Friday Jul 03, 2020
How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Agency for Your Business
The Need for a Marketing Automation Agency
A marketing automation agency can be your secret weapon when seeking to enhance your business’s marketing efforts. Contrary to popular belief, marketing automation isn't only for giant corporations but can be a game-changer for businesses of all sizes. In this guide, we'll focus on how to pick the right marketing automation agency to meet your specific needs and objectives.
Debunking Myths: Marketing Automation is For Everyone
Is Marketing Automation Overwhelming?
The term "marketing automation" might seem daunting, particularly if you're a small business or a creative agency. Rest assured, the right marketing automation agency will make the process seamless, efficient, and highly effective.
Marketing Automation Across the Board
Marketing automation agencies cater to businesses, big and small, spanning various industries. Whether you're a tech startup or a local retail shop, marketing automation is applicable and beneficial.
Critical Advantages of Partnering with a Marketing Automation Agency
Achieve Scalability and Efficiency
Its scalability is one of the most compelling reasons to work with a marketing automation agency. Automation handles repetitive tasks around the clock, freeing up your valuable resources.
A Hands-Off Approach to Lead Generation
Imagine generating qualified leads without lifting a finger. With the right marketing automation agency, you can set up systems that acquire, nurture, and convert leads automatically.
Not Just Set It and Forget It: Ongoing Benefits
Investment and Returns
While implementing automation requires an initial investment in time and capital, the long-term benefits far outweigh the costs. Your selected marketing automation agency will ensure that your systems work tirelessly, growing your business even when you're not actively involved.
Beyond Email: Multi-Channel Capabilities
The Misconception: Email is Everything
A common misconception is that marketing automation only involves email campaigns. In reality, a competent marketing automation agency can do much more.
What Multi-Channel Means for You
From SMS marketing to social media discovery and CRM synchronization, the right agency will allow you to reach your customers at every touchpoint. This ensures a customized and highly effective marketing strategy beyond simple email campaigns.
The Ultimate Advantage: Deep Customer Connections
What Meaningful Connections Can Do
A significant advantage of working with a marketing automation agency is forming more meaningful connections with your customers. Whether through personalized messaging or timing your customer interactions perfectly, automation enables a whole new level of engagement.
Final Thoughts: Simplifying Marketing Automation
Marketing automation may seem complex, but it's straightforward and highly effective with the right agency. If you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, we have a free webinar to watch to learn how easy it is to implement automation for your business.
By choosing a competent marketing automation agency, you’re not just buying a service; you're investing in your business's scalable growth and long-term success.
[Video Transcript]
Today, we will discuss what working with a marketing automation agency should look like. Now, there's a lot of different automation play. There are so many other 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, and use it. But at the end of the day, some straightforward tools tend to be plug-and-play. From a marketing automation standpoint, how you combine those tools is just up to your imagination.
For those 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 we thrive in because it's the glue between many different things. It's the glue that brings a lot of other 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 setting up marketing automation, the big thing 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 speaks 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 what a marketing automation agency is going to do or should do to help you grow your business online.
First, 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 like 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.
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 you haven't seen before, even in some of the stuff we do.
DFY website Marketing Automation
It's funny because we have our page visits tracked to Slack every once in a while. If we have somebody's email address or phone number, and they come to our website and hit a specific 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 email address. If you have been to our website and any of our sales pages, and you get an email from me or one of my staff, it's a personalized email. That is why. It's because we have Slack configured through Zapier. We have our CRM send an alert over to Zapier. Zapier makes connections between software. It's the API hub between a bunch of different, 1000s of other, applications. 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. 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 our collected data.
There have been times where we've noticed, I've seen, somebody be on page two or three or four days in a row. I don't even wait for them. I'll call them and say, "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 creepy." I'm like, "Yeah, it's creepy, but this is what we do. This is marketing automation. 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, a good marketing automation agency can do that for you. That's the idea. They're going to be able to implement those same workflows so that you reap the benefit and reward from it. There are marketing automation agencies, and then there's marketing automation for agencies. Both of those things they're 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 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, you will use Zapier to put that email address inside your CRM. Let's go over here to apps. There's all kinds of stuff, Google Sheets.
Most of the Google Suite has some pretty exciting 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 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 a sales guy would start screaming and working those leads.
If somebody comes in from a Facebook lead ad, we can add or update active campaign contacts—lots of different things you can do there. Your imagination is the limit when it comes to marketing automation. It is that simple. There are so many ways to trigger all kinds of cool stuff.
Slack
Slack is huge. There are so many integrations you can run with Slack. Microsoft Teams is fantastic, 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 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 for project management. We're used to having it, so we get a Slack notification every time a base camp task is updated. 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 methods.
Anyway, your marketing automation agency will know all of this stuff. They will learn to trigger things that will move somebody through your prospect's scenario and 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, emails, text messages, or whatever for months and years to come, they're 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 customers. They've been on the list for six years.
They're our best customers 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 and marketing automation agencies work to set it and forget it.
It's a big question. We get asked all the time, and the answer is not. Marketing automation will make you money long-term, but there are always rules and things that break.
I mean, marketing automation is very much you're looking at Zapier. I just got one yesterday. My Instagram Zap broke between Instagram and Google Drive. I have no idea why. I haven't investigated. But it shows that even though something has been working for years, sometimes it breaks. Sometimes, there's a coding issue. Sometimes, a lot of these integrations have three parties.
They have your ad account. 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 few days, and then it will magically get re-enabled. There are just some things to look at there. Here are some things to take note of.
You are always going to think of ways to do things better. You're going to say, "Oh man, I should've sent lead ads to Slack rather than to a spreadsheet." As I'm talking about it, I think that because we go into a spreadsheet for our clients. Like, "Well, why don't we set them up with a Slack account?" There are always ways to do things better. You have to keep your mind open to it.
As I said earlier in the week, if you're researching and thinking, some of my best, most transparent marketing automation "gotchas" happen 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."
Some of my most significant kind of aha moments come from 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, as you can tell by being in this office. However, we will start shooting some on-location live streams, which I'm excited about, at a co-working place in town.
Marketing Automation Tips
You want to email, SMS, significant, big marketing automation components—any alert, triggers, or anything important to your business is also essential. Suppose you need your sales rep to know immediately when something comes in the door. In that case, 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 motivation, or some other bell or whistle. There are all kinds of exciting 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 sorts of cool things. When a sale comes in, it can ding. You can change the lights in your room, and all kinds of fun stuff there.
Advantages of Marketing Automation
Now, one of the most significant 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. 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 they click in an email or a page 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 pages, then you can send them three or four two-by-four emails. You can think about all kinds of really cool stuff if you just sit back and 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?" 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. Go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form, and book a time on our calendar. We will dig in and figure out where in your business, what in your business can be automated, where we can find traffic, and what kind of automated processes and sales systems we can set up so that everything scales well and fast and as mechanical as possible inside the framework that you're already working in. That ends marketing automation week.
The post How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Agency for Your Business appeared first on Done For You.