Marketing Automation: What Your Business Needs to Know

Marketing Automation: What Your Business Needs to Know

According to our recent survey, more than 2/3 of landscaping business owners are primarily responsible for their marketing.

This challenge has a solution, and it’s marketing automation.

Routine activities can be automated to free you from working in your business so that you can invest more time working on it.

While there is a learning curve with the technology, the true challenge is taking the time to design what can be automated.

In other words, if your business does not have a written process in place for activities like following up on leads or upselling current customers, then clearly, that’s where it needs to start.

Automation Follows Organization

Start thinking in terms of triggers and actions.

The phone rings (trigger) and your team answers (action). The buyer asks for a quote (trigger) and your team dispatches a representative to learn more (action).

Automation Formulas: Trigger > Action > Trigger > Action …

Organize everything and automate what you can.

#1. List the actions

What are the actions you want your buyers to take from their first contact with your business? List them, step- by-step.

#2. Test the sequence

How many of your recent customers have followed those steps? Patterns outside of your ideal flow may suggest disallowing these actions in the future.

The other option is to create multiple pathways to success.

It’s important to be clear about the process steps that are inflexible. Often this involves legal issues or payment terms, but it can include anything in the buyer’s journey.

#3. Automate what you can

Let’s face it, nowadays a website visit is replacing the telephone call.

Clicks to your website are triggers. You can use marketing automation to take action on them to send relevant information. And you can tag that interest to segment prospective buyers into categories. As they move through your funnel they will trigger new actions.

Every successful action should trigger another.

Take the time to automate what you can, even if that’s only one step in your process. After you nail that give yourself a pat on the back and celebrate.

You’ve saved some time! Now look for more ways to automate.

Bonus Tip:

Marketing automation gets a bad reputation when it’s used to interrupt people to sell to them. But there’s nothing wrong with selling when it’s done right.

The key is finding ways to use marketing automation to personalize.

For example, a sales transaction could trigger an email that offers an automated booking calendar such as ScheduleOnce that the buyer can use to independently book a time to meet with your company representative to address whatever issues there may be.

And that personalization just may trigger new business!

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social and host of This Old New Business podcastHe helps organizations create exceptional customer experiences that drive business growth. 

Make People Feel Something

Make People Feel Something

The customer experience, in my opinion, is getting people to feel something appropriate for the stage of the buyers journey they are in.

Curious about your business because they’ve heard good things.

Excited to meet you because they like what they’ve learned from that first interaction.

Patient to give you the opportunity to explain your process.

Confident moving forward because everything seems to make sense. You have a plan for getting them there, and you seem to be good people that will be fun to work with.

Safe when you get into things that are challenging for everybody, such as budgeting, making choices, and committing to contracts.

Trusting that you’ll deliver on the promises that you made.

Hopeful that you’ll deliver even more!

This has always been true, but even more so today because now we can affect these feelings with targeted content and social media. But there is a new reality.

Being helpful is just not enough anymore. I cannot believe I’m saying that, but I have to because it’s true.

Media and technology are raising the bar and if you are not upping your game you are going to get left behind. I realize that’s one reason you are here, and I am committed to your growth.

If you have not already, map out your buyer’s journey, and consider how to use your media to influence what buyers and customers are thinking, seeing, feeling and doing. More on how to do that in this earlier article and podcast episode.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the buyers journey. Meet me over on Twitter to take the conversation further.

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business and host of This Old New Business podcast.

He helps organizations use media to create exceptional customer experiences that drive business growth in a digital, social and global world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedInTwitterFacebook, and Google+

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