CRM Sales & Marketing Automation | Get Fact Up #88

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Chris Hogan - G'day world, Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here at Burleigh Heads for episode 88 of Get Fact Up. And today we're talking about Customer Relationship Managment (CRM) sales and marketing automation software that maybe you haven't heard of and maybe, just maybe you haven't ever tried this form of marketing or boosting your sales.

Andrew Groat - [Andrew] Mm.

CH - So, let's kick it of Andrew. I'm here with Andrew Groat in case you didn't know, cool. Usual suspects.

AG - So, I guess one of the things we talk about in house is that a lot of people have tried all sorts of marketing tactics, especially in the digital world now. You know, they've tried their Facebook advertising, they've tried their Google advertising

CH - Mm-hmm. and they've maybe even tried their LinkedIn marketing and possibly also YouTube discovery adds and whatnot. And, what we're seeing is that this is all well and good because. This is all well and good to do that except all of your customers are kind of being kept at arms reach until they become a customer, right?

AG - Mm. And it's important to, I guess, have a system in place that maybe once you've done all this marketing and they become a customer, you know how they actually became a customer and then be able to deliver them personalised, messaging onsite and in emails and communication going forward.

CH - Mm. And we've seen plenty of tools around for years now that have been able to do that, haven't we? So, some of them being Infusionsoft is one.

AG - Salesforce.

CH - Yeah that's a big one

AG - Although it doesn't

CH - a lot of people know

AG - do too much on its own, it's mostly the CRM.

CH - Yeah, lots of plugins and always seems to be considered a tool for the higher end of town except that it's not the only one that can be used for the higher end of town.

AG - Mm. And so, what else have we got?

CH - So, that's the thing. You're either using something that's sort of like enterprise level that claims to do everything and can be quite a lot of work and need quite a lot of knowhow to actually get going or using all these smaller tools that are only doing just one little job and things like that and everyone's sort of been patching things together like MailChimp for email,

- MailChimp marketing, and then something else for this and something else for this. We're now seeing a lot more of these smaller small business focused, marketing automation suites. And the big one always being spoken about now is ActiveCampaign or you know the hot topic I suppose is ActiveCampaign.

CH - Let's not pigeonhole it just for small businesses though.

- Oh no.

CH - This is absolutely doable for every size business.

- By that I mean it's accessible by small businesses

CH - Yes it is, yes. and it does the full suite of tools so it's definitely making waves. And my experience with it, it's great, like it just does everything it says it will, it does it simple, it does it effectively, it does it cheap.

- Mm.

CH - Yeah, in comparison if you compare it to other products like Infusionsoft and Salesforce that offer similar capabilities, then absolutely the pricing is good.

- Mm-hmm. And features and usability is actually up there compared

CH - Mm-hmm. to those others too, building out your automation campaigns is very user friendly. So, I guess it's important just to take a back step and anybody that hasn't considered this, then they need to understand what it actually means.

- Yeah, so when you're doing marketing everyone knows, the more relevant you can deliver you marketing, the more consistent your messages and the more in line with people's interests it is, the better it's gonna be. And it's not always that easy just to take a wild guess and deliver the right ads and things like that. You need to start having tools that can help funnel people and whittle people down into different segmentation. And this is when something like ActiveCampaign will come in. Where you start quite general and depending on people's actions they take or their interactions with certain marketing, they'll be put in different categorizations and then they start seeing different marketing based on that. Which is called automatic sequencing and that can be emails, that can be SMS's, that can be your website content being changed to be more relevant to what you know about that person. They might start seeing different Facebook ads and AdWords ads and things like that. So that's where ActiveCampaign, it's really the cornerstone of ActiveCampaign in my opinion is their automatic sequencing and you can basically just draw it out almost like a

CH - Flowchart wide-framed flowchart. Yeah, you can see all of your different nodes. So you can see if they click on this link in this email, then tag them this. If they're tagged this then they get this message on the website, if not, then they get this message or, you know.

- Mm. It's really cool, the way it all works. So, it just allows you to get a much better understanding of all the behavioural sort of data of your customers, potential customers and actual customers.

CH - Yeah, I really love it. So for example, you may not know if somebody's male or female coming into your website. And that just to start with, of course you know, you've got your different navigations. You can see where you're getting a lot of traffic, you can see the traffic but individually you don't know if they're male or female

- Mm-hmm. even names can be ambiguous, you know for example Chris. So, it's a great way to then be able to say, okay this person has come in, they're never getting through the site and I don't know much about them except I am tracking it. I'm tracking all of this activity, and then boom, they make a sale and all of a sudden that file in the CRM system actually goes, yeah for the last 60 days.

CH - Yeah, we've seen everything that they've done on the website, on the Facebook page, if they came through AdWords we've seen their AdWords activities and stuff like that, so.

- Yeah, not necessarily everything, that's a bit creepy. Not necessarily everything they've done, but just being able to attribute some of their.

CH - Well everything trackable Yeah, everything trackable.

- that they've

CH - That they've interacted with basically.

- Yeah, it's not like breaching any privacy rules. Let's just say that. So yeah, for example they may have been on your Facebook profile and clicked a link from your Facebook profile. Then they may have been on your Instagram profile and clicked that. So you can find out essentially how long they've been, I guess stalking you, actually

CH - Mm. looking at your content and digesting your content before even making

- Mm-hmm. a sale or entering a form or an inquire form. Which is fantastic because then you get stats and understand well, how long does it take for me to

CH - Mm. from the day that I start advertising on social media to the day they will make a sale, how long is that? And traditionally it's always been around three months for people to I guess, understand a brand and then make a purchase.

- Mm-hmm. But, there's all shapes and size businesses out there now, different price points so some could take an entire year some some could take two, five years.

CH - Mm-hmm. We know with Get Fact Up that we've had people listening for over a year before they actually have inquired about our services so that's just some feedback for you guys. If you're going to start something like Get Fact Up, then plan to be in it for the long term.

- Mm-hmm. That's one content marketing tool.

CH - And that's where you need something like that, because like you said, you've gotta know the life cycle of your customers and you also have to know sort of like a relative score. It's like once they get to a certain heat level, in terms of prospect , are they ready to be pitched to?

- That's my trick mate. So , I'm always the one loosing voice. So, it's a fantastic way of understanding your audience better and seeing that it has the CRM associated with it.

CH - Mm-hmm, yeah. More people need to have a CRM for their customers and I just love the fact that you can, not just rely on email marketing to be spat out from that, you can SMS people.

- Mm. And for retailers and anybody I guess that has a physical location and events that occur at those locations,

CH - Mm-hmm. That's fantastic for actual ROI so actual marketing and actual tasks that you need people to come and see you in store

- Mm. or visit now or purchase within a time frame. And SMS marketing is obviously a fantastic way to do that because it's just, emails just get lost in the ether now.

CH - That's right because it's not just a mailing list, it's more of a logical sequence that people go through. You might have them on say, they receive certain emails and then there's one important one that you cannot let them miss, they have to do something about it. Maybe two days later if they don't get that, if they haven't opened their email yet, there's something that checks have they opened that email, no, send them an SMS reminding them to check that email. You know, if you have a time

- Yeah. sensitive offer or something like that. So it's extremely powerful.

CH - Mm. This is how you get the open rights that you typically wouldn't be able to get just with a normal email blasting sort of suite, you know?

- So, any type of business can and should be using this software and we've seen many service based companies use Infusionsoft for argument sake as their first protocol. The reason why they've been using it is because Infusionsoft is sort of the most popular

CH - Mm. lowest price piece of software to come into the market in the very early stages after Salesforce had already, was at the top end of the market. And yeah, if you're getting all of those follow up emails, it's highly likely that it's coming from some automated tasks

- Mm. or automated actions. But, that's not to say that you can't actually improve on those crappy messages that you may have received from other people. So don't, I guess don't put sales and marketing automation into the box that maybe you've received, the same box that you've been receiving those messages from.

CH - Mm. So some of them will be really really poor, really poor follow up messages and all the rest of it. One of the biggest things that we know that lets sales and marketing automation down is content and hence

- Mm-hmm. why we produce so much content here for our clients. When we plug in a sales and marketing automation campaign, well, the amount of content that you need to produce just skyrockets.

CH - Mm. And so, keep that in mind too. It's a fantastic tool, you can take baby steps in getting involved in them.

- Mm. But, it's really important to keep the content that you are sending out to people rich and actually helpful and maybe educational. You know, what's the three things that we always say? Inspire, educate, or entertain and if you can do all three you're a triple threat.

CH - Mm. We'll close it off with that?

- Yeah, I think that's about it. I mean we could probably keep

- Good one. going, but it's, yeah.

CH - Thanks a lot for watching, it's MeMedia's Get Fact Up. We're here every week here in the MeMedia Studio at Burleigh Heads and you can subscribe to our emails on memedia.com.au. You can watch all of the previous episodes there and by all means come and like us on Facebook and even LinkedIn. Thanks and we'll see you next week.

- Thank you.