“Time is more valuable than money.”
“Work ON your business not IN it.”
“Work smarter, not harder.”
How many times have we heard these quotes?
I bet a lot.
We can even both agree how “cliché” these messages are. But we can’t deny there’s a truth behind them, especially in running a business.
We now live in an environment that’s friendlier for business than ever before. With all the tools, methodologies and resources available to us – most for free – anyone can start and run a successful business.
The good news is you don’t even have to be hands-on, which is what I’m going to show you right now.
My goal is to help you understand that automating a business is easy. And in most cases, free.
In fact, once you learned these 7 techniques, you’ll realize how much money’s leaking from your business because you didn’t apply these methods in the past.
But before we proceed, let me give you 7 reasons why automation is beneficial.
- It makes the job easier for you and your team
- Reduces your overhead cost
- Gives you a birds-eye view of the whole sales funnel
- Streamlines the marketing process
- Allows your sales and marketing team to focus more on qualified leads
- Takes the guess work out of creating marketing campaigns
- Reduces conversion time
Lastly, let me give you a few reminders before jumping into the business automation bandwagon.
Identify your buyer’s journey first
A customer is going thru three stages of buying:
Each stage requires a different type of content. In automating your marketing, the best place to start is knowing which type of content goes where. That way, it’ll be easier to convert leads into buyers.
Prepare a content calendar
Here’s how inbound marketing strategist, Jamie Griffiths explains a content calendar:
“A content calendar is a shareable resource that marketing teams can use to plan all content marketing activity. The benefit of using the calendar format, rather than just a long list of content to be published, is that you can visualize how your content is distributed throughout the year. This allows you to:
- Plan content around key events in your industry or important dates
- See where you have gaps in your content plan, with plenty of warning to line up more content
- And make sure you have your content ready in plenty of time to publish”
Remember, information is today’s currency. If you want to buy your customer’s attention, you’ve got to be ready with a highly-targeted content every time.
Creating a content calendar helps your team in producing a constant stream of content – and attention from your target audience.
7 ways to automate your business
Automate your emails via an autoresponder
Find an ideal email marketing tool that will let you publish scheduled emails instantly. Among the famous service providers are Aweber, Mailchimp, and Getresponse.
The idea behind it is simple.
Let’s say someone signed up to your list via a squeeze page like this:
His email address goes to an autoresponder list being managed by your service provider.
Once listed, your autoresponder starts to work and send pre-written emails for a specific duration (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly). You can send a full sequence of email starting from welcoming your subscribers to promoting a product – on autopilot.
By employing an autoresponder, you don’t have to write emails every time. You can just write them in a batch and the service provider will take care of the rest.
Automate your social media
Other than email, there’s no better way to reach customers online than through social media. However, it would be hard to manage separate social media accounts while gathering pertinent data from each service.
This is where a social media management tool come in.
Ideally, a social media management tool should let you broadcast content, monitor activities and schedule updates in a single platform.
The top 3 social media tools you should check out are Hootsuite, Buffer, and SproutSocial.
Curate your content
They say, “The customer is always right.”
What a customer wants, the customer gets.
You can say the same with your content. By automating content curation, you’ll be able to find, organize and share the most relevant digital content for your target market.
There’s no guesswork.
No writer’s block.
And no pressure.
Websites, authors, gurus and even competitors have already done the hard work for you. All you have to do is to find these content and publish them to your site.
Give these content curation tools a try and see what fits your business (and budget):
Encourage guest posting
Inviting someone else to write content for you has some benefits:
- Builds a strong relationship with leaders and authorities around your niche
- Gives your business a wider exposure
- Leverages other blogger’s traffic source and audience
- Sends SEO link juice back to your site – thus improving your ranking
- Your content becomes more interesting with different ideas coming together from various sources
- Guest blogging means you can give yourself a break and leverage other people’s time and talent
I’ll leave you with a word of caution.
Be sure to choose a contributor who has good material to work with. Ask them for at least 3 sample articles and few topics they like to write about.
Put some buzz in your business
Another way to automate your marketing is to reach out to PR sites like HARO (Help a Reporter Out), ProfNet and PRLeads.
The idea behind it is simple.
You register on these sites as a source or an expert. Then, you will receive email inquiries about various topics such as health and travel. If reporters think you’ve got a newsworthy information, they’ll contact you.
The reporter gets his scoop and you’ve got exposure.
No need to hire a publicist.
Instead, the exposure comes to you. All you have to do is to get ready and prove them why you’re worth their time.
Hire a VA
Don’t have time to send emails to your subscribers?
Do you feel like writing blog articles twice a week is becoming a burden?
Are you worried about your SEO skills, yet you can’t find time to learn more about it?
If you have the same concerns, then the next best thing to do is to hire a professional virtual assistant or “VA”.
From graphic design and social media marketing to list building and content marketing, a competent virtual assistant can do so much more than you can do in a week.
Now, you can concentrate more on building your business and leave the technical stuff to a trusted VA.
If this is your first time hiring a VA, then I encourage you to read “Become Superhuman: How to hire a Virtual Assistant (Includes Exact Steps, Successful Templates, and More)” by Victor Mathieux, founder of Dept. of Motivation and Everest.
Find a consultant
If you’re not a marketing expert, then you can outsource that aspect of your business to a professional marketer.
A competent marketing consultant will be responsible for planning and executing marketing campaigns based on your business goals, customer profile, and budget.
You don’t have to suffer from information overload especially if marketing isn’t your cup of tea.
Plus, you can stay up to date with the latest in inbound marketing and stay ahead of the curve.
You can hire a consultant on a retainer basis or per project depending on your needs. The good news is you can find a competent consultant easier than 5 or 10 years ago.
You can start with LinkedIn, Facebook and online job portals such as Inbound.org.
Final Words
As you can see, having your business on auto-pilot is possible. Now all you have to do is create a high-quality product or service people will love to buy.
These 7 methods should work on any type of business. In fact, most Fortune 500 companies are already implementing these techniques.
So, if you’re ready to run your business on auto-pilot, give me a call or shoot me a message today.
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