what is marketing automation? lookinglion.o The 4 types ALL MARKETERS NEED

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation is a collection of features that automate repetitive tasks and give marketers the ability to operate marketing campaigns at scale. In short, these features help you drive more leads, convert those leads into sales and optimize your spend. You’ll find these features in a what is marketing automation? lookinglion.o platform, which is a software as a service application that runs in the cloud. In the early years, marketing automation platforms were priced prohibitively high for most businesses. But today, there are dozens of marketing automation platforms available on the market. They vary in price points, feature set, and the amount of contacts you can store within them.

But most platforms will include the following features. Email marketing, the ability to send large amounts of emails at the same time. Customer journeys, the ability to pre-set a series of touch points for a prospect or a lead, nurturing them from first touch through advocacy. List segmentation, the ability to segment your contacts by filters like demographics and behaviors. Forms, the ability to create a form and put it on a landing page or a website to collect data from prospective customers. Landing Page Builder.

The ability to quickly build landing pages that are typically dedicated to a single offer,

like downloading an e-book or registering for a webinar, without having to write code. Lead scoring and grading. The ability to automatically rate prospects that are more likely to close based on actions performed by prospects and the demographic information about them. And reporting. The ability to see how your campaigns are performing so you can pull back from what’s not working and double down on what is. Additional features may include social media management, different types of lead attribution, ad management, chat bots, and more.

Marketing automation platforms allow marketers and marketing teams to do more and work in a centralized tool for collaboration and communication. If you’re shopping for a platform, be sure to check out Insightly Marketing. It’s a powerful, full featured marketing automation platform that also shares a data set with Insightly CRM. So your marketing and sales teams are always aligned. Get started with a personalized demo of Insightly marketing Today.

Actually, not for big companies and brands or even small brick and businesses this is for the creators me and you bloggers podcasters online business entrepreneurs or if you just work in digital marketing this is not for like small business sales force i’m a salesman pipeline leads people this is not that marketing automation now that i’ve said that here’s what we’re going to talk about i am going to go through the four really broad types of marketing automations i’m going to give you my recommendations on how to use these and then i’m going to give you a few tool examples and stuff i’ve actually used all right so let’s hit the big two that

The social media automation tools

Everybody’s probably already heard of but then stick around don’t leave the video just yet i actually have some things i can guarantee you probably never really thought about before or heard of later in the video i’m saving the best for last but let’s start off with social media first why is this important this is pretty widely understood but scheduling things to twitter facebook pinterest linkedin instagram all those things can take up a lot of time luckily for us there exists lot of time luckily for us there exists a multitude of tools to make social media scheduling and automations way easier i’m about to share some examples in a second but first pete’s recommendation i recommend most content creators

Who aren’t like live on social every single day if you work for a company that might be what you’re doing but for those of us who aren’t quite that hardcore i recommend going in maybe bi-weekly or even once a month if you can and schedule things out in bulk i said i don’t actually recommend the whole like i’m gonna post this one thing and use a tool like smarter queue to automatically post it every single week from here to eternity i actually recommend using social a little bit smarter than that actually being social encouraging engagement and replies and shares and stuff like that rather than just like publishing your blog post links

Or stuff i suggest going through every couple of weeks scheduling things

Out for the next couple of weeks and then do that again next month or every couple of weeks total recommendations there are a lot buffer meet edgar i have two that i generally recommend number one is what i’ve used for three years now smarterqueue there’s a link in the description below this video i like it because i can do those evergreen scheduling like i mentioned what not to do a second ago but i can actually set it to expire after i post this like five times or after a set date or something like that you can connect a lot of social profiles to it i won’t go into the smarter queue i actually have a full review and tutorial of it on my website but i usually recommend that another one i actually love is later specifically for instagram

But you can actually start to connect different profiles i believe and the user interface is fantastic it’s pretty it’s easy to use and it just works and considering a lot of people are on instagram not exclusively but primarily later.com is a really great tool for that and i actually not going to talk about pinterest because i think almost everybody who is into pinterest almost everybody who is into pinterest marketing probably uses tailwind but go do some you know googling or youtubing and find stuff on ton because i’m not going to talk about pinterest here because i don’t like it next up the big one this is the big what is marketing automation? lookinglion.o

Thy email marketing automation

that every business everywhere is probably doing a little bit of already but i’m gonna tell you how to make it better email marketing sending notifications to your audience to your subscribers why is this important let’s start with there the email list is still important it’s 2021 right now it’s gonna be 2022 a year from now it’s still gonna be important then it’s one of the only channels that gives you i’m not gonna say complete control but it gives you a lot of control of when you show up for people tweets last a couple of minutes facebook posts last a couple of hours pins last i don’t even know how long it’s a different marketing strategy sending email the money’s in the list they always say that but that’s

Of where to start now i recommend you absolutely true so pete’s recommendation call this a million things funnels they talk about email marketing a lot welcome sequence autoresponders that sort of stuff i recommend going in your email service provider of which i’ll give you some recommendations in a second and go ahead and create a general welcome sequence of one to five emails that will welcome and nurture your subscribers i recommend this for small businesses i recommend this for bloggers i recommend this for influencers and anybody really

If you have a lead magnet or a freebie that you’re using

for your list building deliver that first in the first email or whatever or maybe you just link to it i don’t know but build a welcome sequence of at least a couple of emails to tell your story and qualify your audience on autopilot you can go set this up in a mailchimp or wherever have those emails drip out over time you can add like a a day or maybe a couple of days in between the emails and have it set up where every time someone joins your email list send out

this welcome sequence again tell your story about your topic and then qualify your customers as in tell them who this newsletter is for and who it’s not for if you are a small business owner if you are in sales as a career do you even blog is not for you here’s who i target bloggers and podcasters and youtubers who want to make money on the internet i tell people that in those first couple of emails this is helping to turn

Your audience into followers and hopefully eventually customers if you sell stuff and you monetize which i’m assuming you probably do this is the big one this is the biggest automation and quite frankly one of the easiest you can get started with grab an email service provider implement one automation that you can kind of push people through from wherever you collect emails talk about that in a second and then just send them one to five emails telling your story telling a little bit about what you do which will help qualify like yes this is for me or yes this is not for me

That’s what you want to do and of course

At the end you should pitch products if you have them and drop affiliate links and monetize that audience that’s what i talk about here on do you unblock total recommendations this is up for debate because this is a hot topic when it comes to blogging an online business i can’t make a solid recommendation for email platforms right now because they’re all starting to become the same they’re all getting the same features.

It wasn’t like that five years ago i use activecampaign and mailchimp i use activecampaigns for my funnels and i actually export subscribers through that after they’re done with my automations and stuff into mailchimp and that’s where i actually see the newsletters for me personally but of course they have automations too at mailchimp i recommend both of those i think they’re great i also recommend convertkit i also recommend drip i’ve used both of those extensively over the past several years for do you even blog and they’re really great i generally approve there’s also flow desk is really new on the scene and i’ve heard really great things i haven’t actually used them myself but it looks great it’s a low price ticket and they apparently have automation so you can do welcome sequence and autoresponders in

Templates next automation thing

all of those all right i’m going to break the rules on number three here in my marketing automations youtube video let’s talk about this this is my notes but if you’ll notice this just text it was printed out from a google doc which i use as a template templates are my next automation thing now before you scream leaving this youtube video let me explain myself marketing and automations in general are just doing any repetitive task any repetitive tasks can almost always be automated or made more efficient in some way and i am going to count this under automations creating and or buying templates to use for fill in the blank there’s a lot of stuff i have examples that will come up in a second but the point

Is we as marketers create a bunch of content you create podcast blog posts youtube videos sales emails sales pages landing pages headlines for yada yada social media posts right we create a lot of content and one of the most time consuming parts of this there’s editing but there’s also starting from scratch if i ask you to go design some social media share images or some pins for pinterest or whatever that is it’s much easier to start from some templates and then customize to your topic at hand or whatever that is how you want it to look than it is to start from scratch same thing with blogging here’s my recommendation and then i’ll give you some examples of this i recommend

Feel free to purchase most templates for anything whether

it’s blog posts or social media share images or graphics or whatever they’re actually pretty cheap and affordable usually that said i think you should also approach your content creation with the intentionality of could this be a template i have this mindset because i’m lazy and i really like saving time even if it means taking more time to figure out how to save time but that’s beside the point what i really mean is i think you should adapt this mindset of going through all of your blogging or business activities and approaching

It looking at it from the point of view of could this be a template could this be made into a template somehow and if it’s content you create on the internet the answer is probably yes in some small way examples first of all hashtag self promo incoming one hour blog post is actually a suite of templates that i sell for 27 bucks this is a template that you can use in actually a couple of different ways but it helps you save time writing a piece of content and i actually use it for youtube that’s why i held this up earlier i used one hour blog post to create this youtube video

it helped me with the outline it helped me figure out what i’m writing like what i actually want to talk about and what subtopics are in here i use this every time i create a piece of content on the internet that’s one example you can go pay me money if you want to to buy one hour blog post it’s a way to not start from scratch and get up and creating way faster

Here’s another example my friend liz wilcox she’s an online impact member

also in my mastermind group she created an email template subscription membership i think is what she’s calling it she’s basically giving people email ideas every single month so they can email their newsletter they email their list she’s helping people go from zer to one like you’re not sure what to write about i’m gonna give you like more than enough ideas for emails you can send just not starting from scratch if you create content there’s no need to start from scratch and i actually have lots of sales email and sales page templates and my own programs

that i offer but you can find these anywhere most importantly i want you to look at your content creation process from this viewpoint of could this be a template is there anything here that i can make easier and faster next time i actually consider that automations i do it’s not like a specific tool that does it but it’s more of general tools and templates that you can use to save time the fourth type of automations i want to talk about

Integrations integrating different pieces of software

are integrations integrating different pieces of software integrating all the tools the landing page builders the emails the website on wordpress or whatever that is why is this important if there’s anything that is repetitive in your business like we talked about earlier it could probably be automated in some way every little contact you have with a customer potential customer prospect audience member email subscriber all this stuff delivering your freebies enrolling them in your course once they make a purchase or redirecting the urls i mean there’s a million things here it can all be automated and just for more clarity what i’m talking about

When i say integrations is any automation you can do whatsoever that doesn’t involve actually communicating to your customer that would be what we talked about with social media and with automating email or whatnot this is connecting everything on the backend all those moving parts and there’s kind of three that i want to touch on number one would actually be native integrations now if you use convertkit you can actually create landing page urls right there and you have a forum for people to get on your email list and then they can opt in and then they can get triggered in automation that sends them that welcome sequence that we talked about and actually send them the pdf that they want to download

The point is you don’t need any external tools in order

to make that happen you could do that all on convertkit that’s something what i just described there you can do with mailchimp or mailerlite or anything now how about stuff like podia podi is what i use to deliver my online courses and all my digital products actually it’s the same thing i can build a sales page in podia i can drop the price i can change all that stuff in podia i can deliver the stuff in podia i can deliver the products to people when they sign up when they pay me stuff via podia and a native integration

Would be active campaign and podia i can do that right in the dashboard i don’t need any third-party tools i just use those first two parties podia an active campaign or podia and mailchimp or podia and mailerlite or whatever that is that’s a native integration you don’t need third party tools it’s just those two softwares can communicate with each other leadpages and mailerlite those things can communicate whether it’s a native integration no there’s actually two more ones the big one zapier or zapier i have no idea it looks french to me i want to say zapier though

I don’t know zapier is the third party tool

that if something doesn’t have a native integration like this tool that i have doesn’t talk to my other tool you can probably use zapier to integrate those and not only that but you can do it in multiple steps you can have multiple tools and platforms talking to each other whenever something happens whenever your audience does this or does that there’s a billion different possibilities with a tool like this because it connects with almost everything and you can do almost anything you can imagine it’s absolutely mind-boggling start with this simple stuff there’s no need to go up the deep end but you can use this tool to connect

All of your other tools one last one only because

i think it’s really cool is ifttt if this then that if this then i don’t know if i said that right but the point. Is this is almost like a zapier but it’s kind of for more personal stuff you can use it for some business stuff as well let’s say you wanted to send yourself a daily text message reminder every day at 8am with a motivational quote i’ve done that before by the way and i used ifttt to do that you can also do you can connect wordpress you can connect your social media tool probably like buffer or something like that google drive dropbox like there’s a million different things you can use this for you can do all of those things with zapier by the way i’m not gonna lie but ifttt is more

so free and it just kind of looks and works differently but try that one out too that’s a third-party tool that can help integrate all your stuffs and last i want to just mention a few other things scheduling like there’s a lot of other automations in here that we didn’t talk about it didn’t really fall into any of those categories scheduling is a big one for me i actually just signed up for something called tinycal i’ll provide a link in the description below i used to use calendly i don’t really like it and i didn’t want to pay for it and the free plan was really limited so i actually paid 19 for tinycal it’s awesome

So far this can automate the whole let’s book a guest

for my podcast or let’s book one-on-one meetings with coaching clients or whatever that is i don’t know why i’m doing this it’s a scheduling tool that makes scheduling way easier way more automated there’s also stuff like deadline funnels which i use for marketing urgency and you know countdown timers that are evergreen and on my sales page and on emails and that’s like one little automation right there and there’s actually a million things like this that you could probably make more efficient and automate scheduling being

the biggest one in my opinion that could have been its own category if you do any meetings with anybody ever and they all integrate with zoom usually. to like create zoom links and all that stuff can be automated almost anything that’s repetitive in business and creation content creation can be automated anything that is repetitive can be automated so i’m actually going to sign