I often hear entrepreneurs making this excuse about why they aren’t marketing their business consistently:
“I don’t have enough time to market Sydni!”
I’ll refrain from going off on a rant about making excuses (and how that correlates to how successful you are in business), but I will say that we are each gifted 24 hours each day. How you choose to spend that time is entirely up to you. But you can easily buy more time to help you specifically with your marketing.
“How is that?” you ask.
You can do this by automating as much of your marketing as possible. Let’s face it, technological advancement is on the move and not slowing down any time soon. Rather than this being a cause for fear or stress, embrace it and use technology to your marketing advantage. You will serve your audience well and increase your profits by letting technology pull the heavy load for your marketing needs. Automation simply means to use technology to handle repetitive tasks for you. Let’s see how this works.
Set it and forget it
In our business, we use a web-based software called InfusionSoft to automate much of our marketing. For example, when a prospective client visits our website she is given the opportunity to sign up for a free gift and this weekly newsletter (Which you’ve already done. Thank you for that.) The action of entering her name and email address triggers InfusionSoft to send the new community member a series of emails.
The first message welcomes them to the Smart Simple Marketing family. It also gives them instant access to the gift that they were promised. That gift solves a specific problem by teaching the new member “5 Simple Steps to More Clients, More Visibility and More Freedom.”
The remainder of the introductory emails engage the reader in a virtual conversation and give us the opportunity to help them solve other problems they have by making offers for products and services. This automation process gives us the freedom to stay in touch with EVERY new community member and learn more about their personal interests.
How to Implement
You can model this for your business. If you were to meet a new friend and offer them a free gift (based on your expertise) that will help them solve a specific problem, what would you say to them in your follow up? Perhaps “hey, just checking in to see if you have any questions” or “did you notice this point on page 3” or “would you like to chat for a few minutes about your personal situation?” Think of this as if you were sitting down, with your favorite beverage, having a conversation with a person who’s company you really enjoy. What questions might they have about the information you’ve shared? What would you say in response? What questions do you have for them?
Do a brain dump and just write what comes to you. Don’t censor yourself, stay in the moment and just write!
Once you’re done, you can polish up what you’ve written (staying in conversation mode and writing to ONE person) then break them up into a series of messages. You want the closing of each message to have ONE call to action – meaning tell the reader exactly what to do – to call you, request a consultation, buy a product, etc. (This is how you turn this strategy into dollars!)
Now that you’ve written a series of messages you want to set them up in a system like InfusionSoft (or if that seems to robust for you, check out aWeber or 1ShoppingCart). And voila! You’ve just automated part of your marketing process and more importantly, you are staying in touch with people who are obviously interested in what you have to offer.
Automation is a simple method for allowing technology to do your marketing for you. One of the most common tasks you have as a business owner is “meeting” new prospects. If you put this process on auto-pilot, the number of prospects that you connect with will continue to increase, you will increase your profits and, most importantly, you will help more people. All this is due to the power of automation.
Your Action Plan For This Week:
- Analyze how you keep in touch with prospective and existing clients.
- Measure the effectiveness of your current system. Is that system helping you to grow your business?
- List 5 ways that you can improve this process.
- Look into automated marketing systems to see if they will help you to grow your business. (InfusionSoft, aWeber, 1ShoppingCart)
- Contact me for help with automating your marketing strategies and increasing your profits.
