Speaker 1: It is time to talk about my all time favorite topic in marketing automations, baby. I'm excited. Woo marketing automation. I live by it. So first of all, this video is actually not for big companies and brands or even small brick and mortar businesses. This is for the creators. Me and you bloggers, podcasters, online business entrepreneurs, or if you just work in digital marketing, this is not for like small business sales force. I'm a salesman pipeline leads people. This is not that marketing automation. Now that I've said that here's what we're going to talk about. I'm going to go through the four really broad types of marketing automations. I'm going to give you my recommendations on how to use these. And then I'm going to give you a few tool examples and stuff I've actually used. All right. So let's hit the big two that everybody's probably already heard of, but then stick around. Don't leave the video just yet. I actually have some things I can guarantee you probably never really thought about before or heard of later in the video. I'm saving the best for last, but let's start off with social media. First. Why is this important? This is pretty widely understood, but scheduling things to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, all those things can take up a lot of time. Luckily for us, there exists a multitude of tools to make social media scheduling and automations way easier. And I'm about to share some examples in a second, but first Pete's recommendation. I recommend most content creators who aren't like live on social every single day. If you work for a company, that might be what you're doing. But for those of us who aren't quite that hardcore, I recommend going in maybe bi-weekly or even once a month, if you can and schedule things out in bulk. As then I don't actually recommend the whole, like I'm going to post this one thing and use a tool like smarter queue to automatically post it every single week from here to eternity. I actually recommend using social a little bit smarter than that. Actually being social, encouraging engagement and replies and shares and stuff like that, rather than just like publishing your blog posts, links or stuff. I suggest going through every couple of weeks, scheduling things out for the next couple of weeks, and then do that again next month or every couple of weeks. Tool recommendations. There are a lot buffer meet Edgar. I have two that I generally recommend. Number one is what I've used for three years now. Smarter queue. There's a link in the description below this video. I like it because I can do those evergreen scheduling. Like I mentioned what not to do a second ago, but I can actually set it to expire after I post this like five times or after a set date or something like that. You can connect a lot of social profiles to it. I won't go into the smarter queue. I actually have a full review and tutorial of it on my website, but I use and recommend that another one I actually love is later specifically for Instagram, but you can actually start to connect different profiles. I believe, and the user interface is fantastic. It's pretty, it's easy to use and it just works. And considering a lot of people are on Instagram, not exclusively, but primarily later.com is a really great tool for that. And I actually think not going to talk about Pinterest. Cause I think almost everybody who is into Pinterest marketing probably uses tailwind, but go do some, you know, Googling or YouTubing and find stuff on TOM. Cause I'm not going to talk about Pinterest here. Cause I don't like it next up the big one. This is the big marketing automation that every business everywhere is probably doing a little bit of already, but I'm gonna tell you how to make it better. Email marketing, sending notifications to your audience, to your subscribers. And why is this important? We'll start with there. The email list is still important. It's 2021 right now. It's going to be 2022 a year from now. It's still going to be important. Then it's one of the only channels that gives you, I'm not gonna say complete control, but it gives you a lot of control of when you show up for people. Tweets last a couple of minutes. Facebook posts last a couple of hours. Pens last. I don't even know how long it's a different marketing strategy, sending email. The money's in the list. They always say that, but that's absolutely true. So Pete's recommendation on where to start. Now I recommend you call us a million things. Funnels. They talk about email marketing, a lot welcome sequence, autoresponders, that sort of stuff. I recommend going in your email service provider of which I'll give you some recommendations in a second and go ahead and create a general welcome sequence of one to five emails that will welcome and nurture your subscribers. I recommend this for small businesses. I recommend this for bloggers. I recommend this for influencers and anybody really. If you have a lead magnet or a freebie that you're using for your list building, deliver that first and the first email or whatever, or maybe you just linked to it. I don't know, but build a welcome sequence of at least a couple of emails to tell your story and qualify your audience on autopilot. You can go set this up in a MailChimp or wherever, have those emails drip out over time. You can add like a day or maybe a couple of days in between the emails and have it set up where every time someone joins your email list, send out this welcome sequence. Again, tell your story about your topic. And then qualify your customers as in tell them who this newsletter is for and who it's not for. If you are a small business owner, if you were in sales as a career, do you even blog is not for you. Here's who I target bloggers and podcasters and YouTubers who want to make money on the internet. I tell people that in those first couple of emails, this is helping to turn your audience into followers and hopefully eventually customers. If you sell stuff and you monetize, which I'm assuming you probably do, this is the big one. This is the biggest automation. And quite frankly, one of the easiest you can get started with grab an email service provider, implement one automation that you can kind of push people through from wherever you collect emails. Talk about that in a second, and then just send them one to five emails, telling your story, telling a little bit about what you do, which will help qualify like, yes, this is for me, or yes, this is not for me. That's what you want to do. And of course, at the end, you should pitch products. If you have them and drop affiliate links and monetize that audience, that's what I talk about here on do you even blog tool recommendations? This is up for debate because this is a hot topic when it comes to blogging and online business. I can't make a solid recommendation for email platforms right now because they're all starting to become the same. They're all getting the same features. It wasn't like that five years ago. I use active campaign and MailChimp. I use active campaigns for my funnels and I actually export subscribers through that after they're done with my automations and stuff into MailChimp. And that's where I actually send the newsletters for me personally. But of course they have automations too at MailChimp. I recommend both of those. I think they're great. I also recommend convert kit. I also recommend drip. I've used both of those extensively over the past several years for do you even blog? And there's only great. I generally approve. There's also flow desk is really new on the scene and I've heard really great things. I haven't actually used them myself, but it looks great. And it's a low price ticket and they apparently have automation. So you can do a welcome sequence and autoresponders in all of those. I'm going to break the rules on number three here in my marketing automations. YouTube video. Let's talk about this. This is my notes, but if you'll notice this just text, it was printed out from a Google doc, which I use as a template. Templates are my next automation thing. And now before you scream, leaving this YouTube video, let me explain myself. Marketing and automations in general are just doing any repetitive task. Any repetitive tasks can almost always be automated or made more efficient in some way. And I am going to count this under automations, creating and or buying templates to use for fill in the blank. There's a lot of stuff. I have examples that will come up in a second, but the point is we as marketers create a bunch of content. You create podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos, sales, emails, sales pages, landing pages, headlines for yada, yada, yada, social media posts, right? We create a lot of content and one of the most time-consuming parts of this there's editing, but there's also starting from scratch. If I asked you to go design some social media, share images or some pins for Pinterest or whatever that is, it's much easier to start from some templates and then customize to your topic at hand or whatever that is, how you want it to look. Then it is to start from scratch. Same thing with blogging. Here's my recommendation. And then I'll give you some examples of this. I recommend feel free to purchase most templates for anything, whether it's blog posts or social media, share images or graphics or whatever, they're actually pretty cheap and affordable. Usually that said, I think you should also approach your content creation with the intentionality of, could this be a template? I have this mindset because I'm lazy and I really like saving time. Even if it means taking more time to figure out how to save time, but that's beside the point. What I really mean is I think you should adapt this mindset of going through all of your blogging or business activities and approaching it, looking at it from the point of view of, could this be a template? Could this be made into a template somehow? And if it's content you create on the internet, the answer is probably yes. In some small way examples. First of all, hashtag self promo incoming one hour blog post is actually a suite of templates that I sell for 27 bucks. This is a template that you can use in actually a couple of different ways, but it helps you save time writing a piece of content. And I actually use it for YouTube. That's why I held this up earlier. I used one hour blog post to create this YouTube video and it helped me with the outline. It helped me figure out what I'm writing, like what I actually want to talk about and what subtopics are in here. I use this every time I create a piece of content on the internet. That's the one example. You can go pay me money. If you want to, to buy one hour blog posts, it's a way to not start from scratch and get up and creating way faster. Here's another example. My friend, Liz Wilcox, she's an online impact member. Also in my master, my group, she created an email template subscription membership. I think is what she's calling it. She's basically giving people email ideas every single month so they can email their newsletter, the email, their list. She's helping people go from zero to one. Like you're not sure what to write about. I'm going to give you like more than enough ideas for emails. You can send just not starting from scratch. If you create content, there's no need to start from scratch. And I actually have lots of sales email and sales page templates and my own programs that I offer, but you can find these anywhere. Most importantly, I want you to look at your content creation process from this viewpoint of, could this be a template? Is there anything here that I can make easier and faster next time? I actually consider that automations. I do. It's not like a specific tool that does it, but it's more of general tools and templates that you can use to save time for the fourth type of automations. I want to talk about our integrations, integrating different pieces of software, integrating all the tools, the landing page builders, the emails, the website on WordPress or whatever that is. Why is this important? If there's anything that is repetitive in your business, like we talked about earlier, it could probably be automated in some way. Every little contact you have with a customer, potential customer, prospect, audience member, email, subscriber, all this stuff, delivering your freebies, enrolling them in your course. Once they make a purchase or redirecting the URLs. I mean, there's a million things here. It can all be automated. And just for more clarity, what I'm talking about when I say integrations is any automation you can do whatsoever. That doesn't involve actually communicating to your customer. That would be what we talked about with social media and with automating email or whatnot. This is connecting everything on the backend, all those moving parts. And there's kind of three that I want to touch on. Number one would actually be native integrations. Now, if you use convert kit, you can actually create landing page URLs right there. And you have a forum for people to get on your email list, and then they can opt in and then they can get triggered an automation that sends them that welcome sequence that we talked about and actually send them the PDF that they want to download. The point is you don't need any external tools in order to make that happen. You could do that all on convert kit. That's something that I just described there. You can do with MailChimp or MailerLite or anything. Now, how about stuff like podia? Podia is what I use to deliver my online courses and all my digital products. Actually, it's the same thing. I can build a sales page in podia. I can drop the price. I can change all that stuff in podia. I can deliver the products to people when they sign up, when they pay me stuff via podia. And a native integration would be active campaign and podia. I can do that right in the dashboard. I don't need any third party tools. I just use those first two parties, podia and active campaign or podia and MailChimp or podia and MailerLite or whatever that is. That's a native integration. You don't need third party tools. It's just. Those two softwares can communicate with each other, lead pages and MailerLite. Those things can communicate with us a native integration. Now there's actually two more. One's the big one Zapier or Zapier. I have no idea. It looks French to me. I want to say Zapier though. I don't know. Zapier is the third party tool that if something doesn't have a native integration, like this tool that I have, doesn't talk to my other tool, you can probably use Zapier to integrate those. And not only that, but you can do it in multiple steps. You can have multiple tools and platforms talking to each other. Whenever something happens, whenever your audience does this or does that, there's a billion different possibilities with a tool like this, because it connects with almost everything and you can do almost anything you can imagine. It's absolutely mind boggling. Start with the simple stuff. There's no need to go off the deep end, but you can use this tool to connect all of your other tools. One last one, only because I think it's really cool is IFTTT. If this, then that, if this, then the, I don't know if I said that right, but the point is this is almost like a Zapier, but it's kind of for more personal stuff. You can use it for some business stuff as well. Let's say you wanted to send yourself a daily text message reminder every day at 8 AM with a motivational quote. I've done that before, by the way. And I used IFTTT to do that. You can also do, you can connect WordPress. You can connect your social media tool, probably like buffer or something like that. Google drive Dropbox. Like there's a million different things you can use this for. You can do all of those things with Zapier, by the way. I'm not gonna lie, but I have TTT is more so free and it just kind of looks and works differently, but try that one out too. That's a third party tool that can help integrate all your steps. And last, I want to just mention a few other things scheduling. Like there's a lot of other automations in here that we didn't talk about that didn't really fall into any of those categories. Scheduling is a big one for me. I actually just signed up for something called tiny cow. I'll provide a link in the description below. I used to use Calendly. I don't really like it and I didn't want to pay for it. And their free plan was really limited. So I actually paid $19 for tiny cow. It's awesome. So far, this can automate the whole let's book a guest for my podcast or let's book one-on-one meetings with coaching clients or whatever that is. I don't know why I'm doing this. It's a scheduling tool that makes scheduling way easier, way more automated. There's also stuff like deadline funnels, which I use for marketing urgency and, you know, countdown timers that are evergreen and on my sales page and on the emails. And that's like one little automation right there. And there's actually a million things like this. That's you could probably make more efficient and automate scheduling being the biggest one, in my opinion, that could have been its own category. If you do any meetings with anybody ever, and they all integrate with zoom, usually to like create zoom links and all that stuff can be automated. Almost anything that is repetitive in business and creation content creation can be automated. Anything that is repetitive can be automated. So I'm actually going to sign off from this little video right here. I hope you're enjoying this series on funnels. I will provide links in the description below to a bunch of these tools and stuff like that and hashtag YouTube, like comment, subscribe or whatever, whatever. Thank you for watching blog tribe and I'll see you next time. Adios.