The Marketing Huddle Podcast #25 - What is Marketing Automation & Why Do You Need It?

Transcription

1 The Marketing Huddle Podcast #25 - What is Marketing Automation & Why Do You Need It? LAURA CLICK: This is the Marketing Huddle, episode number 25. [Intro Music] STAN SMITH: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Marketing Huddle, where we give you proven advice to help you up your marketing game. This is Stan Smith, and I m here with Laura Click. So how is, we re getting to the end of October-ish, here. Can you imagine? We ve just blown through this year, Laura. LAURA: I know, I know. It goes by in a blink. I think always at the end of the year, too, things start -- time moves faster, so I mean, like Christmas is practically tomorrow. STAN: Yeah. LAURA: Ready or not. STAN: I know, I know. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, it s football season. So you know, I think it s a good time of the year for The Marketing Huddle, because we ll have more than enough metaphors to use. LAURA: Amen, amen. Well, I m definitely excited about today s topic, and I think you ve already got some good, good metaphors and ideas to talk about it. You want to tell folks what we re going to cover today?

2 STAN: Sure. We re going to talk about marketing automation. Specifically do you need it? And I think we can handle that question pretty quickly. But I think, as a listener, you probably want to know, how do I get started with it, and other questions associated with that. So we re just going to dive into that for a few minutes here. So, let s get started. LAURA: Cool. I like it. Great. Well, I mean, so I think, like you said, we can answer the question pretty fast. We ll just say yes, you do need marketing automation. STAN: Right. LAURA: But before we go too much further, like, let s talk about what actually it is, in case there are some folks who don t understand what that means. STAN: Right. Right. And marketing automation can be a geek deep hole, you know, a briar patch. But I think the easiest way to explain it is marketing automation deals with triggers and actions. So if you have, I ll give you an example that a person visits a page on your website. And let s say they re a subscriber that visits your page. Can you send them a follow-up based upon the page, for example, that they visited? So these are kind of triggers and actions that happen automatically so you don t have to worry about it. So marketing automation, the Holy Grail is putting your marketing on autopilot. All right, so we both know that you really truly can t put your marketing on autopilot. LAURA: I was going to say. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. STAN: And anyone who promises to put your marketing on autopilot, your entire marketing plan on autopilot, they -- yeah. Run. Run from them. But there are tasks that can be put on autopilot, and that s what marketing automation is great for.

3 LAURA: Yeah, I think that s a great way to put it. And so kind of to circle back to the question about why you need it, I mean, think about all the times that you have experiences on the web where it feels like it s just so personal and so custom to you. And there s probably, it kind of freaks you out a little bit. It s like, whoa, like, how did they know that I needed this thing? How did they know that I was looking for that? How did they know that this was the problem? And that s what I think really good marketing automation does, is it gives you very customized, personal, typically is what we re talking about, but you re getting messaging that is very targeted to you based on actions you ve already taken. So you mentioned a new subscriber. You can also do it for, you ve made a purchase, and so maybe you re going to get an that says, hey, you purchased this widget. Well, did you know this accessory goes really great with that? Maybe you d like that, too. Those kinds of things can be really, really powerful, and that s what automation can offer. STAN: Yeah. Yeah. And I think probably the best at this, and that s popular, is Amazon. Amazon is just very, very good at this type of marketing automation. They are inside of your head. You know. LAURA: Yeah. I didn t even know I needed that, but thank you, Amazon. STAN: That s exactly it. Exactly. I think another great example is Netflix. You know? They have an that goes out to me, it seems like it comes at the perfect time, and it s other things you may be interested in that were just added to Netflix. Then I have my next weekend lost to binge watching on Netflix.

4 LAURA: There you go. Another one that comes to mind, now that you re talking about this, and I notice we re talking a lot about retailers, but there s even -- I ll see if I can dig up the article because I think it was from about a year or so ago -- Target has gotten scary good at even predicting when a woman is pregnant. STAN: I know. They got in a little hot water over that one, too. LAURA: Yeah, they did. But it was still incredibly fascinating to me that people were getting s and promotions in the mail based on products that they purchased at Target. Maybe it s certain kinds of lotion or creams or whatever it might be. If you re buying these products, you re probably in the first trimester, and so we re going to start sending you stuff. And anyway you re right. They did get into hot water. We ll find that article. But I think they were wrongly predicting it some cases and I think it was freaking people out. But gosh, for those times they get it right, can you imagine? Like, imagine you re that newly pregnant -- granted, it s hard for you imagine being pregnant, I m sure, Stan. But let s say you re a woman. STAN: Right. I ll put on my feminine hat, here. LAURA: There you go. Or pretend that your wife is really pregnant, and then all of a sudden there s these offers for things that she ll need throughout her pregnancy. Or, hey, your baby s coming in April. You re like holy moly how d they know? STAN: Right, right. And I think that s the real promise of marketing automation is that your messages become relevant, highly relevant. And I think that s the reason why we want to use it.

5 LAURA: Yeah, for sure. So let s talk about some of the ways to use it. I mean, we ve talked about based on purchases or based on subscribing. What are some of the other ways you can automate, or triggers that you like to use with your clients? STAN: Yeah, and this is real a goldmine of opportunities, and I think as a listener and as a marketer, you re probably going to want to do everything. But we ll talk a little bit more about when is automating too much, but there is a lot of great user scenario, or use cases. New customer onboarding I think is really a good area. And what I mean by onboarding is that let s say you are a landscaping company. And I love using landscapers because they re quintessential local companies. But, if you have a person who has just hired you to do a job, being able to send them, first of all, reminders of when you will show up at their location to cut their lawn or to seed their lawn or fertilize their lawn. So that s a reminder that you re coming. And then, you can also send them, hey, here s a couple of things to ask us when we get there. And then after that particular, after that job is complete, how did we do? And based upon, send them a survey. If they say you did really well, you can automate an that goes back to them that says, you know what? We re willing to give you 15 or 20% off of your next, you know, mowing project if you do this for us, a testimony or a feedback. All of those, if they do this then you do that actions, those are great marketing automation things that you can do there. So, and I really love marketing automation also from kind of bridging that gap between and social media. So, my list, you know, people who have come to Pushing Social and maybe have subscribed for any of the things that we offer there, they will have received an from me that says, Do you Tweet? Right? And then that person says, Oh yeah, I do Tweet. And I just let them know. I want to give you a shout out to the folks that, my audience on Twitter. And I have a lot of people that say, you know what? This is what I do and this is my Twitter handle.

6 STAN: And marketing automation on the back end, there s a little script that says, okay, they gave me, they answered that question, and it sends out a Tweet on their behalf. Give a shout out to our fellow Pushing Social reader. So those types of connections I think are great opportunities. Have you come across any more that you like to do? LAURA: I think it s also good on the prospect side of things, so I think it can be really good when you have some sort of premium piece of content. So let s say you ve got an ebook or some sort of piece of material that you re asking for an address for, right? So you can send, when someone downloads that, that ebook or signs up to get that piece of content, you send that person a series of s to prompt them. It gives them a little bit more information. And then towards the end you can make an Ask there, and have a Call to Action. So I think that s another way to go about it, is kind of introducing someone who is a prospect, and hopefully taking them down that funnel, and hopefully becoming a lead, and then eventually a customer. STAN: Yeah, yeah. You know, there s one other situation I m seeing a lot more, especially with Slack, a tool that, kind of the team messaging tool. As it has become more popular, people have figured out different ways of getting Slack integrated into their marketing automation. And one is using a service that, you can use a service like a, there s a few out there like Deliver It, or something like that, that watches your or your Twitter stream, and if somebody does have a customer service issue, and it s usually they just went to maybe a specific Twitter account that you have for customer service. If a person sends a, makes a Tweet, then it can fire off a chat message to a person on your customer service team to follow up on that. So that s a, I m seeing more and more of that type of automation on the back end that s happening.

7 LAURA: Yeah. Yeah, there s, I mean, you can almost, like your brain could explode with a lot of this stuff. I mean, we re talking a lot about , but you re right, there are a lot of things you can do on the social media front. I mean, the tool, If This Then That, you know, IFTTT? STAN: Yep. That s it, yep. LAURA: You know. You can set up all sorts of different actions to help on the social media side of things, so you can start following people who mention certain things. So if there s a topic that s relevant to your industry, you can set up recipes that allow you to follow people that are Tweeting about certain things. So there are some interesting things you can do in that regard, too. So even outside of the realm. So, there s, it s kind of mind-blowing, really, isn t it? STAN: Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah, I can go on forever. There s thousands, tens of thousands of ways you can use marketing automation by mixing and matching these different platforms and tools. LAURA: So when you said, you made the question like, you know, don t listen to a marketer that says they can put everything on autopilot for you because that s not really true, and I agree with that. So I guess the question is what are maybe things you shouldn t automate? Or can you automate too much? Like, where are the areas where it s like, okay, like that s maybe something you shouldn t do? Do you have any kind of things you absolutely won t automate?

8 STAN: Well you know, I -- yeah, well, I guess the rule I tell folks and I follow myself is that working on automation doesn t replace conversations, you know, and genuine oneon-one discussions with customers. And also, marketing automation is not really that good for things that are of very high importance and are critical to your business. So you don t want to automate follow-ups with your number one client. Right? I mean, like, you might be tempted to, and you might find a good reason to do it. But human beings, we know when we re getting something that automated. We just know it. And it can be very good, but you just have an uneasy feeling around, uh, is that a real person on the other side of this ? So, in those cases, I don t believe in automation for that. So customer service is one of those areas where you just have to be very careful about when do you send a follow-up. Right? Also, prospecting after a certain stage. So when the person is getting to the stage where let s say you re a business to business situation, and you have responded to an RFP from a particular client that might be a prospect that might be on your list. I always tell my clients turn off the automation for that person. Because it s really weird that, oh, on Monday I talked to them about a pretty large deal, and on Tuesday my marketing automation system is acting as if they re a stranger. LAURA: Yeah. STAN: You know. So take your prospects or people you re talking to out of your marketing automation stream. So I think that those are the cases, and even on social media, I think there s a lot that you can do with marketing automation. I m even encouraging people, I think 80% of what you do on social media can be automated in terms of articles that you share and blog posts that you ve just published. That all can be taken care of by marketing automation.

9 STAN: But there is a point where you actually have to make sure you watch and see if somebody asks you a question, or asks a follow-up on something that you ve sent out. And you ve going to have to answer that, but it s totally fine to have something, you know, an app watching your Twitter stream and alerting you when somebody does ask a question. You know. That s good automation, there. LAURA: Well I mean, and there s also bad automation, when it s all implemented poorly. I mean, how many times have we seen, or have you received s where the mail merge was wrong? I, like, almost have -- STAN: Once a day. It s almost twice a day. LAURA: I know. It s crazy to me. It cracks me up. Like we laugh about it all the time over here whenever we get them. I really need to create a wall of shame. Because it s like, so bad. Like there s been times when they ve left your name out entirely and it says, like, Dear Name. Or they ve put the wrong name, or what s really funny to me is, with our social media, like with Twitter. We have a Twitter account for our company, for Blue Kite Marketing. And I get tons of automated direct messages. It amazes that that still exists. It s almost like it s on the rise, in fact, I ve gotten so many of them lately. And it cracks me up, because people say, Hi, Blue. Like as if Blue is the first name. And it s like, you could totally tell it s automated because it s wrong. STAN: I know, I know. Hello, Pushing. LAURA: Right. You re, like, um... Busted! You totally automated that. STAN: Mm-hm. Okay. Fail.

10 LAURA: Like it s just, so it kind of, it makes me laugh. It makes me laugh when you receive it, but gosh, you ve got to be really careful about that kind of stuff, so be really careful and watchful. When to automate and then how to do it, and do it in a way that feels very natural, and not going to cause you to have all sorts of errors and problems and make it look like you re a robot. So certainly things to think about. Well, before we let people go, what are some of your favorite tools? I know that you love tools, Stan. So do you have any tools that you use for automation? STAN: Yeah, you know, it depends upon -- of course, everything depends -- but it depends upon what level, or, how big your company is, what resources you have. But a couple of ones off the top of my head is HubSpot. They have a lot of this marketing automation all in one spot. And if you have the revenue to kind of support the cost of that, it s definitely not something that if you only have 20 bucks for marketing per month you don t want to work with HubSpot. But HubSpot is one. Infusionsoft is very similar to HubSpot but they really excel, I believe, at the integrating ecommerce if you re selling products on your site, and you want to set up automation based upon if a person purchases something, they do particularly well there. I know a lot of our listeners are already on WordPress, and you know there are some great plugins that automate some things. My favorite is -- and your favorite, too, is Coschedule. You know. LAURA: Yeah, I love it. STAN: That automates a lot of social media on the back end. And they re moving into different areas that they can automate for you. They do a great job of it. I use another plugin called Leadin, which kind of handles it, operates as kind of my CRM. You know, so when a person fills in a form it gives me great information about them that allows me to automate something based upon that information.

11 STAN: And then you mentioned IFTTT before. And kind of the cousin to IFTTT is Zapier. And I think a lot of people may have heard of Zapier. I know we talk about it in our special report we put together on all these tools. But Zapier is really good at, they basically will take one app and connect it with another. So once you see how it works, then you can kind of come up with your custom automations, and it s really handy for that. So those are a few that are top of mind for me. Do you have any to add on that? LAURA: No. That s a good list. The only other one that comes to mind for me is MailChimp, which we re always big fans of. So on the side of things, MailChimp is really great for building all sorts of -- I don t want to say recipes. I ve got IFTTT on the brain -- building configurations for sending a series of s based on different triggers. So especially for new subscribers, or people who download. If you ve got landing pages and whatnot, that can all flow into MailChimp and they can get a series of s based on whatever it was that they looked at or downloaded or whatnot. So a lot of cool things you can do with MailChimp, also. STAN: Cool. Cool. LAURA: Awesome. Well, I think that may wrap up our conversation on automation. I think we could talk about it for a long time because there are so many different pieces to it. But hopefully this gives folks a good place to start. And we also mentioned a lot of tools on the show, but there s a place where we have a whole lot more tools for you. If you d like to know exactly what Stan and I have in our toolkit, we d love for you to take a look at our free ebook. I think we ve got at last count, like 48 different tools in there that we use on a regular basis. So we d love to show you what those are and tell you why they re great. So to get that, all you have to do is go to themarketinghuddle.com/subscribe. Give us your , and we will send you that free ebook.

12 LAURA: It s a really great resource for you if you re looking to find the best tools to use for your business, I think you ll love that resource. That wraps up our show for today. We also want to thank our sponsor, S2N Design. If you ve got a design task that needs to be right the first time, check out s2ndesign.com. They are fantastic. We also love your feedback, so if you liked today s show, and all of our shows, we d love for you to leave us a review on itunes. If you do that, we ll send you a free leather-bound journal. It s pretty darn sweet. All you have to do is go to itunes, leave that review, and then go to themarketinghuddle.com/review, give us your information, and we ll send that to you in the mail. It will be like Christmas. So do that and you ll get a Christmas present early. So go to themarketinghuddle.com/review and let us know where to send your journal. Thanks so much for listening. We appreciate you so much. We ll be back next week with another episode of The Marketing Huddle. [Outro Music] Links & Resources: How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - Forbes Hubspot Infusionsoft CoSchedule Leadin WordPress plugin MailChimp Zapier IFTTT