Marketing is of fundamental importance to the health of your business. Your main concern as a business owner should be to fine tune your marketing process. But you can automate many of the marketing activities that you are currently slaving away at.
How much of your time is wasted on useless repetitive activities that are basically nothing more than data entry tasks? What can marketing automation do to help you handle these tasks efficiently?
Today’s article gives you a glimpse into how Dr. Dustin Burleson, an orthodontist from Kansas City, used marketing automation software to improve the marketing of his practice. This article is taken from an interview we did with Dr. Burleson. You can listen to the original interview here.
We will look at the benefits you are missing out on if you are not making an effort to implement marketing automation software in your business. We are going to take a basic tour of the marketing automation process and debunk some myths along the way.
Different Types of Marketing Automation Software
There are many awesome types of marketing automation software available. Deciding which one is best for your business is beyond the scope of this article. You will have to go and do some research on the features and pricing of all the available products. Here is a user review based comparison of different marketing automation products that could be of some help.
Groove Digital Marketing uses Infusionsoft, which is a great piece of software. For the sake of simplicity we are going to refer to Infusionsoft sometimes throughout this post, just know that there are other options out there that have the same functionality. The goal of these references is to demonstrate how automation software can simplify your marketing process.
The Benefits of Automation
Excerpt from the interview:
…so for those who are result-driven much like I am, I will fast-forward to the end result and say that since we started with Infusionsoft our company grew 600% and that was beyond our pretty good-sized company. – Dustin Burleson
Infusionsoft automates all your lead capturing, customer relationship management and email campaigns. It also quantifies your campaigns so that it is easier to test and change them around to get the most effective results. Have you ever marketed something like a piece of content and then just forgot to follow up on the lead or waited too long and the lead got cold?
If your marketing automation software is properly set up, this doesn’t happen. Your leads go into a funnel, and the funnel takes care of itself. Such a drastic growth of 600% is now possible because you can focus on fine tuning the marketing process itself and closing sales. Or use your extra time to take a much-needed vacation.
The essence of marketing automation software is that all the useless data entry tasks are eliminated. Wonderful as this is you obviously still need to create quality content. Quality content is still going to be the driving force behind your business. Infusionsoft is just the skeleton that keeps everything from becoming a shapeless mess. It can do many amazing things, but you still have to analyze and change elements that are not producing measurable results.
The Basic Infusionsoft Sales Process
The basic sales process in online marketing goes like this:
Attract traffic with gated content through social media
Capture their contact details as leads
Nurture those leads with bite size content pieces that educate and inspire them
Convert those prospects to customers
Deliver your product or service and then motivate your customers to generate referrals.
This sales process is a massive amount of work if you are still manually emailing everyone and working off a spreadsheet where you type in contact information of leads. Infusionsoft can take over most of this repetitive work.
We will look briefly at each part of this process and the role Infusionsoft plays in it.
Attract traffic
Attracting the traffic is not something that your marketing automation software can do for you. You need to produce high-quality content. Then you use search engines and social media to get people on to your landing page.
Capture Leads
This step is where you take the prospect to the landing page. They fill out their contact information on a lead capture form.
You can create and host your landing pages effortlessly with software like Infusionsoft or HubSpot. But first you need to create the gated content that the prospects exchange their contact information for.
The gated content is usually in the form of an ebook or whitepaper but can be a whole range of media like webinars or pre-recorded videos. The difference between gated content and normal content is that for gated content the visitors have to provide their contact details to access it.
Nurture the leads
Usually a customer is not ready to speak to your sales team just after they downloaded a piece of content. They still want to remain invisible and do their own research. You are going to spook them if you try to initiate a sales conversation too soon.
So the next step is to send them quality bite-sized pieces of content that they find interesting. Infusionsoft automates this whole process. You can place calls-to-action at the bottom of these to lead them to other content pieces.
You can program Infusionsoft to send different pieces of content in different sequences depending on the choices the prospects make when interacting with your content. This ability makes it look like a very personalized interaction, but it still has to be programmed to do this.
Convert them into customers
The next step of the process depends heavily on the type of product that you are selling. In the case of Dr. Burleson, they just continued the nurturing campaign until the parents decided it was time to get braces for their kids, even for months or years. The reason for this is they wanted to stay top of mind with their prospective patients’ parents. And once you automate something like this it is no trouble just to keep in touch once a month or once every two weeks.
Months later when the parents decide the kid needs braces, they are likely going to use Dr. Burleson’s practice. Why? Because they were the only orthodontist that stayed in touch and probably the only practice that had an inbound campaign.
Would you have the time and patience to keep something like this up manually for months?
In B2B marketing, you would want a more aggressive approach at the end of the nurturing campaign because it is usually a much easier short-term decision to buy a business product vs. braces for your kid. Infusionsoft can facilitate you whole e-commerce process if you are directing prospects to a sales page.
Motivate your customers to generate referrals
After a sale Infusionsoft can send email newsletters to keep you top of mind with the customer and keep them coming back. It can automatically ask for referrals which you can then add to another nurturing campaign.
Conclusion
Marketing automation software can make your life ten times easier and generate guaranteed and predictable results. It is no substitute for good management and sound marketing practices but will cut some of the repetitive admin tasks down to zero.
Make more money and work less hours by taking the first steps to implement marketing automation into your business right now. If you want to learn more about Infusionsoft and other marketing automation software we have a whole article list of tips and tactics on our sister-site, BrightIdeas.co.