what the other person is interested in then delivering information that is relevant to their situation.

In order to do that, you must not only think about automating what you say, you need to think about how to use the tools to listen.

This type of personalization is very different from just inserting the person’s name somewhere in the message.

One way to start this type of conversation is to ask questions. I’m guessing you already do this when you meet a prospect in person. You may ask about:

the size of their business
their industry
how they help their customers
how they make their money (business model)
goals they want to accomplish
challenges they need to address

You can ask these same questions in a number of different ways online and vial email by:

Presenting surveys or questions
Presenting information related to different business problems and noting which ones they select
Observing topics they interact with on your website or newsletter
Using techniques like progressive profiling (asking for additional pieces of information as you deliver more materials)

Those are only a few examples. The important point is to use the information shared with you to provide relevant information back to your prospects and customers. We’ve all been in conversations where the other person asks for information about us and then continues to deliver a canned presentation. It’s frustrating and there is no need to automate that experience (unless you goal is to aggravate more people faster <g>).

Increase your chances of success with marketing automation by focusing on delivering the right information, to the right person, at the right time.

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Categories : Marketing Automation

Tags : marketing automation, marketing system

Infusionsoft Improves Lead Scoring

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

Infusionsoft is the all in one sales and marketing software for small business. It is a great tool for automating your marketing as well as your internal processes.

Over the last few releases, Infusionsoft has added and improved on it’s lead scoring capabilities. The latest version (Winter 2013) continues to improve upon lead scoring capabilities by adding search features, new behavior-based lead scoring options and campaign triggers that allow you to automatically follow up when a contact achieves a specific score.

If you are a current Infusionsoft user, the first think you may notice is the simplified lead scoring set up page. The user interface on the Configure and Edit Score pages have been simplified. The basic configuration options have been reorganized in a single column. Some users found the points slider in the Rules Criteria area to be confusing; it has been replaced with a drop-down box. The number of points that can be added or removed when criteria is met has been increased from 10 to 100, which should provide additional flexibility when devising your scoring scheme.

When you assign point to a lead’s score, what you are saying is this person has taken and action that indicates they may have an interest in X. We all know that a person may act interested today, but that interest will dwindle if they don’t take action soon. Infusionsoft helps you model this behavior by allowing you to specify an expiration for points that are assigned when a rule criteria is met. So, not only can you add points when actions are taken, you can subtract points after a period of inactivity.

You can now search for contacts and opportunities based on lead score – making it easier to follow up with your highest scored opportunities first. You can search based on a specific score or a range of scores. You can also combine lead score with other search filters to create more targeted lists.

Scores can now be adjusted base on a contacts interactions with your email messages by allowing you to add points to their score when they open and email or subtract points if they unsubscribe. The system is smart enough to only add points for opening an email once, so you don’t have to worry about falsely inflated scores from one email being opened several times.

The campaign builder now includes a goal called “Reaches a Certain Score”. This allows you to automatically trigger a message or series of events once a specified threshold has been reached.

Taking advantage of these changes to lead scoring should not only help you stay on top of your most qualified leads, but can help improve your overall marketing by allowing you to send more relevant messages to the right people at the right time.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about how lead scoring can help your marketing efforts, or if you’d like to see a demo of Infusionsoft.

The Winter 2013 update to Infusionsoft includes many additional updates to the product – you can read about them here.

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Categories : Marketing Automation

Tags : infusionsoft, lead-scoring

7 Marketing Campaigns for Your Small Businesses

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, January 24th, 2013

One way to improve our small business marketing systems is to create standardized procedures and communications for activities we are already doing. Creating procedures can help improve consistency, speeds up processing time, and makes it easier to delegate.

The campaigns below focus on common small business marketing activities that you may be doing to one extent or another. Thinking of each activity in context of a campaign helps identify the processes that we can standardize (and possibly automate) along with templates we may be able to create for our routine messages.

While these campaigns can be automated, I didn’t want you to think you have to run out and buy expensive software before you can start your marketing campaigns. Automated or not, you still need to map out the process, decision points, and content that you will need – so focus on doing that first. You can decide later whether you can use the tools you have or if you need to purchase new ones.

1. Free Report / Free Download / Free Newsletter Campaigns – Most business offer some sort of free download or newsletter subscription on their website. However, most “campaigns” consist only of an email confirmation and then delivery of the free item. By adding more messages to your free download campaign you can learn more about your prospects and how you may be able to help them.

Consider:

including offers to other resources you have available
asking a few survey questions to determine interests and needs
creating follow up campaigns for each question in your survey

2. Free Consultation / Free Quote Campaigns – it is also common for business to offer a free consultation or quote to prospective customers. If you have such an offering, take a look at your processes and identify steps and communications you can standardize.

Consider:

Using appointment reminders or phone calls to reduce no shows
Providing “tips for getting the most from our meeting”, or a list of things you want them to bring/provide for you
What communications and tasks need to take place if the customer buys
What communications and tasks need to take place if the customer “wants to think about it”.
Having a process in place for dealing with no shows.

3. New Customer Campaign – Do you have a standard, systematic approach for onboarding new customers? Standardizing your new customer welcoming process can help get the relationship started on the right foot, reducing problems down the road by properly setting expectations, and increasing your chances for receiving referrals.

Consider:

Creating a document outlining “what to expect” or “what to bring to your first meeting”
Providing a list of names and ways to contact your employees along with a description of how they can help
Outlining your billing procedures and expectations along with the customer’s payment options
Sending an unexpected gift early in the relationship
Including a customer happiness survey after the first 30, 60, or 90 days

4. Customer Happiness Feedback – Having a system in place for regularly soliciting feedback from your customers not only improves customer retention but can also help you get more business from referrals. One strategy you can employ is to determine what is a “passing score” on your survey and then when surveys are received all failing scores receive an immediate phone call follow up while passing scores may be asked to provide a testimonial or referral.

Consider:

Sending a testimonial template and/or examples of other testimonials to help them get started
Providing an online referral form to happy customers, asking if they know anyone else who would benefit from your product or service
Let them know you want to refer them as well and ask them how you can help

5. Re-engagement Campaigns – if you have a list, you undoubtedly have cold contacts on that list. Re-engagement campaigns can help you determine if you should continue to contact them (and if so, about what topics), replace them with a new contact at the same company, or remove them from your list. The goal is to get the conversation started again.

Consider:

Asking if they are still the appropriate person to contact about X
Sending a survey with questions related to the pains you address, so you can follow up with a relevant campaign
Asking previous prospects if they were able to find a solution and if so, ask how it is working for them

6. Webinar, Seminar, or Event Campaigns – If you use webinars, seminars, or other events in your marketing mix then you have plenty of opportunity to create standardized processes and communications. Event registration and reminders are obvious candidates, but you don’t forget the follow up.

Consider:

Including instructions for attending the event such as directions, accommodations, information about the speaker(s), etc.
Creating a “how to get the most from this event” document
Following up with a special offer for attendees
Creating a communication series for people who registered but did not attend
Using your event feedback form to gather information to help you determine which of your other campaigns your attendees would be interested in receiving

7. Referral Partner Campaigns – We all like business from referrals and for many businesses, having a robust referral partner network may be all the marketing they need. Creating such a network takes time and effort which means we have a lot to gain by standardizing procedures and communications in this area.

Consider:

Creating a standard process, as well as a set of messages, for identifying and approaching potential referral partners
Standardizing your process for following up with your referral partners. Make sure to have a process for first gaining Top of Mind status as well as a second process for maintaining Top of Mind status.
Creating a series of snack sized messages that give examples of customers you serve and the problems you have helped them solve
Documenting your process for making and following up on introductions to your referral partners

I hope this post has given you some ideas about how you may be able to move from performing marketing activities to creating systems that allow you to grow your business.

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Categories : Marketing Automation

Tags : email marketing, marketing automation, marketing system