Marketing Automation is Great… With Oversight

One of the hottest buzzword phrases in our world is Marketing Automation.  Automate this, automate that – make your marketing work for you without having to touch it.

That is what most of the people selling automation systems want you to think: That Marketing Automation is the easiest thing in the world to do.

Guess what?  That isn’t completely true.

In order for marketing automation to work for you, you STILL have to do lots of work.

Think of it this way:  You can drive your car from Los Angeles, CA to Sedona, AZ to work with us. It will take you about 8 hours. If you walked, it would take you two weeks, if you rode a bike, two days. So, you have automated yourself to come work with us by using the car. It saved you lots of time and money. But you still had to drive the car. You had to steer it in the right direction.

Marketing automation is the same way.  You can set it up, but you still have to pay attention.

Here are two examples:

I use a marketing automation tool in my social media. It allows me to post to facebook and twitter while I am not in front of my computer. The best thing about the tool I use compared to all the others we have tested is that I can set up a post to go over and over. This is how I am able to share a link to some of my blog posts to come out once every 90 days or so. I wrote the blog once, shared it to our website (well, Sharyn did it), syndicated it to a lot of other sites (she did that too) and then I share it to my social media pages. Once it is published, I take the link, load it in to my social media app, and set it up to get posted automatically over and over again.

If you want to try it out, head to www.SetYourOwnStatus.com. By the way, with full disclosure, if you begin to use it, I make about .50 a month.

The second example was what gave me the idea to write this blog about marketing automation in the first place. Last week, I went to the optometrist for an exam.

Here is a picture of my new glasses:

Hank’s New Glasses?

This clinic uses a system to let me know that my appointment was coming up. It kept reminding me if I did not respond to the text confirming or cancelling my appointment. If you do not respond, you get a phone call.

The fun began after my appointment. 3 days later, I got two emails within minutes of each other. One asked me to fill out a survey as to how they did. The next one, uh oh, was telling me that I was overdue and needed to set an appointment.  .   I also got the same messages via text on my phone.

That second example was THE example of how and why you have to keep an eye on your marketing automation.  The clinic is looking bad because their marketing automation is not being paid attention to.

Marketing Automation can go wrong if you don’t check on it

In addition to the social media tool I mentioned earlier, we use several other tools. Here is a description of a few.

We use another tool, a customer relationship manager (CRM) as part of an autoresponder, that allows us to send you messages, information, and offers. We can send them to different groups on our list.  All we have to do is make sure someone is entered into the correct groups when we put them in to the system. If we make a mistake or do not pay close attention, then the marketing automation tool is useless. By the way, using a an authoresponder to send out your mass emails is vital because you can see if the email was opened AND it gives the people you mail to an option to opt out, which avoids you being labeled as a spammer and lose your email privileges. Some of these CRMs are rather expensive, including the one we run OUR business with. There is one that we found, but are not using, called Active Campaign, which is only $10 a month (as of this writing), so you may want to try.

We use another tool to help potential clients decide if they want to work with us, and if we want to work with them.  If you want to see how that marketing automation tool works, head to BoxFullOfMarketing.com and take the completely free marketing assessment.  You will notice that it puts you automatically in to our calendar where you get a free 30-minute evaluation of your marketing process with Sharyn and me on the phone. The system works automatically until we get on the phone. We all get a copy of the evaluation, too, which makes it easier for us to advise you.

One more tool we use is SendOutCards. It is a personalized greeting card system that mails, using the United States Postal Service, a REAL GREETING CARD to our clients, potential clients and important people in our lives. When I meet someone, I have  created a “funnel” that mails people I meet a series of friendly notes over a period of months. If you want to try this one for free, on me, go to www. CardsByHank .com.

A lot of people we talk to keep telling us that they hear about Marketing Automation and are not sure what to do about using it. That it scares them. They say that all the technical computer stuff is hard to learn. It’s ok to feel that way, but don’t let that feeling make you not use any marketing automation tools. As you can see from the tools I have discussed, some of them are VERY easy to use and will help you build your business faster.

I mentioned our free marketing assessment above, so if you want some help in finding the right marketing automation tools which will work for you, fill in the short, 4 minute assessment and take a spot in our calendar.  Automatically.  You can also give us a call at 800-705-4265 with some questions.