We’re a Marketing Automation Agency. As such, a lot of other marketing automation companies agencies visit pages to find out what the latest and greatest is. And marketing automation is one of those things!
Are you an agency examining the benefits of marketing automation for small businesses? Maybe you are interested in automating your agency’s online marketing and lead generation. Or, you are looking to implement marketing automation in one of your client businesses. Whichever the case, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’ll demonstrate the benefits of marketing automation for agencies and show you that it can be simple to understand and implement. At the end of this post, we’ll direct you to one more free resource for those who prefer consuming video content.
Marketing Automation For Agencies: Is It For You?
As an agency, you may be familiar with the term “marketing automation.” However, you may also be put off by the term — does it sound too complex or too technical for creative minds like yours? Or, maybe you think marketing automation is for large enterprises not for small fish. If so, you may be assuming that you don’t need marketing automation and you can keep on running your good old processes manually.
What Are The Benefits of Marketing Automation for Small Businesses (and Yourself?)
In the real world, though, marketing automation is not that difficult of a concept to grasp. It involves putting the right systems in place so that previously tedious marketing tasks are now done automatically and scalable.
Additionally, online automation systems have evolved into simple-to-use tools with an intuitive interface. Although some technical setup might be needed, marketing automation is not a tech-intensive task.
What’s more, marketing automation is for both small and big companies of any industry, creative agencies included. In fact, agencies of all sizes use marketing automation to acquire leads, qualify prospects, and engage with them automatically until they convert into customers.
It is a fact that marketing automation can help you grow your agency and drive better results. Here’s how:
Is Agency Automation Set It and Forget It?
Marketing automation will make the online marketing efforts of your agency more efficient. Okay, there is some work to be done upfront, and an investment in time and money, but then your systems and workflows will do the work for you, and even more efficiently than you, 24/7. The result is that you’ll be growing your business on autopilot.
Marketing automation puts repetitive tasks on autopilot and allows you to, let’s say, lead generation hands-free.
Start by implementing marketing automation in your agency. Then, you will build up your know-how and be able to work on automation projects for clients as well. It’s important to see the benefits of marketing automation with your own eyes before you start selling it to your contacts.
You will see on your own that the resources you save from doing mundane, repetitive marketing tasks can now be directed towards more revenue-generating things.
Marketing Automation Tips
One of the most helpful marketing automation tips is to make sure that you create multi-channel marketing campaigns…
A common misconception is that “marketing automation” is all about automating your marketing email. Marketing automation, though, is not equal to email marketing automation. Email automation is only a part of it.
While it’s true that most automation solutions comprise an email component, more often than not they are capable of doing more. In addition to email, marketing automation software allows you to incorporate SMS marketing, social media discovery, CRM sync, in-app messaging, analytics, and management of the complete customer journey.
In other words, they follow the customer at every touchpoint and allow you to market to your audience in a personalized way and through multiple channels. Marketing automation tools allow you to form meaningful connections with your customers.
One Of The Biggest Advantages Of Marketing Automation…
One of the biggest advantages of marketing automation is to form deep and meaningful connections.
With marketing automation for your agency, you will be able to automate lead generation, lead nurturing, onboarding, cross- or upselling, support and ticketing, and improve customer communication.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could create a customized, personalized journey for every lead and customer who interacts with your agency or your client brand? And wouldn’t it be fantastic if they all got the right message at the most appropriate time in their buyer’s journey? Your marketing efforts would be much more effective and you wouldn’t have to commit more resources to achieve that level of automation and personalization.
It’s not possible to cover everything about automation in a single content piece; however, we need to stress that marketing automation can be simple, really. We’ve put together a webinar that you can watch right now for free, to find out how easy it is to set up automation in your agency or your client business.
GSDdaily Episode 80
I’m using a new mic set-up today so I might be really loud. I am looking at my audio levels and my board here is not showing anything. But let’s see, doesn’t look like there’s anything on the back end. It looks pretty good when it’s quiet. I got a new mic. It same mic as what I had been using only it has the three-prong thing. I don’t know any of these technical terms when it comes to audio/video equipment, but this one is the same thing as my USB mic. I put my USB might over on my other computer and then this one is stationary here. And then it goes into a mixing board and the mixing board goes into the computer.
Today we’re going to talk about what working with a marketing automation agency should look like. Now, there’s a lot of different automation play. There are so many different things about marketing automation, so many different ways to cut it up and so many different ways to generate revenue from it, profit from it, use it. But at the end of the day, there are a couple of very simple tools that all tend to be plug-and-play. From a marketing automation standpoint, how you combine those tools is really just up to your imagination.
For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in creating offers, building sales funnels, and doing marketing automation and traffic for clients. Marketing automation tends to be a place that we really thrive in because it’s the glue between a lot of different things. It’s the glue that brings a lot of different elements together. It brings the pages together and it brings the email marketing together and it brings outbound kind of SMS stuff, and sales, and sales staff, and sales teams and, pipelines, and workflows. It all comes together in this idea of marketing automation.
What should be the goal in setting up a Marketing Automation?
When it comes to setting up marketing automation, the big thing that you’re looking for is making sure that the different pieces talk together. They go through and you have your marketing. You have your CRM that talks to your sales pages and your sales page, they talk to your CRM, and then all of that.
What we’re going to talk about today is some of the things that a marketing automation agency is going to do or should do to help you grow your business online.
First of all, as marketing artists, we do a lot of marketing automation. We’re a marketing automation agency. Although, I don’t classify that as what we are. We’re more along the lines of a growth team that does marketing automation.
Marketing automation is a key fundamental kind of building block of what sales funnels are and what sales funnels do.
At the end of the day, everybody does a small amount of marketing automation. Some agencies specialize in marketing automation though. I would say that we specialize in marketing automation. We can make the website do things that you haven’t ever seen before, even in some of the stuff we do.
DFY website Marketing Automation
It’s funny because every once in a while we have our page visits track all the way to Slack. If we have somebody’s email address or somebody’s phone number and they come to our website and they hit a certain page, then it will send up kind of a warning flare and say, “This person is on your page.” Ding and the whole deal.
When that happens, it also outputs their phone number and their email address. If you have been to our website and been to any of our sales pages or whatever, and you get an email from me or one of my staff, and it’s a personalized email. That is why. It’s because we have Slack configured through Zapier. Basically, we have our CRM sends an alert over to Zapier. Zapier just makes connections between software. It’s the API hub between a bunch of different, 1000s of different, applications. Basically, a CRM sends a Zap to Slack and says, “Show, basically ping, these people on Slack every time this person, or we know who a person is, who hit a sales page.
Every once in a while, if you get a call from somebody on my team or an email from somebody on my team or even me, it’s because we’re watching that channel. Basically, you showed up on that page and ping, we see your email, we see your phone number because you’ve given it to us in the past. Not because it’s weird and we’re spying on the world. But it’s because it’s all used from the data that we already have collected.
There have been times where we’ve noticed, I’ve noticed, somebody be on page two or three or four days in a row. I don’t even wait for them. I’ll just call them and be like, “Hey, what’s up, blah, blah, blah. This is Jason. You know, I saw you were on the page.” And they’re like, “What? You know, like that’s kind of creepy.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s kind of creepy, but this is what we do. This is marketing automation. Literally, it’s what we do. We wrote a book on it. You know what I mean?”
A good marketing agency must be able to implement workflows that will reap benefits and rewards from marketing automation.
That is one of the blessings of marketing automation. When you can run it correctly. Now, a good marketing automation agency is going to be able to do that for you. That’s the idea. They’re going to be able to implement those same workflows so that you get to reap the benefit, reap the reward from it. There are marketing automation agencies, and then there’s marketing automation for agencies. Both of those things, they’re really the same. Marketing automation is marketing automation, whether you are an agency that is using it for your clients or you’re an agency that’s using it to acquire clients. It’s all the same thing.
It’s basically connecting different pieces of software so that things talk and trigger.
Zapier
There are lots of ways to do marketing automation. Zapier tends to be the place that everything comes to. It’s kind of the head between all of the different sides. If you’re running a Facebook lead ad, then you’re going to use Zapier to put that email address inside your CRM. Let’s just go over here to apps. There’s all kinds of stuff, Google Sheets.
Most of the Google Suite has some pretty interesting stuff:
- Google Drive
- Facebook Lead Ads
- ActiveCampaign
- Facebook Pages
All of the things that it can do. We can get or send Gmail emails to new leads from Facebook Lead Ads, which I don’t recommend.
You can also get emails with new Facebook Lead Ads leads. You can send lead ads to different rows in Google Sheets. We do that all the time, especially for our real estate clients.
- We’ll actually set the trigger.
- Facebook sends the lead-in.
- Then, it adds them to the CRM.
- Then finally, it puts them in a spreadsheet.
The CRM triggers, then the email marketing workflows, and then the spreadsheet is what somebody would call like a sales guy would start calling and working those leads.
If somebody comes in from a Facebook lead ad, we can add or update active campaign contacts too. Lots of different things you can do there. Your imagination is really the limit when it comes to marketing automation. It really is that simple. There are so many different ways that you can trigger all kinds of cool stuff.
Slack
Slack is huge. There are so many integrations you can run with Slack. Microsoft Teams is awesome too, but Slack will integrate with everything. I’m not in a Microsoft environment at all. I don’t think I have any Microsoft products installed on any of my computers, maybe Skype. We set it up with our CRM. We’ll have Facebook Lead Ads ping Slack whenever there’s a new sale.
A new conversation goes off into Google Sheets. We can set up some stuff in Airtable in Slack, do some project management. We’re used to having it so that every time a base camp task was updated, then we get a Slack notification. We’ve set it up so that there are KPIs inside ad managers that will ping a Slack notification.
There are lots of different ways to work. There are lots of different ways to work on that moving forward. Now, let’s see if we go to some of the other ways.
Anyway, your marketing automation agency is going to know all of this stuff. They’re going to know how to trigger things that will then move somebody through your prospects scenario, your pipeline. That’s just what marketing automation does.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
1. The first is you’re going to sell more.
You’re going to sell more because people are in front of you or your brand is in front of them I should say. You’re going to generate more revenue in the long-term from that.
2. Your brand will be remembered better.
You will also, and perhaps more importantly, you will be remembered better. If somebody is seeing your ads, your emails, your text messages, or whatever for months and years to come, they’re that much more likely to buy. I can’t tell you how many times we ended up getting somebody. They come in and the first time they ever bought anything, a book or maybe a video course or whatever. Then, all of a sudden, they’re our best customer. They’ve been on the list for six years.
They’re our best customer because it just took a long time to warm up to us enough or to be ready to buy something. But once they do, they’re committed because they’re getting results. They know our process and they know us without working directly with us. It ends up working out that much better for them. Marketing automation makes that possible.
Our marketing automation and marketing automation agency work to set it and forget it?
It’s a big question. We get asked all the time, and the answer is absolutely not. Marketing automation, it will make you money, well long-term, but there are always rules and things that break.
I mean, marketing automation is very much you’re looking at Zapier. I actually just got one yesterday. My Instagram Zap broke between Instagram and Google Drive. I have no idea why. I haven’t investigated. But it just goes to show that even though something is working for years, sometimes it breaks. Sometimes there’s a coding issue. Sometimes there’s a lot of these integrations have three parties.
They have your ad account. Basically, you have two sides. Let’s say Instagram and Google Drive, and then you have Zapier in the middle. You have three coding teams who are all trying to work together, technically. They’re building the frameworks for everything to coincide. Sometimes it doesn’t work out all that well. Sometimes something will break for a couple of days and then it will all of a sudden magically get re-enabled. There are just some things to look at there. Some things to take note of.
You are always going to think of ways to do things better. You’re going to be like, “Oh man, I should’ve sent lead ads to Slack rather than lead ads to a spreadsheet.” As I’m talking about it, I’m literally thinking that because for our clients, we just go into a spreadsheet. Like, “Well, why don’t we set them up with a Slack account?” There are always ways to do things better. You just got to keep your mind open to it.
If you’re researching and thinking, as I said earlier in the week, some of my best, most clear marketing automation “gotchas” happens when I’m mowing the lawn. I don’t know why. I’m just driving around, riding on a lawnmower, but then I’m like, “Oh, damn, I shouldn’t do this. Or I should do that.”
That is where some of my biggest kind of aha moments come from is when I’m driving, which my wife pointed out. In the middle of this pandemic, she’s like, “Yeah, we don’t drive anywhere.” She’s like, “So you don’t have any processing time.” And it’s right. She’s absolutely 100% right as always. And I don’t. That’s always what I did when I drove I’d process things that happened during the week because we don’t go anywhere during the week, as you can tell by being in this office. Although, we are going to start shooting some on-location live streams, which I’m really excited about at a co-working place in town, anyway.
Marketing Automation Tips
You want to email, SMS, big, big marketing automation components. Any alert, triggers, anything that’s important to your business always really important too. If you need your sales rep to know immediately when something comes in the door, then you can set up a marketing automation trigger, put it in Slack, send it to a text message, put it in a spreadsheet, whatever the trigger, some other bell or whistle. There are all kinds of interesting things to do. You can download an app called If This, Then That: I-F-T-T-T, IFTTT.com. If This, Then That, it’s on iPad, probably Android too. But it’s kind of like Zapier only it’s mobile, and you can trigger all kinds of cool things. When a sale comes in, it can ding. You can change the lights in your room, all kinds of fun stuff that it can do there.
Advantages of Marketing Automation
Now, one of the biggest advantages of marketing automation is it creates a customized personal, it just customizes your marketing message for your end-user. You can do so much to customize the way they’re marketed to. If you have a survey and there are four answers on a survey, and depending on how they pick one of those answers, you enter them into an email sequence. That’s one way to do it. You can send them down different paths based on a link that they click in an email or a page that they visit.
They go to a particular page, like a Facebook traffic page or how to make a garden table out of two by fours page, then you can send them three or four two by four emails. There are all kinds of really cool stuff you can think about, if you just kind of sit back, think, “What do they want from me? What can I give them to help them grow or help them transform their lives or help them do something better?” At the end of the day, that’s all marketing automation is.
For Questions and Guide
With that, if there’s anything we can do to help, we’re happy to, just go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form, book a time on our calendar, and we will dig in and figure out where in your business, what in your business can be automated, and where we can find traffic and what kind of automated processes and sales systems we can set up so that everything scales really well and in fast and as automated as possible inside the framework that you’re already working in. That ends marketing automation week.
