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The Level Up Creators podcast is for digital creators ready to take their business to the next level. You'll learn valuable strategies and hear engaging stories from industry pros and digital creators who have walked the path of scaling up.
Whether you're tired of tap dancing for the algorithm or seeking to build real wealth - without the burnout - this podcast offers proven methods and practical advice to help you elevate your business, on your terms. Join us!
hey hey you're listening to the LevelUp creators podcast Amanda Northcutt here founder and CEO we help digital creators
build thriving sustainable businesses they love we're so glad you're here today as we peel back the curtain on the
world of marketing Automation and what it can do for your Creator first business welcome I am joined again today
by our head of Revenue strategy and marketing automation extraordinaire Natalie Williams welcome Natalie thanks
Amanda and a couple of weeks ago I was on Neil Schaefer's podcast the your digital marketing coach podcast which
we'll link up in the show notes and he and I had a great discussion about marketing automation definitely check
out that show and what Natalie and I are about to discuss is definitely not like a carbon copy of NE onized discussion by
any stretch of the imagination but rather a more specific look under the hood at what Market marketing automation
actually is what role it plays in Creator first businesses and how to start implementing it in your business
this is going to be very practical very tactical um and if you're coming in not knowing anything about marketing
automation you are going to level up your knowledge very very quickly in the next 30 or 45 minutes so let's get
started by talking about what marketing automation is in layman's terms so
marketing automation is the software and system that lets you communicate with your subscribers at scale on their terms
in a way it's sort of like a behind the scenes automated sales machine working for you around the clock always on your
subscribers terms which is a very important Point yeah and a thoughtful marketing automation machine will
connect every digital touch point you have with customers and prospective customers with a backend tool or two
that is carefully configured to take your community of followers on a thoughtful customer Journey that leads
to purchase or whatever you're asking them to do and a way to think about it is it's a way to be able to talk to your
customers one-on-one to help them solve their struggles and show up as a trustworthy hero to them the email
sequences let them do those one-on-one con convos and demonstrate value it's a longer play that yields more sustainable
growth longterm yeah and done well you've got your customers and customers to be on a value
Laden continuous Journey where ultimately you consistently solve people's problems with a mix of free and
paid products and services which turns into a self-perpetuating flywheel of Maximum conver conversions LTV again
that's lifetime customer value and referrals and you always want to lead with serving people like that's really
at the heart of a Creator first business anyway it is so incredibly personal and unique and relationship driven
and marketing automation can really help you do that even better and when you're solving people's problems I promise you
sales will follow and marketing automation also provides the opportunity for feedback at
scale which can be incredibly important for making those data driven decisions some creators can get survey responses
that approach or exceed statistical significance which is really really amazing yeah and let's talk a little bit
about how does it help a Creator first business well there's a number of different ways um but one is that it
allows you to grow your business very very efficiently with a high degree of personalization and I know that that
sounds almost in conflict with the term marketing automation like we're talking about a personalized customer Journey
but when you approach writing emails or text messages within marketing automation a marketing automation system
you want to actually think as though you're writing to just one member of your community who is sort of like representative and embodies
the the spirit and the vibe and the culture of your community and in marketing uh in the business world we
call that customer Persona or an ICP an ideal customer Persona um there I'm sure
a couple other names for that we use ICP at level up creators but it's it's this one person that you have in mind and
you're thinking of very specifically demographic psychographic information um
and what their foundational desires and wants and needs truly are so that you
can write to them and such a way that it does feel very personalized you're not trying to write to the masses if you
really focus your mind on writing to this one person you will really cut through the noise in someone's inbox
because people will feel that you are writing truly just for them and for professional creators and
entrepreneurs uh again it marketing automation enables you to scale a marketing automation configuration can
handle 10 people or 100,000 people literally same setup same system
multiplier on you know the number of people that it can handle and handle well once you're set up and have a
system for ongoing upkeep with within your marketing automation system when you hit that home run with a viral post
or a high converting campaign that exceeds your wildest expectations you are ready you know that the system will
work and you can rest assured that the 100,000 people going through your marketing automation system are having a
highly personalized Journey where again they feel like they're really being spoken to specifically and uniquely by
you right and it also enables you to make the right offer at the right time to the right person and in the right way
which creates a personalized customer Journey marketing automation allows digital creators and small businesses to
create personalized customer Journeys by segmenting their audiences based off of their behavior and preferences and then
allows them to send targeted messages that resonates with each group improving engagement and conversion
rates yeah and don't uh recoil at Natalie's mention of the word segmenting
or segment within marketing automation that's kind of like next level and not for a beginner necessarily but within
systems like convertkit and active Campaign which are the two that we most highly recommend we'll come back to that in a bit um your users within your
marketing automation system like kind of once they're in the flow um you can send them more specific and granular
information that's valuable to them based on things that they click on or emails that they open so the marketing
automation system based on how you set it up sort of like morphs and makes a more unique personalized Journey for
each user based on their behavior so again that's next level maybe we'll do a whole episode you know on highly
technical pieces of marketing automation but um it's pretty cool and okay moving right along I could
go on all day right we we all know that so we know that um marketing automation also increases your audience's affinity
for your brand and again uh that's a double-edged sword done right it increases Affinity done very poorly it
will turn people off so you want to make sure that you're nailing this again the most important piece of that is your writing to one person who is
representative of your community um but again we're looking for marketing automation to provide value at scale in
what feels like a one toone environment with each member of your
audience and man I'm talking a lot here just burning this list down all right
time and resource efficiency so I really want to emphasize the efficiency and Time Savings that come
along with a marketing automation system it really helps streamline repetitive tasks like marketing email campaigns
frees up time for you the Creator and business owner to focus on more strategic aspects of your business again
this not only saves time but ensures consistency and accuracy in your marketing efforts right over you Natalie
I got to take a SE here yeah take a break take a breather um I had mentioned earlier on that marketing automation
allow you to have some data driven decision-making abilities too and those marketing automations can really highlight the role of facilitating data
driven decision-making automation tools often come with analytics and Reporting features built in that help businesses
track and analyze the performance of their marketing campaigns so you don't have to really reinvent the wheels with a lot of this a lot of this is done for
you and ready out of the box and this data can be used to make informed decisions optimize marketing strategies
and Achieve better Roi and being able to have access to that data allows you to
reduce your dependency on making emotional decisions um which there's certainly a time and a place for but a
lot of these decisions need to have that analytical component that's based in facts and so you can evolve your
business and your brand around what people are responding to not just what you think they prefer or you think they
might like you can actually use that you know gut instinct that you have and then back it up with the data and the
analytics that that underline your point yeah thank you Natalie I appreciate you sharing about making emotional decision
versus datadriven decisions and there's certainly a time and place for um both of those things but the more you can
inject datadriven decisions to your business strategy uh likely the more
effective and successful you're going to be so I do appreciate you drawing that distinction okay walk us through the
difference between marketing automation on the whole versus email automation which is a term you know term we hear a
lot so marketing automations are the systems and email automations are a part
of the marketing automation a so email automations are preconfigured sequences of emails that are designed to take
someone from point A to point B when they opt in to start that Jour Journey usually by downloading a lead magnet
maybe joining your newsletter list or purchasing a product or a service yeah thank you and mature
digital businesses actually have dozens and dozens of email automations running
within their marketing automation machine and they have systems for updating those automations to keep
content fresh it be really embarrassing to promote content that happened six months ago in someone who received an
email from your marketing automation system so it is really imperative to make sure that you have systems for
keeping that content Super Fresh and um also you know a more mature digital
business would ensure that the same human people aren't enrolled in too many automations at a time that kind of goes
back to segmenting and how you can kind of route your automations very strategically to make sure that you're
not overwhelming people um because obviously that's a pretty bad look but the good news is you don't have to start
there you don't you know jump in headlong with the Dozen automations