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Hey! Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. Clarence Fisher, your host, and today we're talking about marketing automation. It's not a luxury anymore. It's absolutely necessary, I promise you. And today's fast-paced world, falling behind is not an option. You know this. Automation is the key to staying ahead. It's easy, it's effective, and it's essential. Or as they say in the country, Essentia. Don't go anywhere. I'm going to show you how to get it started in your business and not one, not two, not three. Yes, three easy steps. We'll be right back.

You are listening to Local Market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher - uncovering the tools, tactics and strategies, the most successful small businesses use to dominate their local market and own the block.

All right, we are back and today's been a great day and I want to share something with you. If you have kids and for sure like grandkids, then you'll definitely appreciate this, so you'll be able to relate. So this morning, I went as usual, after, I have a little seven o'clock devotional that I have with a few guys. And right after that, I go and drive about 35, 40 minutes to walk one of my granddaughters to the bus stop. This is the very first year that she has had to catch the bus. And her mom was like freaking all out at the very beginning of the year, like, “oh my goodness”. And of course, you know, me the guy, being a guy that I am, I'm like, well, I mean, come on man, and being the grandparent, you know what we had to do to get to school? You have no idea what we fought on the way to school and walk uphill both ways, snowing, fighter pilots, all this stuff happening just to get to homeroom. So I'm like, she can walk. But anyway, we go back and forth and finally her mom's like, okay, we're at lunch. And she's like, okay, and I can just see it in her face, you know how you can…

And my heart was like, okay, so yeah, I mean, this is why I have my business. This is why we do these things so that we can do these things. I mean, I used to pick her up from school so we can do this. All right, she's advancing. She's never caught the bus before. And so I would drive over and long story short, and it's like 30, 35 degrees now in Tulsa. But long story short, today, I said, do you think that we're ready for me to take this off my schedule? And she said, “Yeah, pop. I've been meaning to tell you that for a couple of weeks, I think I'm ready”. And if you could've just seen a single tear because of the growth that happened from, at first she was anxious, she was even anxious at first. And you know I'd go and show up and we'd talk and I started using this as life lesson time.

Really. This is probably why she's like, “Hey, you don't have to come back anymore”. I'm done with that because it would be like we would talk about life lessons, but I would use the time for me or say to use the time for me, that’s not it. I flip frame, in my mind is like, you're not driving all the way across town just to spend 15 minutes for her to get on the bus. You're driving across town because one day you won't be here and these moments will mean something hopefully to her. So that was that. But today she let me know that she's ready to fly. So it was super, super awesome and that's what we're going to do with you. I'm not going to walk you to school, but I am going to help you get this marketing automation setup here in your business because I know probably, if you're like most people, you're spending too much time on repetitive marketing tasks.

You know what I'm talking about. You're sending individual emails, especially response emails for people you meet at networking groups and stuff like that, or people who fill out your contact us form. Even, heaven forbid, you could be posting to social media manually and sporadically and trying to track your customer/client/patient interactions across all these multiple platforms, you know Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff, kind of doing that manually. It's like trying to, you know that guy that you see at the circus that's juggling while he is riding a unicycle. I have no idea how difficult that is, but that has to be difficult. But that's kind of how it is. But imagine if you could take all of these time-consuming tasks and they could take care of themselves where you just spend a little bit of time getting it set up and then it takes care of itself.

What if you could streamline all that into a seamless automated process? Well, guess what? You can and it's simpler than you think. So let's do it. The very first thing that we want to do is identify the repetitive task that we want automated. And the best way to do this is visually, you know, if you still have a whiteboard in your office. So crazy. I just sold a 10 foot by four foot whiteboard that took up this huge wall in my office, sold it on Facebook marketplace. Never ever, ever, ever have I sold anything on Facebook marketplace. Back in the day, I was the Craigslist king, but I did not know if it translated on Facebook. And evidently it does baby. And then as I made my post on marketplace, I'm sitting here, this looks really markety. I wonder if people are going to be like, this smells scammy, but marketing copywriting works no matter what.

Sold that bad boy. Then I sold, what else did I sell? I sold something, oh some, a light kit to build and green screen so that we can get upgrade our equipment in here and this stuff is going. So finally my wife's like, what else can you sell? So I'm like, I dunno, dig around here, find some stuff. I'm going to set this up in the corner and take the shots and all that stuff. But anyway, how did I get off in the Facebook marketplace? Oh, the whiteboard, my bad. It's been that kind of day. So the whiteboard, if you can visualize it, you can do that or you can do it on Canva or I don't know, Microsoft Word, whatever you use to visualize it, you can just take a piece of paper and write this bad boy down you and whoever's handling this with you.

But you want to identify and list all of the tasks that you are doing that are eating up your time. We're talking about tasks that you do over and over and over, like sending the welcome emails to new subscribers for sure. I mean the people that you meet when you're networking and all that stuff. One of the best things that I did, and it started when I was in BNI, I would always get these business cards. And so you're going and you're meeting people, and I set up our system to where I could, I mean this is after meeting you and then I go down and I'm sitting down at my table. I would scan the business card, the business card would get transcribed into our email marketing system. And then depending on when I am doing this, it's going to tag you number one as a new person that has to go through our welcome series of emails.

But before that, it's going to send you a nice to meet you email, it was nice to meet you. Hey, here's all of my information. And then also, here's a free gift for you, which at that time was a PDF of our book. All of this from just meeting you. I'll tell you, we used to send it out immediately. As soon as I tag, I would scan the business card, but then it started getting kind of weird when I would go to night events. So I'm at an event at eight, nine o'clock, and then I finally leave and I'm in the car because I'm trying to make sure that I get this done now. And then you get this email, it's like, nice to meet you. Here's all this stuff. It may not be as weird now, but for whatever reason it was weird then.

So we put in an automation that said, Hey, if this person's being tagged, if this person's being added after 5:00 PM don't send it until in the morning. And so all of this would happen just for me talking to you, shaking your hand. And then the next time I go sit down, I pull out your card, I scan it, it goes up, and you're set in our system. And this happens time and time again, and I don't have to worry about it. Same exact same thing for if we get a referral and we do this regardless. This is something that you can do. It's called promptings. It used to be send out cards. But I mean if I get a referral and we go in to send out cards and we have cards that are, it's called promptings, not send out cards that are already designed and that goes out about thanks for the referral, and then there's a couple of brownies that goes out with it.

And that is done immediately as soon as I get off the phone with the referral, whether this referral becomes a piece of business or not. Because what you want to do, and the reason we do that is because you want to incentivize the action, whether it is not up to the person who is referring me whether that person becomes a client or not. What I want to do is reward just even bringing my name, bringing my name up. So that's something else that you want to do. But anyway, list all of the repetitive tasks that you're doing. If you're posting the same content on Tuesday, you've got Taco Tuesday, your restaurant, right? List that down. You don't want it. Here's a kicker. When you automate these tasks, you're not just going to be saving time, you're going to open up a whole new world of possibilities because when your mind is free, you're going to start thinking about all kinds of other things that you can add to this.

We call this the power of one. If you think of not sending things out to a whole bunch of people, but just one person, think about that one person, your one perfect person, and then what are the things that you would do for that person if you could, and let's automate those things. Okay? So grab a pen, start jotting down those repetitive tasks because moving forward, we're going to get some freedom here and automate those things. Okay? So that's step one. Step two is now we're going to choose the right automation tools. Now here, I know there are a ton of automation tools. What I'm going to share with you right now are a few that we have used personally and that I am okay with recommending. Number one, we got started with. I mean, MailChimp is still good, okay? If you have MailChimp, use MailChimp.

Man, I thought they started getting a bit expensive after you get out, which is part of their thing after you get past the free account. But still, they're still good. You can use MailChimp. Another good one is because we used to use MailChimp for clients all the time, is keep, it used to be Infusionsoft, we used that for over a decade. This is so crazy used. Infusionsoft, we also have used ActiveCampaign. And ActiveCampaign is still great. ConvertKit is good for emails. Let's see what else I would say I would, I'm going to send you to either ActiveCampaign, because Infusionsoft, they changed their name to Keap because it started being, people started calling it Confusionsoft because it's really, really a beast to use, but we're programmers really. So it was nothing to us. But ActiveCampaign is really robust and really easy to use. And then also I'm going to throw in their lead connector, which is our personal software, which is what we have moved from Keap after a decade to our own software.

And it's what we are, we offer with our clients, and it's called Lead Connector. And if you want to check that out, you can go to local marketer pro, local marketer pro.com and check that out. But it doesn't matter. I mean, you got to pick a tool that you enjoy. So, try these things and if you don't get a feel for it, it doesn't really work. It's really difficult for people on your team to get around, then don't use it. I mean, something has to fit just right. It's like Cinderella slipper, it has to fit you. Okay, so you've got options. So now number one, we've written down everything that we need to automate. Now we're going to choose the right automation tools. Most of them have either 14-day trials or things like that. Do your homework, compare them whenever you're ready. Get the free demo or 14-day trial for Lead Connector.

You can get a free demo. Just go to Local Marketer Pro and tell me or whoever that, or you can put it in the form. Say you said I could have a free demo, so a free demo account, so check it out. And I said, did I say free demo account? I said, you can have a free demo, not a free demo account. There's a difference there. And then implement and monitor. This is number three. Start slow, take one task, implement it. And this is where I don't want to turn this into a commercial. This is where something like our software would help is because we can help set up that work those workflows for you, like we set that first workflow up and then record the video on how it was set up. And then you or whoever can set it up after that, or we can continue to set it up.

But I also think that ActiveCampaign will onboard you as well. But the point is implemented and then monitor what's happening after you've picked the tool. The next thing is just roll up your sleeves, implement it and see if it works. But here's the thing, you have to nurture it. You got to watch it. It has to grow. And this is what I'm saying by starting small. Start with one automation. If it's the business card thing, start with the business card thing. No, no, no, no. Don't even start with that. Start with, I'll tell you what to start with. You start with the welcome email series for people who are just becoming aware of you. Everything works with tags now. So, you can input somebody into the system, and you can tag them lead or you can tag them, whatever naming convention you want, new awareness, and then those people can start getting your welcome email.

Here's about us. A few days later they can get an email about this is our story. How do we get started? Few emails. So, you can have three, let's say three emails at most, five that are going out to everybody that you just met. And here's the beauty of these systems. As you start offering free what we call lead magnets. Let's say you offer a free checklist or something and they go, and they download that. Well, let's say they've already gotten your welcome email system. You can have your system actually look for that to see if they've been in the system before and not send them their welcome sequence anymore. It just sends them the toolkit and then they can be in line to get your newsletter, say every month or every other week or whatever. This is just such a time saver.

If you are not automating all of these things, you're falling behind, and you can tell when I get really, really serious about something like that, just do it. Just do it. So start with the welcome email campaign. Anything else you should have that. A couple of other things you can automate. I mean, have your newsletter out there. Automate your review requests. So, a lot of service people, I mean if you're a vet, you're a chiropractor, you have an auto shop, I mean you have this in your POS systems for sure that are going to send out the email asking for a review. You want to automate that. I mean, there's tons of stuff. And let me know. I mean, let me know. Reach out to me and let me know what you've automated. So those are the steps, is write down what you need to automate or all the repetitive tasks. Do the homework on your marketing system, your all-in-one system.

We'll give you a list here in the show notes, and then start with pick one task, implement it, and then monitor it. And when it saves you time, you're going to be like, oh my goodness, what else can we automate? Can I get my bed made? Well, I guess if you hire a maid, you can get your bed made right? So everything can be automated. Alright, I hope this helps you short one today. I'm going to catch you next week and I really do want to hear from you. If you have not yet signed up for the local Market Monopoly newsletter, shame on you. Go do that right now. Local markets monopoly.com and I'll see you next week. Go own the block.

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