Learning how to market presents enough challenges for the average entrepreneur.
Throw in automation and you have quite the code to crack in order to be successful.
If you think about it, it’s the process of cracking the code that business ideas are validated. Finding your business’s formula for success.
This is is why I hate the idea of “funnel hacking” or reverse engineering someone else’s funnel to try to mimc your way to success. The formula someone else found more than likely will not work for your business.
A real business solves a prevalent problem in a unique way. And it is worth all the blood, sweat and tears you put in it to find your way of solving the problem.
Automation can help you do that if you utilize it correctly.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.
A lack of understanding leaves their bank account lacking.
I hate seeing it.
This is why I’m presenting you with the 5 Commandments of Marketing Automation. Abiding by these commandments will lead you to the promise land of profits. Ignore them and your business may end up a profitless purgatory.
Commandment #1: Thou Shall Measure Everything
Do not execute your marketing automatically if you’re not going to measure what you’re doing. Metrics are you ongoing feedback loop. Your pulse for what’s really going on in your business.
Ignoring the numbers is like committing professional suicide. You simply cannot find your way to success blindly. You must be willing to always monitor and analyze your data even if it’s telling a story you don’t like hearing (which most of the times it does).
But building dashboards and reading them accurately is the only way to find a proven path of success for your business.
Commandment #2: Thou Shall Know Who They Are Talking T0.
If you haven’t heard there’s this thing called segmentation. It allows you to place people in groups depending on their expressed interests. Enabling you to talk to your leads differently depending on the group they have placed themselves in.
The most basic segmentation is between Customers and Non-Customers. Start with those two segments and continue to segment down as your marketing requires.
Commandment #3: Thou Shall Qualify Everybody.
You should be using automation as much as possible to qualify all of your leads. Remember, automation should afford you the privilege to engage with only the highest qualified leads while nurturing the rest of your leads until they become highly qualified. Here are a couple ways to do this:
- Streamline the information you need from every prospect and ask those questions on a web form they are required to fill out before every consultation you offer.
- Create LeadMagnets for different points along your funnel. That way just them opting in will qualify them for what kind of information they should receive next. Someone opting in for a free report is way less qualified than someone opting it to see a live demo of your product. Who do you want to spend your time with?
Commandment #4: Thou Shall Not Customize Pricing.
I cringe every time I hear someone customizing their pricing on the fly to a prospect. They think the more flexible they are the better chance they have with landing the deal. What they don’t know is how badly that same flexibility is killing their scalability.
When it comes to automation, remember streamlined pricing is your friend. When you have a static price set for your product it is a lot easier to build out strong campaigns that will convert by eliminating unnecessary variables that flexible pricing introduces. Eventually you can add more tiers of pricing, just wait until you’ve sold enough at one price point to understand what tiers you should be offering.
With a single price point scaling is much easier, marketing is a lot more straight forward, and selling happens a lot faster.
Commandment #5: Thou Shall Sell One Before Some.
All you need is one funnel. I will take that belief with me to the grave. Until you have created one funnel that successfully sells your product you should not dare create another product.
Sounds simple right?..Wrong!
I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I meet that have created a product that they didn’t know how to market and sell effectively. Instead of improving on their marketing funnel they decide that creating another product is the answer. Months and lots of money later they are left with shelves full of digital products with no shoppers.
Instead, you need to use focus, patience, and diligence to work on one funnel selling one product until the profits start pouring in. Only the people who have built a single successful sales funnel know how much work goes into building and optimizing it. They also know how rewarding it is.
So if you ever thought you needed multiple funnels with multiple products to be successful…”somebody done told you wrong”. You just need one profitable funnel that provides you with predictable profits. Once you have that in place you can build out from there and start adding more LeadMagnets and products.
Automation is a wonderful power in the hands of entrepreneurs and comes with great responsibility. It requires time and focus to really get it implemented and running correctly.
But trust me, there’s nothing like a fully functional system working for you to sell your product automatically 24/7. It’s a feeling I want every entrepreneur whose passionate about what they do to experience.
I hope this helps.
Automate responsibly my friends.
See ya next week!
Would love to hear from you…make sure you drop a comment below and let me know if you’ve seen the fruits of your labor abiding by these commandments.
