The Future of Marketing Automation (and this podcast)

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where we invite startup founders and digital marketers to discuss strategies and software used to build automated marketing and sales systems at scale. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. And on this episode, I want to talk about the future, the future of marketing automation. And times times in the past, I’ve, I’ve relied on my futuristic vision from paying attention to close to trends and happenings in the space. I often refer to myself as nostre, Dom Chris, that could see where things were going and what was about to happen. And thankfully, in this episode, I didn’t need any of that. No crystal ball, no, no prophetic vision, no, no eagle eye that flies out and sees that that’s beyond what man can see. I didn’t need any of that. Because this time, the future is pretty much right in your face. And I wanted to make sure that you don’t miss it. Okay, I need to make sure that you don’t miss it, that you can see it so you can capitalize on it. And you know what to expect the word automation in my estimation, my estimation is never objective. Absolute maybe, but but not objective, right? It’s it’s always subjective. Or another way of saying it is, automation is always in need of context. Okay? It needs context, because the word automation is absolute. Right? That means doing something without humans. And usually technology involves technology doing something that humans used to do automation. Right now, that’s the absolute term term and probably as objective as we can get subjectively, it looks different depending on your industry. So this is why you can’t always just say, hey, let’s, let’s run, let’s do automation. If you’re talking Amazon, maybe that’s automating shipping. Right? So that’s packing and shipping, versus hey, let’s automate our sales online. Shopify. Right. So Amazon warehouse automation versus Shopify online, e commerce, automation, two totally different things, right? Finance, versus HR versus marketing, right? Finance is automating my bank account transactions going into my software and categorizing. HR may be automating the different phases that a potential employee goes through as they go through the interview process. Right. So automation can only truly be understood in in the context in which it is being used. But the term automation itself, it’s sloppy, sloppy, if you just if you just blanketly, say automation. Now, when we put marketing in front of it, that leads us to stay in a specific realm, right, at least now we know we’re talking about automation and marketing. But even that, I’ll admit marketing, automation and sales automation, often get talked about synonymously. Right. Back in fulfillment or onboarding automation. I’ve called it administration automation in the past that gets lumped in with marketing automation. Right. So so there’s a concerted effort as especially for people like myself, who are what I call the defenders of the space, we, me and in all of my automation service providers, hopefully you’ll be one become the the guardians of the marketing automation space in the understanding in the leveraging of it to make sure it’s done the right way. Right. So regardless of what industry you’re in, they’re all showing us the future. Okay. And it’s irrefutable, by the way, this is not something that I’m about to tell you where you’re going to be have to be like, No, Chris, I actually see it this way. No, there this is, again, it’s right in your face. And once I say it, those of you in the space those of you who are a little more digital marketing savvy, you’re going to be like yep, so It is absolutely right. Because you’re already experiencing it, you’re already using it. The the future is already here, we’re just going to see more of it. Right. So before I make my declaration, I need to provide some definitions. And when I say definitions, these are

Chris Davis 5:25
this is the foundation of everything to understand when it comes to automation, marketing automation and its future. And you need to be able to differentiate between native and external. Okay, native and external automation. Native automation is automation that takes place within the platform that you’re using. That’s native. External is via third party integration. Okay. So with those two, I hope it’s crystal clear to my digital marketers, you all should know, right now, like what I’m saying is like, Okay, I see where he’s going with this. Right. And it’s, it’s native, native automation, is the future, the future is tools, providing more automation within themselves, and not requiring you to go outward. Okay? Now, historically, native integrations have taken place in your CRM system historically, that’s just how it’s been, right? using third party software to fuel it. So think of Active Campaign, and then it allowing you to integrate Calendly with it. Right, so now, it just added to its already robust Automation Engine. But now having this direct integration with Callen Calendly allows your appointments and all of that to be fueled by that to feed to feed into that that engine. Same with Google Sheets, direct integration Active Campaign has same with Slack integration that that Active Campaign has, you get what I’m saying. So the third party tool gets to be integrated with the CRM to expand the CRMs systems are ready, robust, automation capabilities, Stripe and keep, I remember when keep launched, keep payments and integration with stripe, Stripe by itself. Good platform stripe integrated with keep opens up a whole new world of possibilities by leveraging keeps internal automation system. Last one is Shopify and clay VO, right Shopify itself, sale products, deliver track orders, integrate with clay vos, all automated capabilities. And now I can take my marketing even further. So that’s native integrations historically, right you have a platform, usually your CRM system that provides the bulk of the automation, and then it’s extended through third party integrations. So the future of future everyone is going to be more native to reduce the dependency on external third party integrations. So the tools you use allow you to do more automation, without ever leaving them, you’re in the tool, you need to do some, maybe it’s just a click of a setting moment, I can do it right, right within that tool. And I’ll give you some examples. And these are from tools that we use. And when I say we myself and everybody who’s gone through through any one of my programs, know all of the software that I live and die for. Okay. And some prime examples. One is air table. Air table is probably leading the charge because I remember before air table had automations, you would you know, use views, different types of views and groupings and things of that nature to pull off some kind of different visualization of of your your database data, but no real action that can be taken. Well, now, with automation and air tape, I mean, there has been a

Chris Davis 9:16
I have to save this for the future version of this podcast, which by the way, we’re talking about the future of marketing automation. We’re also going to be talking about the future of this podcast in this episode as well. But I’ll put it like this, there are certain pipelines that used to be an active campaign for me that I run 100% through airtable, because it now has built in automated capabilities. And with those capabilities, I can send emails from air table at a specific time. I can even tag a user inactive campaign if I need to at a specific time. And I can capture form information. I can do a lot haul within air table and really format the data and prepare it and take action on it without ever leaving the platform. Right? Native native automation. Next one is WordPress. And, and I say WordPress a little loosely, I say it with an asterix. But this is real because the WordPress environment is that to be extended by a plugin. So we’ve got articles written, if you haven’t read the articles that we have on WordPress, his automation capabilities, talk about plugins that are available as well. And these plugins what they do is extend WordPress is capability. I can’t even say extent they extend WordPress as a platform, but they add native automation capabilities. Thrive. Automator is one that we just wrote, wrote an article about. And essentially now you don’t have to leave WordPress, you’re in there and you’re saying, hey, something happens over here in a lesson, tag them in my CRM, or within WordPress, you’re not going out to Zapier or you’re not, you know, integrating it with anything else. You’re doing the automation right there, right there. Right. So WordPress has it has a few plugins now that do automation, perhaps Perhaps that’s a future episode where we start to talk about the differences in all of them. And lastly, click up, click up automation, you know, when a task reaches a certain status sign in, assign them to person, notify them do this do that. It’s the thing. And I use it all I use, I didn’t used to I used to be so conditioned for native integrate third party integrations, that i i for a while have bypassed these native integrations, but they’re there to help you. And let me say this, we’re talking about the future. I say the future will be more native integrations, not replace your integrations. Okay. So just because you have more to do internally does not mean that you’re not going to need a, you know, Zapier or make operations, Pavlick, whatever your tool is of integrating tools, you’re still going to need that. You just won’t need it as much. I think that’s the goal. And it will just be more of a convenience, right? If I’m in WordPress, clickup, airtable, Asana, you name it, and I can just set up some stuff there. Now, granted, I’m still a proponent of mapping this stuff out, I’m still a proponent of if you’re going to offer automation, give me the ability to document what’s going on, that’s one thing I’ll give airtable, you’re able to add a description to each step, so that you don’t get lost, you have to have sections that you can group, your automations and everything. Don’t just give me automation. And don’t give me a way of documenting it. Right, click up does a good job, you can add a description, they can make it easier, but you can add a description to your automation. Right. But it’d be more of a convenience and it’ll make the process of getting started are or getting some kind of action. With automation, just getting the barrier of entry is already low, but the the ease of usage, making that higher, okay. So ultimately, ultimately, it’s going to allow the software to be more sticky and more profitable for the founder and owner of the software. So we get more convenience, more power, they get more money, more profit. It’s a win win. It is it’s a win win. So I want to I want you all to be mindful of that. You’ve heard it here first. And if you haven’t been paying attention to it, and if you haven’t said it yourself, or if you already have said it. Hey, look, I’m just your your hype man. I’m just repeating what you said. Repeating what you thought.

Chris Davis 14:07
Right? But be excited about that. Be excited about it, and expect it expect more. I mean, there’s i It’s becoming one of my considerations and checklist items like okay, what kind of automation? Do you offer me just native? Right? I want I want as many automated capabilities as I can get. Because you never know what business strategy or marketing strategy or business use case that you need that you need to leverage it for. So, okay. And speaking of the future, I told you all there’s a there’s two futures here. Okay. The next future is the future of the all system go podcasts. And I have to say this, let me say that before I make this statement, I have to say, you know, I’m new. I was new to podcasting maybe four or five years ago. Since then I’ve got about 300 it to 400 episodes under my belt. Half of those were at Active Campaign where I was the director of education, the other half here at automation bridge, where I’m the founder. And I’ve enjoyed every single bit of it. I have not enjoyed the anonymity of it, and the lack of analytics around it. And for that reason for that, for those two reasons alone, there’s many more reasons that I’ll get into in the future. But this was in Listen, everybody. You see me delay in saying this, right? You hear us? Yeah, I’m buying time you hear to my voice, you see what I’m doing. But essentially, let me rip the band aid off and just say the all systems go podcast is coming to an end. You’ve heard it. This is the final episode. The final public episode, I shall say. Okay, so the public version of the all systems go podcast is coming to an end, this will be the final version, that you will be able to just go into iTunes, Stitcher, Google, Google podcasts, whatever the platform may be, and subscribe and get new episodes. From this point on, we’re going to a private podcast feed. Okay, so what that means is, you’re going to need to subscribe in order to get your private, your individualized private podcast feed. And what happens is you get that feed via email, yo, you’ll copy the link, load up your your podcast player, and add a new, add a new podcast and ask you the URL, you’ll put the URL in. And you’ll just continue to get these episodes. Same Same great goodness that you’ve been getting. But we’re going private. And looking forward. It’s going to be more episodes around software that I’m using tips on how to leverage the software, we’re gonna get a little more techie, a lot more techie, honestly, because I’m different from everything else on the market. I’m not the big strategy, big top level, hey, do this. This podcast has always been for and has always been intended to help you navigate the technological terrain much more effective for the sake of building marketing and sales systems that scale. That’s my commitment. For the founders and CEOs and business model folks that listen to this and kind of get a little overwhelmed, you’re listening to it just so you can be more informed of what you can expect a system to do and, and what type of knowledge your marketers should have. But make no mistake, I’m unapologetic about going more techy, talking about the software, I want episodes dedicated to a particular tool, right how to set up your marketing technology to consistently generate revenue. So with that being said, I cannot guarantee you how long the private podcast will be free. Okay, so just, I’m laying this out. So we’re all we all know what to expect. And we’re all on the same page.

Chris Davis 18:16
So I want you to know, as of right now, this is the last public episode. In about 30 days, you got to give us some time to transition everyone I would love to have had a smooth transition and just ate next Thursday is the private podcast. And there’s some internal things. There’s some stuff that needs to take place. So give us about 30 days, and everybody who subscribes to the podcast, you’ll get your personalized link as soon as we’re ready. Okay, but again, it’s going to be free for a limited time. I don’t know how long, I do not know how long. All right. But there is going to be some point you all have seen Patreon you all have paid for content. I’m just letting you know ahead of time, it’s eventually going to be there because I don’t plan on hold. I plan on going deeper and deeper and deeper with giving you all more and more and more and at some point. Those who truly want it will show by doing whatever it takes. Alright, so how do you subscribe, subscribe to the All systems go podcast going forward. One simple website. All systems go podcast.com Go to All systems go podcast.com Right now, you’ll be able to put your information in on that on that page to hold your seat. Once we are ready to go live on the private podcast, which will be the future of podcast yet automation bridge. Okay. You will get notified those of you who are listening to this later. You might get your link immediately after you after you opt in. So these are from our people Woohoo. Listen to every single episode, by the way, thank you. Thank you for listening to every single episode. When it drops every Thursday you’re looking, you got it, you get the notification while you’re running, jogging, working out whatever doing work, you listen to me, I greatly appreciate it. And I intend on adding even more value on the private side. So head over to allsystemsgopodcast.com, you will be able to register register, you will be able to subscribe at no cost to the all system go podcast. Again, it’ll be your individualized private fee. I look forward to serving you in a greater capacity. Again, I am thankful humbled and honored for your attention thus far, those of you who have come from active campaigns, podcasts all the way over to this podcast. I cannot thank you enough. And I look forward to meeting more and getting to know more as we move into a realm that’s going to allow me to connect more intimate intimately with you all provide more engagement and just overall better learning, listening and owner experience. Alright, so thank you in advance for those of you who are going to show your continued support. I can’t wait for this next chapter of the podcast. I am again glad in advance that you chose to continue to support and learn from me. So with that being said, Allsystemsgopodcast.com Go over there and subscribe. And I will see you online