If your marketing spend feels like gambling.
This article is for you.
Fact: What most people call digital marketing today is largely a waste of time and is more akin to gambling than investing, or creating lasting, revenue-producing assets. Are you creating digital business assets? A business asset is something you buy, or build once and it delivers dividends over time if maintained properly. It’s no different than a delivery truck, a 3D printer, or opening a new sales position in your organization. *Please hold off from hiring any more salespeople, however, until you finish reading this series because it strikes at the heart of traditional, expensive, and often fickle sales teams. It’s not the salesperson you want. It’s not the marketing you want. It’s the qualified, eager, pre-informed, motivated customers you want. So why not start there?
Keep this in mind as you consider how you allocate your marketing and growth dollars:
Marketing, social media, and today’s marketing, sales, and messaging automation tools today ultimately serve two goals and two goals ONLY:
Increasing/stabilizing and automating inbound quality leads & sales
Decreasing operational and customer acquisition costs.
*A complete list of benefits that can be realized from nailing your marketing and systems automation systems is provided in the next article.
FINALLY: Consider this before you jump ahead or spend another dollar on marketing or technology:
When it comes to point one above (increasing sales and leads) most marketers, agencies, and ad-managers deliver junk leads and unqualified customers, then they blame you for being unable to turn those leads into profitable sales and lifetime customers. Then, they call it a day and go spend your money. When it comes to point number two (decreasing operational costs), almost nobody has experience using automation tools to streamline repetitive but critical customer service tasks, admin tasks, valuable customer communications, and of course lead warm-ups. All of which can dramatically lower manual staff admin and enrollment costs.
After spending many years in agency land, I’ve created a team and workflow aimed at putting the power in your hands, so you are never dependent on an overpriced hyped-up agency or guru again. Ironically, today’s all-in-one CRM and marketing software tools (when applied correctly) can deliver on both points 1 and 2 above in powerful even dramatic ways. It can be that simple, but for some reason, we often love to complicate it. For now, forget about the social media vanity metrics, forget about page views, forget about ad spend. First, start with your CRM, landing pages, and automation sequences. That's the hub that will help you produce ROI from your peripheral marketing assets. If you'd like help dialing in an automation workflow that your team can deploy internally, or if you'd like to know what working with a team of committed automation nerds is like:
Use the Work With Me Tab to learn more about why today’s automation tools are able to dramatically reduce the costs of acquiring new customers while reducing admin costs at the same time.
In the next article, we will continue this journey and cover the full list of time and cost-saving benefits that are realized by a competently activated sales automation system working in your business.