Automated Marketing; The Biggest Mistake I’ve Seen in 20 Years of Business

The mistake is not that businesses are utilizing automated marketing. It’s that they don’t. I can’t tell you how many small businesses stay small and in many cases, struggle because they don’t take advantage of the very affordable tools available right now to generate new customers on auto-pilot. 

The great thing about automated marketing is how easily it generates new clients and you can turn it on or off anytime you’d like. We have developed a very simple integration of three very affordable tools. The first is simple advertising in Facebook to your perfect client or patient who resides within a few miles of your place of business. The targeting is so sophisticated that you can even target their net worth, salary, preferences, etc. That way only your perfect clients will be able to see the offer you make and you will be making the offer to someone who can afford you.

If you were selling Buicks, you can target every Buick owner within 40 miles whose Buick is older than 4 years. You can target almost anything you’d like. Males, 62 or older with a net worth of 1 million dollars and they must have at least $50,000 in cash on hand. Facebook has it all! We put those parameters into Facebook and they will come back with a number. Let’s say they say there are 1226 male Buick owners 62 years of age or older within 50 miles who have a car at least 4 years old. Your ad will only be seen by those 1226 men!

This isn’t advertising. It’s taking a rifle with a scope and targeting as precise as any message delivery system ever used in the history of marketing. Once you grasp what can be done, you can grow your business at breakneck speed and with very little investment. You see, you aren’t blasting your message all over the place where 99% of the people you’re paying for, aren’t your customer. When you just target the customers or patients you want to add, the cost is very low and the return on investment is off the charts. You can select the client from the pool of people who you want to have as clients and you don’t have to deal with customers that you don’t. It’s that simple!

Don’t look at this as an ad campaign, because the offer gives them an incentive that we call a “lead magnet”. This incentive shares some information with your prospect that is free for you to give them and yet has value to them. This not only gives the information or promotion you want them to have in their hands, but it makes you “THE” authority who gave it to them free of charge.

Once you have traded your incentive for their name and email, you can then begin to automatically drip information to them with incentives and reminders every week or two depending on what type of client you are looking for. A chiropractor for instance may want to stay in front of a patient every week to 10 days where a dentist or oral surgeon may only want to send one bit of information every month, but remember that this is all automated by a simple thing called a funnel.

A funnel is merely a set of rules that it gives to an autoresponder to send emails to these people based on their behavior. If they reply to your email, go to your website or even call, we can track that behavior and then reply or not based on what they wanted.

This may sound complicated but once we built the system and perfected it, we use it every day for all of our clients just by changing the “rules” or instructions that we send to the “emailer”. We actually use a set of what are called “swipe files” which are emails that we have tested and been proven to evoke a response because the emails are written so well and they are usually very short and to the point.

The next great thing about automated marketing is the lowest hanging fruit of all; the referrals that come from satisfied customers. We use this system for plumbers, contractors, attorneys and medical professionals. It always works.

Over the past ten years, my brother John has perfected a method that generates referrals on a continual basis. He calls it “Do the Work”.  What it really means is that we send out emails every 60 days to your existing customers and ask if they wouldn’t mind forwarding the email that we just sent.

The email asks your client that if they were happy with your service, if they wouldn’t mind sending the email below to any of their friends or family that might need your help. If you give them the email to send, the rate of referrals will jump at least fourfold. We typically see referrals jump from one or two a month for a dentist client of ours to an average of 12 a month and one month before school started, he got 23.

Automated marketing is the magic formula for small businesses who want to grow and at the very least, who don’t want to lose the customer base they already have. It allows you to control your destiny and the number of clients you want to add every month. Once the system is integrated, within 90 days, you’ll be able to predict with relative certainty what a new client will cost and how many you will add.

If you'd like to learn more about how your company can utilize automated marketing, click this link: https://costiganconsulting.com/one-on-one-free-consultation and you will be taken to a page where you can schedule a free call with me and I'll give you a few things you can do yourself to change your bottom line.