Firstly, what is marketing automation?
Marketing automation can be defined as the art of automating your business’s marketing activities to increase efficiency, decreasing time spent on labor-intensive marketing tasks from email marketing to managing your Google Ads campaign. As platforms and algorithms become more sophisticated the opportunities marketing automation presents become ever more attractive for business owners but is it really the digital jet-pack that will elevate your business to online success like some are proclaiming?
Marketing automation might be hyped as the next big thing in marketing, especially in these socially distanced times, but it is by no means a silver bullet business tool.
We are living in an era of business ownership that is both exciting and daunting. With the outbreak of COVID-19 globally, many business owners are being forced to take their businesses exclusively online and use digital marketing and marketing automation to help them operate efficiently. Whilst it might look easy, there are also some easy traps to fall into when deploying digital marketing systems as a novice.
Any business owner with a domain name and a product or service can set up their own marketing. There is a glut of SAS (software as a service) platforms available for business owners to trial, use free for a month or sign up to for ongoing monthly direct debits such as Mailchimp, Canva, Logo Joy, Go Daddy, Wix, Squarespace, Hubspot, Hootsuite, and even Facebook Business Manager, Walk Me and thousands of others. They all promise a unique and seamless user experience – for even the most non-tech users. Their glossy, user interfaces with dopamine inducing ‘drag and drop’ functionality, visually stunning graphics, bolt-on plugins, and APIs – all curated to make the busy business owner’s marketing practice ‘easy and time-saving’. Whether you choose to set up a marketing funnel, an email list, Facebook ads, Google ads or a blog, you can do it all yourself – or can you?
Do you know how to set marketing automation up for success or are you just experimenting?
We all like to think we can learn a new skill and do things ourselves, especially when we are running a business and every dollar counts. However, when it comes to digital marketing, the poor man does pay twice, and there is a lot to know and to continue learning about when it comes to managing and navigating these tools efficiently and consistently to create real, long-lasting results.
Mastering the craft of marketing automation takes a full-time healthy obsession with data, technology, design, and development – which many do not have nor have an interest in developing.
Every day in our business new clients and small business owners come to us, strung out and exhausted, trying to do marketing automation themselves, but failing, or worse have put their trust in the wrong so-called ‘experts’ to do it for them and wasting thousands of hard-earned dollars, and need us to fix the damage.
Once known as the ‘coloring in department’, advertising agencies have gone from creating pretty billboards and TV ads to having the opportunity to be the Captains of the digital marketing industry, bravely navigating their clients through the murky waters of marketing automation technology.
Goop Digital’s founder, Karl Morris has seen this journey first hand, and is a digital marketing veteran. Hailing from big ad agency George Patts, moving into selling media at Yellow Pages in the early noughties – to having the foresight to re-train himself as a digital marketing specialist before most even knew how to set up a domain.
Fast forward 13 years, and we can confidently say that most of Goop Digital’s 700 business owner clients are expert technicians at their craft, whether that be making wedding dresses, running 4 x 4 driving experiences or sourcing and installing window coverings.
They are not – nor want to be, expert technicians at marketing their business. They just want to dominate the market.
You are better to invest your dollars in a trusted marketing advisor
To be a good marketer, you have to be committed to staying abreast of the constantly moving and changing trends in culture, your target audience’s behaviors, their preferred touchpoints and how they engage with them. Then you have to engineer and tweak a communications pathway to get to them.
Becoming a marketing expert in your own business is a balancing act. You need to know not only the latest tools available, but also when to use them, where to use them and whom to use them on, and the messaging to use in each once executed can read and interpret the data to grow your bottom line and business.
Marketing automation might look easy at the outset, but we see many who jump to the execution – posting the ads, without creating a strategy first. Their efforts usually yield little to no results – leads or sales, or they do not give the campaigns the time needed to achieve those results – and they give up, convinced that it’s all too hard.
The marketing landscape today requires an expert who will partner with you to market your business, whilst also listening to your operational goals.
To wrap it up
At the end of the day, you can have all the marketing automation tools in the world, but if you don’t have a good advisor telling you how to use the tools, it’s going to be a waste of money. A good marketing expert is honest and will tell you the minimum that you need to spend in order to get the results to meet your goals. They will show you data to back up those costs, and they will keep you informed with data every step of the way. They will steer you away from ego-driven, subjective marketing decisions, and help you to tune into the customer’s needs. They will push you to take educated risks to grow and move out of the crowded competitive space and into a category all of your own.
Goop Digital can prove year on year growth for all if not most of its clients. We have an occasional few who just don’t align with our honest approach, preferring to go their own way and we hold no grudge. Most of the clients who leave us, end up coming back, saying that they were sorry in the end that they left, and that the service they got elsewhere didn’t prove the same return on investment.
If you need help navigating the world of digital marketing automation for your business, please give our Geelong office a call.
