Marketing Automation: What Your Business Needs to Know – Business 2 Community

According to our recent survey, more than 2/3 of landscaping business owners are primarily responsible for their marketing.

This challenge has a solution, and its marketing automation.

Routine activities can be automated to free you from working in your business so that you can invest more time working on it.

While there is a learning curve with the technology, the true challenge is taking the time to design what can be automated.

In other words, if your business does not have a written process in place for activities like following up on leads or upselling current customers, then clearly, thats where it needs to start.

Start thinking in terms of triggers and actions.

The phone rings (trigger) and your team answers (action). The buyer asks for a quote (trigger) and your team dispatches a representative to learn more (action).

Automation Formulas: Trigger > Action > Trigger > Action

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Organize everything and automate what you can.

#1. List the actions

What are the actions you want your buyers to take from their first contact with your business? List them, step- by-step.

#2. Test the sequence

How many of your recent customers have followed those steps? Patterns outside of your ideal flow may suggest disallowing these actions in the future.

The other option is to create multiple pathways to success.

Its important to be clear about the process steps that are inflexible. Often this involves legal issues or payment terms, but it can include anything in the buyers journey.

#3. Automate what you can

Lets face it, nowadays a website visit is replacing the telephone call.

Clicks to your website are triggers. You can use marketing automation to take action on them to send relevant information. And you can tag that interest to segment prospective buyers into categories. As they move through your funnel they will trigger new actions.

Every successful action should trigger another.

Take the time to automate what you can, even if thats only one step in your process. After you nail that give yourself a pat on the back and celebrate.

Youve saved some time! Now look for more ways to automate.

Marketing automation gets a bad reputation when its used to interrupt people to sell to them. But theres nothing wrong with selling when its done right.

The key is finding ways to use marketing automation to personalize.

For example, a sales transaction could trigger an email that offers an automated booking calendar such as ScheduleOnce that the buyer can use to independently book a time to meet with your company representative to address whatever issues there may be.

And that personalization just may trigger new business!

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Marketing Automation: What Your Business Needs to Know - Business 2 Community