Infusionsoft Archives - Journey Point

How to Get Started with Customer Journey Mapping

Aveline Clarke — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 02:54:54 +0000

Customer Journey Mapping is a tool for visualising your customers experience. Initially for many business owners, it can seem overwhelming with how to create a Customer Journey Map, so in this article I’m going to explain how you can create your own Customer Journey Map and how to put it to good use in your business.

Most overwhelm in this process comes from people believing that you must plot every nuance of every customer’s experience with your business. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

You can take the pressure off yourself immediately by seeing a Customer Journey Map as a “typical” experience a customer has when interacting with your business. This is the clear difference between creating your Ideal Customer Avatars which focuses more on the demographics and psychographics of your customers,

Customer Journey Mapping focuses more on their actions and the questions in their minds as they move towards becoming a customer and after they have purchased from you.

Creating a Customer Journey Map does take time, but there’s no need to get bogged down into too much detail, what you are looking to achieve is an overview of the entire journey for each of your ideal customer types you ought to have already identified.

Now before I get into explaining how you can develop your own customer journey map(s), let’s take a quick look at why it is so important for your business.

Why is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

1. Identify the Gaps

There are holes in every customer journey, and this is mostly because businesses don’t take the time to understand who their customers really are and how they make the buying decision from go to whoa.

By mapping your customers’ journey, you will gain great insight into who they are, what they are thinking, what their next question is likely to be and the predictable steps they will take towards purchasing from you.

With this information at hand, you will identify the gaps and know exactly how you can improve the customer experience and make the transition from initial interest to purchase effortless for your customers.

In other words, with your Marketing Collateral and with your sales team, you can answer the questions in your customers minds before they are even asked. You can clearly lead them to the next step in their own decision-making process. When you do this, you build like-ability and trust to a level that your competitors cannot compete with.

Why?

Because they haven’t taken the time to create the ideal journey for their customer like you have. And the best part is, you have, so you’ll end up with the lion’s share of the business!

2. It’s About the Customer, Not You

Many organisations market their products and services based on how they want to do it. A lot of this is done through “push” marketing, where you push your brand, your message, your product out to the market.

By developing your Customer Journey Map(s) you develop “pull” marketing otherwise known as “inbound marketing”, that often includes marketing automation.

Putting the customer front and centre which helps with not only your marketing and sales processes but also your product development. Many businesses will create a product and take it to market.

The most success business find out what consumers want and then fulfil that need.

3. You Can Adapt To Change Faster

By undertaking the Customer Journey mapping exercise on a regular basis (yes, it’s not a one-off process), you can quickly identify changes in you customers’ behaviour. This ensures that all your future planning is done based on up-to-date and relevant information, not outdated assumptions.

4. You Can Focus on What Works Best

There is a lot of information out there about marketing, how to market and where to market; it can be a minefield.

A business may have an obsession with say Facebook and put all their money and resources into Facebook Marketing only to find some months or in some cases years, that their audience rarely uses Facebook and they would have been better focusing on Instagram or LinkedIn (depending on the type of business).

Okay, so now we’ve looked at why taking the time to conduct a Customer Journey Mapping exercise is important, let’s now look at how to undertake this process.

How To Create a Customer Journey Map

Step #1

The first thing you will need to do is research. I know, it’s not very sexy, but, without it, you’re not going to get too far.

The first area is getting your analytical data. This means getting your data from your website, your Google Analytics, your Google Console, your Social Media and phone data if you have it.

Having this data at hand, will allow you to see a pattern in what your customers are searching for online, where they are searching for it and how they go about contact you from there.

The next thing you need to do is survey your customers. If this is the only thing you do in this process, you’ll be ahead of 85% of your competitors because almost no one does this, let along doing it well.

The more detailed the responses you can get from customers, the easier it’s going to be to map their buying and after sales processes, questions in their minds while making decisions and habits.

Step #2

Run a Customer Journey Mapping workshop. The biggest mistake you can make in this process is trying to create the map on your own. The more people involved from your business the better. And if it’s possible, try to include some customers as well.

This workshop is an opportunity to bring the customer to the forefront of everyone’s mind as well as collaborate and use everyone’s perspective to create as clear a picture as possible of the journey your customers take.

Keep in mind when you do this that the outcome as I mentioned earlier in this article is not to identify every little nuance, but to create an overarching “typical” story around who your customer is, what questions they have on their mind before beginning a search for something, how the start their search, where they search, who they ask, how they weigh up options and so on.

The workshop will not only identify these things, but also help everyone see very clearly where the gaps are; gaps that need to be filled in order to provide your customers with an “ultimate” experience with your business.

Keeping in mind that most businesses have more than one ideal customer and sell more than one product and service, so you may need to map a number of journeys for the same product and/or a number of journeys for the various products and services you offer.

During this workshop, you want to identify the key stages in a customer’s interaction with your business and then answer the following questions at each of these key touch points:

How is the customer feeling at this stage?
What are they trying to achieve?
What questions are in their minds?
What action are they likely to take at this stage?
Do we fulfill their needs and desires at this stage?
What are we not doing, or could we be doing better at this stage?
What is the biggest thing that is going to determine their decision at this stage?

During the workshop it’s a good idea to begin mapping the information on a grid. One axis of the grid represents the stages, the other axis is the answers to the questions above.

The grid is the basis from which you can tell your Customers’ Story as they interact with your brand. Ultimately your customer journey story may be represented as a flow chart, a story board or even as a video.

How to use Your Customer Journey Map

Okay, now that you have developed your Customer Journey map, it’s time to put it to good use for the benefit of you, your team, your business and most of all for your customers.

Th first thing to do is to ensure that all the good work you have done does not go to waste. Many businesses will go through this process only to throw the map in the draw and get on with “business as usual”.

This means the first step in using the journey is to actually use it!

You need to ensure that this journey is in everyone’s minds and embedded deeply into the business’s culture. Have a poster made and put it on the wall if necessary and make it the central point of business meetings. Most of your decisions in business ought to be made with this journey utmost in mind.

Then once you are in the habit of using it regularly to make savvy business decisions, review it every 6 months as a minimum. This will help you stay on top of consumer behaviour changes and there’ll be no surprises such as sales drying up because your customer’s buying behaviours changed.

Customer Journey Mapping is not the be all and end all, however it is a very important part of the marketing puzzle. At the end of the day, the better you know your customers, the better you know how they think and behave, the better experience you can create for them, the more successful you are going to be!

If you need some guidance, reach out and talk to an expert.

To your success.
Rohan James

Rohan James is an Owner of Journey Point Digital Marketing – Customer Journey Mapping and Marketing Automation Experts.

The post How to Get Started with Customer Journey Mapping appeared first on Journey Point.

Marketing Automation: It’s Not as Difficult as You Think

Aveline Clarke — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 02:58:02 +0000

Marketing Automation is Not Difficult!

Is Marketing Automation difficult? I’d love a dollar for every time I’ve been asked that question. The answer to that question is, there’s a marketing game changer out there, and it’s called Marketing Automation. And don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

So, if the question “is Marketing Automation difficult?” is on your mind, here’s what you need to know…

Marketing Automation is not difficult, it’s simply a way to keep your existing customers, and your potential leads, engaged with your business for as long as possible, while minimising the drain on your precious resources.

If you own or manage a business and you’re keen to streamline your marketing strategy, Marketing Automation is your simple cost-effective solution. Here’s why…

The Main Types of Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation takes your time-consuming and repetitive marketing tasks and mechanises them. For example, you can automate:

SMS messaging
Email campaigns
Widget content
Campaign creation
Social media posting
Data analysis

And so much more.

However, if you’re still asking, “is Marketing Automation difficult?” here’s how you can simplify your marketing processes, and make it work for you…

How Businesses Use Marketing Automation

Almost 50% of businesses are already using some form of Marketing Automation. Here are some examples of how this is done.

Sending “happy birthday” emails to subscribers and including special day discounts or incentives.
Creating two versions of the same email and using A/B testing to analyse which email has the highest conversion rate.
Showing customers items they might like from your store based on their previous browsing history.
Daily or weekly social media posts for marketing campaigns.

As you can see, Marketing Automation isn’t all about email subscription lists. In fact, it can be applied across your entire marketing process – and it is not difficult.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation for Your Business

So, now you’re clearer on what Marketing Automation is, why should you give this form of streamlined marketing a go?

Put simply, this process helps you build personalised connections with EVERY customer.

You can check in with them if they abandon their basket or send out customer satisfaction surveys after a purchase. The more engagement a consumer feels with your business, the more likely they are to become loyal long-term customers.

And it’s not limited to online stores. All service-based businesses can benefit tremendously by automating many marketing activities.

For example, if you are a coach or consultant, you can automate an education series for prospects and/or clients. Delivering then information in the right proportion at the right time just as these people want it delivered.

One of the biggest benefits of Marketing Automation is it helps make your lead nurture a lot easier because it educates and nurtures prospective leads and convert them into customers while you focus on what you do best.

In addition, personalised emails result in six times more revenue than impersonal, cold emails, meaning this simple automation can drastically increase your ROI.

If that’s not enough to make you want to automate, I don’t know what is!

Marketing Automation doesn’t just increase your revenue. It saves you money. This means once you get past the question of “is Marketing Automation difficult?” you win twice!

You convert more leads into paying customers, plus you make savings on staff and resources because you don’t need people working on mundane marketing tasks anymore.

What can You Automate?

The reality is, the limit to which you can automate tasks is only restricted by your imagination. And once you begin, you’ll understand that Marketing Automation is not difficult at all. In fact, a couple of months in, you’ll wonder why the question, “is Marketing Automation difficult?” was ever in your mind.

On first investigation, Marketing Automation might sound a little daunting, but it’s easier to integrate into your business than you might think. What’s more, automated marketing saves you time, money, and resources in the long run, which ultimately generates the greatest possible ROI for your business.

Marketing Automation is not difficult, and…

Once you automate, you’ll never go back!

If you want to know more information, contact us now and get a free consultation.

The post Marketing Automation: It’s Not as Difficult as You Think appeared first on Journey Point.

Why Keap is the best tool for service based businesses

Aveline Clarke — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 03:58:42 +0000

Modern businesses rely on smart software solutions to help them work faster and more efficiently. From client management and communication tools through to invoice tracking and payments, clever automated solutions such as a CRM for small business can help you save time and money by minimizing repetitive tasks. Keap is a new product on the marketplace, with this simple yet powerful service featuring an intuitive user interface and fantastic flow-through design. This software provides key automation features to service existing clients so you can focus on capturing new leads and growing your business.

Keap solves a real problem

After researching the market and analyzing the needs of small businesses, the team behind Keap noticed a few common themes. While everyone wants to focus on new leads in order to get people in their pipeline, time and resources are often taken up with managing existing clients. This is even truer with service-based businesses. While it’s important to look after the people who’ve invested in your service, a lot of the work involved is repetitive and best left to the robots. Keap offers the best of both worlds by combining automated services to help you get new clients with other features dedicated to looking after your existing clients. It’s a truly integrated and intuitive CRM for small business.

Key features of Keap

Keap combines a number of services in one easy-to-use interface, including lead capture, follow up, appointments, CRM, quotes, invoices, and even an integrated sales and payments solution. How you use Keap is completely up to you, with users able to use and integrate services to help improve workflow and productivity. Unlike other tools on the market, Keap offers access to a diverse range of solutions in a single interface.

Client management – Centralize client information across devices, independent of location.
Appointment scheduler – Links to Google Calendar and organizes your appointments from one easy-to-use interface.
Quotes – Send quotes to single or multiple clients with the click of a button.
Invoices and payments – Centralize your invoicing and receive money through multiple payment options.
Business integration – Keap already includes hundreds of plug-ins, and more will be developed over time.
Pipeline – Tracking sales and orders is much less challenging through Keap’s custom dashboard.

Benefits of Keap

Unlike other business tools, Keap has been designed specifically for service-based businesses.
The team behind the software is familiar with the challenges of running a small business and has found novel new ways to streamline common administrative tasks.
If you enjoy doing more than what’s required for your clients but don’t want to waste any more time and resources, Keap is a fantastic solution being a true CRM for small business.
From the early days of lead capture and efficient scheduling through to making appointments and getting paid, Keap is a fully featured and well integrated solution that’s here to help. This is the best tool in automating your marketing efforts so you can focus on other areas of your business.

Want to know information about keap? Contact us today!

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Why Every Solo Business Owner Needs a CRM that Automates Follow Up

Aveline Clarke — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 02:10:36 +0000

Relationships are the lifeblood of every modern business, with reliable communication tools needed to capture attention and turn interest into value. While the Internet has opened up more communication channels than ever before, success depends on building long-term relationships. Automation is key as it allows you to capture leads and create follow-up messages that engage your target market. Keap is a new customer relationship management (CRM) for small business solution that helps you spread the word, automate the delivery schedule, and develop relationships that create value for your business. Read on to learn why solo business owner needs a CRM that automates follow up!

Keap transforms leads into value

When you run a small or solo business, there’s nothing more important than capturing and developing leads. While it’s always important to look after your existing clients, the long-term growth of your business depends on attracting new energy and turning interest into sales. There are lots of ways to generate leads, from broadcast advertising through to paid and organic search engine and social marketing. That is why a solo business owner needs a CRM that automates follow up. To keep the leads on coming.

Despite the wealth of opportunities, businesses still face the same hurdles when it comes to maintaining interest over time. As an advanced CRM for small business tool, Keap can help you capture leads, segment your market, automate follow up messages, and manage your entire communication process.

Streamlining communication

While leads are good, clients are better. Keap helps businesses turn interest into value by following up using accurate information, targeted content, and well-managed timelines. The software is designed to do the hard work, saving you time and energy by performing manual repetitive tasks. From capturing form data from websites and e-commerce applications through to populating data fields and sending out emails, Keap allows you to connect and sync your entire business. When you’re developing relationships, following up on leads is absolutely crucial. Keap is a fast and intuitive CRM for small business that helps to automate your messaging system and streamline your entire communication process.

The importance of follow up

Capturing leads and turning inquiries into sales is not an easy process. It often takes multiple messages before someone will engage with your business, which is why it’s important to stay active and produce ongoing content while you keep an eye on the prize. Keap is a great CRM for small business owners who are currently managing contacts manually in their address book and email system. If you want to produce better results by doing less, Keap makes it easy to benefit from automation in a simple and intuitive package.

Want to know more information? Contact us today!

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How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Providers

Aveline Clarke — Thu, 23 May 2019 05:06:55 +0000

There are various things which you need to consider before choosing the right marketing automation providers. You can only choose one after knowing your company’s future requirements and budget. Many factors are involved in choosing the right marketing automation providers so you need to identify your company’s requirements first.

As most of the contracts are of at least a year, you must be careful when choosing to hire a marketing automation provider. You need to take a step further as solely relying on advertisements, or word of mouth can make you suffer in the future. To avoid such severe consequences, you need to consider the following factors first:

Your Future Requirements

Even though it sounds obvious, anticipating the future needs necessary for your company can be a difficult task at times; especially when your company is growing quickly at an accelerated rate. To play the number’s game right, you need to be aware of the number of customers and prospects in your CRM database. You should also know the number of people in your company who would need access to the enterprise marketing campaign automation software in the future. So if you have an idea of where your company will be in the next six months, you might find it easier in selecting a software provider.

Determining the Services You Need

As different providers can offer various services for your business, it is easy to get confused about choosing the right marketing automation providers. While selecting the best provider, you need to ignore those who tell you about a plethora of services which are all unrelated or unnecessary to your business. To be precise and clear, you should beforehand make a list of the required services and then proceed with interviewing the service providers. You also need to know that the quality of services has nothing to do with the number of features a company provides. Whereas some companies can provide the best quality services even while giving a restricted amount of features, others may give numerous features while failing to provide any quality service. Thus, before making a decision, you need to know your demands thoroughly.

Features

In addition to providing the platform of your choice, the company should also provide you with some tools which can be essential to your marketing campaigns. The list of these significant tools and features supporting automation should include digital ads, SMS, content development, social media, email, blogging, e-commerce, webinars, and referrals. The chosen platform should help you in knowing how your business is doing through tracking user interaction. You can also use the platform for tracking leads, websites, report analytics, and for A/B testing, which lets you test two options simultaneously to help you compare and find out the best-suited option.

Cost

The Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) has a price attached to it which includes the setup fee, usage fees (monthly, depends on the number of users), and the on-site team training charges. Regardless of the budget of your organisation, you can always find a suitable MAP after planning why you need automation and singling out a MAP accordingly. Another thing which you will have to keep in mind while pitching the budget is that some providers also charge an extra amount of money when the leads you achieve through the platform becomes higher.

Thus, only after having a complete insight into your company’s future and its needs, you should choose relevant marketing automation providers for it.

Find out more information by contacting us here.

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How Marketing Automation Helps Your Business Run More Efficiently

Aveline Clarke — Thu, 23 May 2019 04:45:12 +0000

Marketing automation streamlines automate and monitor the routine marketing tasks. There are many ways to implement an automation marketing system to boost your online presence and sales. This will prove how marketing automation helps your business run more efficiently

Marketers are under pressure to provide more to their customers by putting fewer efforts. It can be possible only due to marketing automation services as it can increase leads, target audiences and ultimately generate more revenue. Below are some of the ways that help businesses to increase their sales as well as target audiences:

1. Fully Automated Welcome Programs

A welcome program is the right way for a brand to create a relationship with the customers. Any business or brand can reach out to their customers by sending an email or newsletter, they can let the customers that what they should expect from the company, share more details about the brand and encourage the customers for shopping and becoming their existing customers.

It can be used as an opportunity to gather more information about new customers. The data generated can be used to trigger additional communication, customized on-page content and, personalized incentives.

2. Customer Retention

Campaigns such as win-back programs, abandoned cart campaigns can have more impact on a brand’s bottom line. No matter how great a brand, website or their services are, it all depends on the customers who are making all that purchase. It is one of the easiest ways of raising the company’s overall profit, how marketing automation helps your business run more efficiently.

Automating such retention programs that are triggered and constructed with timely and relevant messaging, can be helpful to bring the customer back and helps to re-engage them with the brand. Thus, with the help of marketing automation, a brand can recover lost revenue by putting minimal additional manual effort on behalf of the marketing team.

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3. Coordinated Multi-Channel Campaign

Most marketers know that it is necessary to coordinate their campaigns through multiple platforms, channels, and devices because, in this advanced world, shoppers often jump from one to another. As customers are everywhere and searching every platform so, the brand should be as well. The technique can make easier for businesses to achieve omnipresent status.

The brands can target customers through email, social interactions, SMS messaging, push notifications, targeted ads, and more. All these tactics work together to make the customer interaction easier for the marketer whereas more personal and effective for the customers.

4. Improved Customer Personalization

Through marketing automation, businesses create strong, fruitful, holistic customer profiles. It helps the businesses to analyze and turn their customers into highly targeted audiences by ensuring the right message gets to the right person on the right channel. It can be done automatically by marketing automation solutions.

It helps to keep the information up to date without asking marketing teams to sort through massive amounts of data.

5. Test, Optimize, and Test Again

Apart from all the other ways, marketing automation help businesses to run better and it is one of the best methods. IT is easy for a marketing team to instantly understand which message can best resonate with each target audience, as well as where, when, and how. But it should not be a one-time process, the team of marketing automation agency can continuously test, optimize, and re-test various messages, produce creative executions, and even subject lines to their customers.

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How To Have a High-Converting Website In 5 Simple Steps

Aveline Clarke — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 07:00:28 +0000

A high converting website is paramount to your business success. Unfortunately, many small to medium size business owners believe they only have to do the bare minimum when it comes to creating a website – simply build a website and then the sales will come rolling in. Wrong!! Your website is what will persuade people why you are what they need.

It is through your website that you can tell your prospect customers ‘What’s in it for them?’ Why they should hit the contact us button and know how you can assist them in their needs. A converting website – converting website visitors into actual customers – is what you should aim for and not just having a website that contains basic information about your business.

The goal is to have a high converting website. Your website must be a lead generating one so that you can focus on other important tasks to run your business. Your website should help you generate sales too! Don’t worry. It is not that difficult.

Let us show you how to have a high converting website in 5 simple steps.

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Your content should be attention-grabbing that readers will definitely click on and read on further
Your page load speed is crucial, as customers will leave if it takes too long to access your site. We know of cases where Google stopped AdWords campaigns because pages were taking too long to load.

You have to ensure that your website is following the best practices for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). If you are unsure about this, consult a reputable SEO services provider to explain how they can help you get the rankings you want.

Engage with your visitors by offering them a lead magnet free of charge (information that is highly desired by prospects). This allows you to get the contact details of visitors who are interested in your offering, but who are not ready to purchase now. You can follow up with these leads with offers to convert them into sales.

Make sure that you have an automated follow-up emailing service that can communicate with your newly captured leads to save you time, and will help to further qualify them.

These are 5 Tips to convert visitors to your website into customers…

If you know you need a high-converting website and are unsure how to get started, contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Happy Converting!

The Journey Point Team

PS. Would you like a Client Stampede towards you?

“7 Steps To Get Clients Climbing Over Each Other To Get To You”

Click Here To Grab your Free copy of this eBook now.

Rohan James is Creative Director at Journey Point. He is a master at using words to create desired outcomes, but when it comes to surfing his favourite breaks, the word “master” is nowhere to be found!

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Boosting Sales Without Working Harder

Aveline Clarke — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 07:00:28 +0000

Boosting sales can be easy and you don’t have to work any harder than you do now…You don’t have to think for other creative things on how to increase your sales channel and do all sorts of marketing which in the end may not really give you sales. In fact, its more costly to attract new customers than retaining one. Studies show that, Acquiring one new customer costs around 6-7X’s more than retaining an existing one. As such, we will be sharing with you below, discover ways on how you can boost sales without working harder!

Many small to medium size business owners are under the impression that once a sale is made, that it is the last time that they will hear from their customer.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

At the point of sale, your job is only 50% complete.

By going the full-distance in the client lifecycle, you generate more money through repeat sales and referrals for your business.

You see, if you follow up after the sale, you are engaging with a customer who knows about your business and offerings.

They have already purchased from you, so they already like and trust you…

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Why Marketing Automation Is Important

Aveline Clarke — Tue, 06 Mar 2018 21:18:16 +0000

Why marketing automation is important varies from business to business. Even so, there are certain functions and reporting that are relevant to all businesses that are available through marketing automation that are not with traditional marketing. Once you understand the benefits that marketing automation offers, you will have all the answers you require when wanting to understand why marketing automation is important.

Marketing Automation CRM

Marketing automation offers a platform (Customer Relationship Manager – CRM) on which you can store enormous amounts of data about your target audience(s). With this information, you are able to micro-target segments in your database sending them the right information at the right time. Why marketing automation is important #1 – So that you can successfully move your leads smoothly along their buying journey, answering the right questions at the right time and by covering off objections before they are raised. This is done by micro-targeting your audience and message. Without a marketing automation CRM platform, this is not possible. Adding on to this, as your prospects interact with your marketing, using marketing automation, you can see what is working, what is not working and which leads are showing “buying behaviour”. In the marketing automation CRM and software, we use Infusionsoft, this is called “lead scoring”. When a lead is scored as “warm” or “hot”, this information is automatically relayed to a salesperson, who is given a task to contact a highly qualified lead. Why marketing automation is important #2 – you can see what is working, what is not working and which leads are showing buying behaviour. This saves a lot of time, as your sales team is only dealing with highly qualified leads, not cold ones.

Marketing automation doesn’t replace traditional marketing principles, it magnifies them!

While marketing automation provides these tremendous benefits, it is important to remember that having a marketing automation CRM platform such as Infusionsoft (to provide this information and marketing automation experience), it doesn’t replace solid marketing fundamentals.

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Why Marketing Automation Is Important – Fundamentals

We know why marketing automation is essential, however, these benefits will not be realised unless you have properly scoped out what you are selling, who are you selling it to and how you are different to your competition.

Now when you are looking at what you are selling, you must look at what the “benefits” of what you are selling are.

Let’s say you sell gym memberships, you’re not really selling gym memberships, are you? What you are really selling is health and wellbeing; perhaps weight loss, and maybe self-esteem.

Now what you are selling must also marry up with who you are selling it to. For example, if you are selling gym memberships to young men who want six-pack abs, selling them weight loss is probably not going to hit the mark is it?

This is why marketing automation is important and will only work when you have what you are selling matched up perfectly with who you are selling it to.

On top of this, your marketing must include messages that differentiate you from your competition.

Let’s look at the gym example. Every gym has exercise equipment so bragging about how good your new equipment is, is not an ideal differentiator.

However, if you are a gym that specialises in helping middle-aged people lose weight, your message is clear.

This means those who are fearful of going to a gym because they are overweight will be more attracted to your messaging than a “six-pack gym”.

You know why marketing automation should be used in your business.. You know that it will help you to micro-target your audience with the right messaging at the right time. It will help you to know what is working and not working. It will also help you identify those most likely to buy when they are ready to buy.

Marketing automation has the potential to increase your bottom line and make your internal processes more efficient, however…

Even though you understand why marketing automation is essential, never forget that it can only be as good as the solid marketing principles it is built on.

Rohan James is a Director at Journey Point. He is a Marketing Wizard, but when it comes to surfing his favourite breaks, the word “wizard” is nowhere to be found!

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How Marketing Automation Works – Journey Point

Aveline Clarke — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 21:10:16 +0000

How marketing automation works, is one of the most popular questions that I’m asked. This question arises because I’ve seen many cases in which small business owners blame the technology for their marketing automation not working.

However, when we dig a little deeper we find that nine times out of ten, it’s the strategy that was either non-existent or flawed to begin with.

This means that before you undertake any automated marketing, you must first understand how marketing automation works.

Having powerful marketing automation software at hand without the correct underlying strategy is similar to putting a high-powered car in the hands of an inexperienced driver, i.e. you’re asking for trouble.

Don’t just automate what you already have. This will result in magnifying what you already have. If it’s already great, good, you’re lucky; but if it is flawed… well, I don’t need to tell you what will happen.

Once you understand how marketing automation works, investing in a new CRM and Automated Marketing Platform such as Infusionsoft, is an opportunity for you to re-evaluate.

This is a chance to determine what is working and not working in your business. It’s an opportunity to streamline and moving forward only use what is working and likely to work in the future.

How marketing automation works can be broken down into three categories:

People
Processes
Systems

People

Your organization must be culturally aligned. This means that those involved with Sales and Marketing must view marketing and sales as one integrated process. Any breakdown here will be reflected and magnified by your marketing automation.

We have encountered many businesses that have “sales” people and “marketing” people and they are run as individual silos. A business owner who allows this to continue after implementing marketing automation does not understand how marketing automation works.

So the first step in learning how marketing automation works is to ensure that your entire sales and your entire marketing team are familiar with the Ideal Customer Lifecycle.

This lifecycle begins with the first contact with your marketing effort and “ends” with asking for referrals from happy satisfied customers.

With this overall understanding, your team will be able to easily identify what stage a “lead” or a “customer” is at. They will also understand exactly what the next step ought to be, to have them continue through your marketing and sales funnel.

The next important aspect for your people is having someone who can absorb large amounts of data and complex concepts. This is imperative to be able to make decisions to solve problems or refine your marketing automation efforts.

You see, marketing is increasingly becoming a technical profession that includes high-proficiency with technological solutions.

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Today’s marketing automation platforms such as Infusionsoft are much easier to use than earlier systems, however marketers today must be comfortable using technology.

So if you don’t have the right skills on-staff already, you’ll need to train your current staff using external consultants, and/or look at hiring the right staff.

Processes

Prior to marketing automation, almost all marketing was simply about Lead Generation. This is not how marketing automation works.

Marketing automation is a highly organized, integrated, repeatable process.

It’s about understanding your customers’ buying process and moving from focussing on lead generation to lead education and nurturing in a logical, sequential manner.

You’ll also need to understand your Lead Flow.

Some businesses have too many leads that need to “scored” before handing over only the “hottest” leads to your salespeople.

You see, understanding how marketing automation works can help you guide leads through your funnel more efficiently, and when done well, it can nurture leads all the way to sales conversion.

Even so, if your business is new or if you have a small business, you may not have enough leads.

If you have nothing coming into the top of your funnel, you will have nothing to nurture!

If you don’t have enough leads, you’ll need to put a plan in place to get more leads using with content marketing, social media marketing, networking events, and so on.

You’ll need to do anything that will help to get prospects into the top of your funnel.

So how marketing automation works with your internal processes will be determined by answering the following questions:

What defines a sales-ready lead for your business?
How does your sales team prioritize their time?
How will you implement lead nurturing for leads that are not ready to buy yet?
How will you re-engage sales leads that don’t move forward?
What key metrics do you report on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis?
How do you measure a campaign ROI?
Do you have missing or incomplete data?
If so, how will your data get cleansed to ensure your marketing automation doesn’t suffer?

Now you understand the effect of people and your processes on how marketing automation works, it’s now time for…

Systems

Choosing the right system(s) for your business is paramount. Every business’ needs are unique. So do your research and select with care.

Whilst doing this, keep integration top of mind. The right marketing automation system for your business also needs to integrate seamlessly and completely with your accounting software, your website, and your other marketing tools and systems such as content management systems, and analytics platforms.

Ideally, you would use a complete CRM with Marketing Automation already built in such as Infusionsoft.

How Marketing Automation Works – Summary

All of the factors discussed here are paramount for marketing automation success, but don’t let not having all of them in place keep you from getting stuck into it.

The best marketing automation strategies I’ve seen have started small with what they have, they plan for the future and scale up only as success is achieved.

Success breeds success!

Start small; aim for small successes first and then scale up realistically and methodically by building on those successes.

How does marketing automation work?

Now you know!

Rohan James is a Director at Journey Point. He is a Marketing Wizard, but when it comes to surfing his favourite breaks, the word “wizard” is nowhere to be found!

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