[Video Tip] Automating your Marketing activities

Hannah McNamara from SME Academy (http://www.smeacademy.co.uk) explains how to take the time and effort out of small business marketing by automating and systemising marketing activities. This includes the use of autoresponders, YouTube and other techniques.

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Transcript

Most people I speak to admit that they can have a fairly inconsistent approach to marketing. It gets done when they have time or when sales are down and this creates a feast or famine situation – you’re either doing well or you’re scratching around for business.

So what can you do if you’re a small business without a dedicated Marketing team?

Well, the answer is to systemise your marketing and even your sales process. This isn’t as complicated as you might think. I’m guessing that you have certain sales and marketing activities which aren’t really unique. For example someone visits your website and is interested in getting more information so they send an email to the address on your ‘contact us’ page. Either you or one of your staff has to reply to the email attaching a brochure and then remember to follow up with them to find out whether they are likely to buy from you. If they do decide to buy then you’ll have to process the sale and if they don’t decide to buy on this occasion someone has to remember to contact them again at a later date.

This could all be automated.

The bottom line is that if you do any marketing activity more than once you can probably automate or part-automate it.

Many marketing software packages enable you to do any of the following:

• Capture people’s contact details and add them to your opt-in database
• Automatically send an email to them with the information that they have requested
• Follow up with them to see whether they have any questions
• Email them with your latest offers
• Send out a sequence of emails at set intervals telling them more about what you offer
• Suggest and up-sell additional items when customers are using your shopping cart
• Automatically unsubscribe and subscribe people
• Schedule seasonal Marketing messages weeks or months in advance
• And many, many more

We use a package called 1shoppingcart to automate our own marketing activities and it’s so much more cost effective than trying to do all of these activities manually. It gives us more time to spend with our clients.

If yours is a people-focused business and your customers and clients like to see who they’re dealing with, you could record a video to share your sales presentations or to share tips with them. YouTube is filled with informercials and demonstrations from lots and lots of businesses.

Automating your marketing can take some time planning, but it really is worth it if you can put in the time to do it now.

For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

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