Automating Your Growth

Angela Frank: 00:00:00

Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to learn how you can automate your business growth.

Systematization and automation has been the key, enabling me to create massive growth at scale. Like the time I built an eight figure pipeline in less than 12 months.

And automation allows me to do all of this without requiring additional headcount. I'm your host, Angela Frank.

I've been a growth marketer for over a decade, and during that time I've generated more than $50 million in client marketing revenue. My secret to success?

No nonsense Marketing Ecosystems there's so much noise online when it comes to marketing, and it's easy to overcomplicate things. But on this podcast, I give you the tools to create predictable, scalable and profitable growth without all the headache.

Systems are currently all the rage, and while I normally advise clients to avoid trendy strategies, systematized growth has actually been around for over a decade.

And if you're not currently using the power of systems to automate your marketing and scale your brand, you're missing out on a lot of potential growth.

Automated systems help you reduce busywork for you and your team, improve the customer journey, reinforce trust and create psychological safety, and most importantly, increase conversion rates so you can generate more revenue. I'm all about strategies that help you work less, spend less, and make more money.

So this week on The Growth Pod, I'm helping you clean up some of your marketing headaches, reduce your tech expenses, and automate your business growth. Let's chat.

Systematizing your marketing strategy Optimized and automated growth systems are central to all of my consulting engagements, and these systems have been the key to creating massive growth at scale while requiring little to no additional headcount to manage. But just because they're the key to growth doesn't mean they're easy to implement.

And with all the marketing noise online making things seem even more complicated, it's no wonder automated systems have made it to the bottom of many founders priority lists. However, automating growth is actually very straightforward.

Once you cut through that noise online, which I'm going to help you do now, the first step in automating your growth is to map out your touch points. The key to automating your growth is simple Map out the buyer journey.

For prospects purchasing services like yours, you can ask yourself these how do they find out they need a solution? When do they hear about your offer? What steps do they need to make a purchase? How easy is it for someone to buy your offer?

Is there missing information or context in Your funnel. What information do customers need after purchasing your offer? What is your customer's current life cycle and how do you encourage repeat purchases?

When you have the journey completely mapped out, you get a clear view of all of your brand's current touchpoints with prospects and where the gaps are. With these two pieces of information, you can begin automating your systems. The second step is to create a plan for automation.

Each of your touch points in the buyer journey creates an opportunity for automation, but knowing which steps to automate is critical to making your marketing ecosystem work. My general rule of thumb when deciding which tasks to automate falls down to three simple questions.

One, Is this a step we need to complete for multiple prospects and clients? If it is, move on to the next question. If it's not something you need to do multiple times, it's probably a waste of bandwidth to automate.

The second question is, does this step require a ton of personalization? When you need to include a lot of nuance and personalization in a step, it doesn't make sense to automate it.

But if you can use basic personalization or if it doesn't need personalization at all, then it could be something good to automate. But you need to ask yourself one final question, which is is this a new step in the buyer journey that we're testing?

If you're testing, hold off on automation until you've proven this to be a great step in your buyer journey. If. If you've already run the gambit on testing and you know that this is a step that you are going to keep in your funnels, go ahead and automate it.

Now that you've gone through your decision matrix, the final step in your plan is to begin automating your outlined steps based on the customer journey and the decision matrix we just walked through.

While automating will take some time initially, the more your team automates marketing touch points, the less busy work they will have, meaning your team will have more and more time to focus on work that moves the needle forward for your brand. Now, I know one of the questions in that decision matrix focuses on new channels, but I want to highlight it again here.

After your automation is set up, you're going to be tempted to automate everything, even if it's a new channel that you're just testing. However, when you launch a new channel or initiative, speed to market is key to your learning and success.

Therefore, I recommend not automating new channels until they have proven to be a viable avenue for growth for your brand. Once they pass that test Automate away So far we've talked about the strategy behind automating growth.

Now let's combine that with some of the tactics that I use when automating marketing strategies for myself and clients. First up, we can talk about dashboards and data connectors. The foundation of every great marketing strategy is great data.

Yet this is one of the areas I see brands struggling with most. The good news is that straightforward tools exist to connect and visualize all of your marketing data in one place.

One of those is Google Looker Studio. If your business currently runs on G Suite, you already have access to Looker Studio.

Looker Studio provides a straightforward way for your brand to visualize data. The only downside? You will need a data connector if you want to include non Google data. For example Meta Ads Performance.

When I have a client who is in G Suite and they're using Looker Studio but they need a data connector, I use Porter Metrics due to its ease of use and the cost effective plans.

For those of you who don't use G Suite or want an even more plug and play solution, agencyalytics is my go to for founders who don't need a data warehouse and are looking for that straightforward, user friendly solution. After you have your data system set up and automated, it's time to move on to your marketing ecosystem.

There are so many marketing technology providers and with more coming available each day, it's difficult to know what you should use for your tech stack. However, whatever you use, what's most important is its ability to integrate into your ecosystem, and there are a few ways you can do this.

The first is to use an all in one solution.

I'm currently migrating my entire ecosystem to Kajabi, my all in one solution that seamlessly integrates email, newsletter, website, products, and more. I personally like Kajabi because it's an all in one solution that meets the needs of my marketing consultancy.

However, if you're not using an all in one solution, or if you do but you decide to use some tech outside of your all in one solution, you'll need an automation tool. My recommendation here is Zapier, which has been a lifesaver when I need to connect odd tech stacks together for clients.

But there's also some other tools that help me systematize my process and any list would not be complete without recommending my favorite email plugin. Streak CRM Streak is a Gmail plugin that helps people manage their pipeline from their inboxes, but that's not actually what I use Streak for.

My favorite thing about Streak is that it allows you to save email templates and access them with the click of a But I currently have snippets set up for my podcast and the discovery call process, and I add new snippets about every month. Now let's chat about what I'm systematizing this quarter.

I'm practicing what I preach Heading into the final quarter of this year, I've been knee deep systematizing our user acquisition funnels, email flows, and my tech stack. Here's a look behind the curtain at what I'm systematizing this quarter. The first is email sequences.

My email sequences are getting a full refresh with new sequences being created for discovery call bookings, newsletter subscribers and clients.

To achieve this, I'm actually migrating away from my current email service provider and hosting all new email sequences in Kajabi, my all in one marketing solution.

Speaking of an all in one solution, I'm also working on migrating a few other things over to Kajabi this quarter and that includes the website for the growth directive and my newsletter Weekly Traction. I'll also complete a few funnel optimizations that have been on my to do list for most of the year. So that's what's on my plate this quarter.

But now it's your turn. Start mapping out your customer journey, ask those questions and create a plan to systematize your marketing.

Not only will this free up bandwidth for you and your team, but it will help you create an automated growth system that increases your revenue and works without you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.