Sean Garner Consulting | Marketing Agency & Certified StoryBrand Guide

View Original

E15: My Top 5 Marketing Automations for Small Business Owners

Sean Garner
See this content in the original post

Running a small business is demanding, and automating key marketing tasks can be the game-changer you need. 

In this episode, I walk through the top 5 marketing automations that have helped my clients save time, secure more leads, and improve customer engagement. 

From automating lead follow-ups to rebooking no-shows, these strategies will help you grow faster and keep your business running smoothly, even when you’re busy serving your customers.

===========================

P.S.  When you are ready, here are a few ways I can help…

===========================

Subscribe and Listen to the Podcast HERE:📱 

➡︎YT: https://www.youtube.com/seangarner 

➡︎Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-domination 

➡︎Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marketingdomination

===========================

Sean Garner is a marketing consultant and Certified StoryBrand guide dedicated to helping small business owners grow and dominate their industries. He created the Marketing Domination podcast to teach people how to combine storytelling with strategic marketing to help businesses connect with customers and stand out online.

===========================

Let’s Connect!   

Website: https://www.seangarner.co/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanagarner/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seangarner/ 

FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/sean.garner.927/ 

Twitter: https://x.com/coachseang 

——————————————————————————————————————————

EPISODE 15 TRANSCRIPTION

Introduction

[00:00:00] Sean Garner: If you ask any small business owner how they're doing, the reply is typically the same: "I'm busy." And because they're busy, too often they're missing critical actions that help their business grow. Well, in this episode, I am going to give you my top five favorite marketing automations for local small business owners, coming up on the Marketing Domination Podcast.

[00:00:19] Sean Garner: So this is going to be the final video that I'm making for this first initial series over this marketing domination framework. This is the framework that we use at our marketing agency to help small local business owners dominate their business, get more leads, and grow their business. And if we are going to go back and recap, it's these three critical steps.

[00:00:37] Sean Garner: So the very first thing is we believe every business owner needs a sales funnel. So the first thing that we help them do is build their sales funnel. That sales funnel consists of several aspects. It's the words and messaging that you use. It's the visual aspect of your logos and your whole overall brand.

[00:00:54] Sean Garner: It's your website. It is your lead generator. So when people come to your website, you can follow up with them. And it is these automations that we're building out. Like, you need to have that as kind of the foundation. But then we have to, after we build the thing, we have to go into step two, which is filling the sales funnel.

[00:01:10] Sean Garner: Throughout those videos, we talked all about things like SEO, content marketing, building out your digital storefront and your social media profiles, paid ads versus organic. Even things like doing a video podcast just like this and several different ways from networking events, to social, all the different ways that you can use to fill your sales funnel.

[00:01:31] Sean Garner: And this last series is a little bit shorter because it is honestly never-ending. And I want this series to finalize and kind of wrap up here so we can keep going in. But that last step of marketing domination is optimization. So we talked about last episode, a lot about data and some main data points that you should be looking at as a small business owner, from metrics, analytics, from web traffic, SEO numbers, things like impressions, what that means.

[00:01:57] Sean Garner: And then the last part of optimization is automation. And so in this episode, because it is so nuanced and there are so many different variables and types of automations that you can create, I wanted to give this episode as kind of my top five favorite automations that we build out for all of our clients.

[00:02:16] Sean Garner: Because I think that this is the foundation for where to kind of start out with automating. So one thing that I will say overall is there's a reason why we do things in this order. There are some, and most of the things that we're going to go over today, I think are foundational automations. But one kind of trap I see business owners get sucked into sometimes is they try too early to automate a bunch of things and processes that they haven't actually proven yet, or maybe don't even realize that they don't need. 

And so you might've watched a YouTube video, you read a blog, you heard about some other person in your industry doing something, so you automatically think that you need to build out that automation in the process and you waste time, you waste money and resources building this thing out that you haven't actually tested, and you don't even know if your business actually needs it. So when you're building out these automations and kind of the reason why we do it the way that we do is we want to make sure that we're building out things that the business actually needs to drive the business forward. You can automate things just for automation's sake, but it doesn't actually mean that it's going to help get you more leads or make you more money or grow the business.

[00:03:24] Sean Garner: So, these ones that we're talking about today, my five favorite, they're ones that I believe are foundational for all local business owners. You need to have these in place because they are going to do those things. They're going to help you get more leads and help your business grow. So here we go. These are my five favorite automations that I think every local small business owner should have, starting off with number one, and that should be the obvious one—lead gen follow-ups.

Importance of Lead Generation Follow-Up Automations

[00:03:41] Sean Garner: We talked about as part of the foundational aspect of building your sales funnel. Having some type of a lead generator on your website, whether it be that, you know, PDF, free checklist guide, it is a mini course, it's a free trial, whatever it is, we want to have something to where people are opting in or we're collecting their information.

[00:04:09] Sean Garner: We talked about, it's not just collecting that information, right? It's following that up with those people. So the number one automation that I always push for all of my clients and we build out for is the very first aspect, which is that lead gen follow-up. So after somebody downloads that lead generator, what happens typically for the businesses that we work with, we're going to do two things.

[00:04:32] Sean Garner: One is we're going to plug them into an email sequence. Well, in that email sequence, it's typically five to six emails delivered over, you know, one to three, four days apart on each one, depending on the ticket price of what the client's selling. If they're selling a lower price point thing with a higher, with a shorter turnaround time or shorter sales cycle.

[00:04:53] Sean Garner: We're going to get those emails closer together. If they're selling bigger ticket items, like we've got clients that are selling, you know, $500,000 CNC machines and stuff, well, those we're going to spread them out because it's still typically a longer sales cycle. It's a much higher ticket item. So we want to spread those things out a little bit more.

[00:05:08] Sean Garner: So I want to build out that automation sequence. And typically with those, the first email is going to thank them for downloading the thing. The second one is going to talk about the problem that they're dealing with and why you guys are the perfect solution for them. The third one is going to be some type of a testimonial or success story about somebody that's worked with you in the past.

[00:05:25] Sean Garner: The fourth email is typically something like a new and better way. So we're going to show them how your way is different than what they've been thinking. And then the fifth email or sixth is going to be a sales email. We might throw another email in there that just overcomes a common objection, depending on the business and how long that sales cycle is.

[00:05:43] Sean Garner: But typically it's an email series that focuses on those things. Well, another thing that we want to do is whenever somebody downloads that lead generator, we want to plug them into our pipeline. So. I love just kind of a Kanban-style board of all of the leads of a business, because what it does is it gives you a good pulse on how the leads are coming in, what stages people are at within your sales funnel pipeline.

[00:06:08] Sean Garner: And for me, I'm a visual, so I like being able to see all of my leads in a Kanban style. So if you don't know what that means, imagine having a spreadsheet all the way across. And there's different columns for different stages that a lead could be in. So it might be, you know, a new lead came in, they downloaded your lead generator, they booked a call, they didn't show up for the call, they did show up for the call. We need to follow up. And we have all of these different stages, and you can just drag and drop people based upon where they're at in the stage, or in this case, automate based upon where they're at in the stage. So as they do different things within your sales funnel ecosystem, they're automatically going to move into different stages of your CRM pipeline.

[00:06:46] Sean Garner: So you can easily see when a lead does come in through your lead generator, how they're moving through. And then you can also just manually move them through into if you are, you know, booking calls, you're reaching out, you're having conversations with them, your sales team, or you are doing sales call follow-ups and everything.

[00:07:02] Sean Garner: So we want to be able to track that up. So that's the very first automation I like is the lead gen follow-up where we're sending them the email sequence, and we're getting them plugged into our CRM pipeline. So the second automation that I think all local business owners should need is some type of calendar booking or appointment reminders.

Automating Calendar Booking and Appointment Reminders

[00:07:21] Sean Garner: So again, because small business owners, we're busy. We've got lots of, lots of irons in the fire. And so it's really difficult to get appointments booked, whether that be service calls, because you've got a local business, like you're, you're a plumbing company or you're a medical practice or anything like that, or consulting agency like we are, or you just have an appointment for people that want to make appointments, staff or colleagues, or just other vendors and stuff want to make appointments with you. Going back and forth, trying to book on email, like, "Hey, does this time work?" or "What about this time? Are you free here?" wastes a lot of time. So one of the things that we love doing is we like creating calendars for people to where it's linked with their personal calendar.

[00:08:00] Sean Garner: So that way, whether it be clients, prospects, staff members, they can go on and they can book a time based upon the parameters that you've set on the back end for when somebody can book a time with you. This is really, really important for any service-based business that does appointments. Like I said, medical practices, IV med spas, attorneys, plumbers, home services, all of that stuff, because the customers can just go on directly.

[00:08:24] Sean Garner: If they are ready to buy. Cause we've set the sales funnel up. Maybe they've gone through the email autoresponder we just talked about and they're ready to book. We don't want them to have to reach out and go back and forth with somebody. If we can automate that process by linking it with our calendar and making it to where the client can just automatically book that appointment when they are ready.

[00:08:42] Sean Garner: So once we do have that calendar set up, one important aspect of it is the appointment reminder. Getting them to book is the first difficult thing we have to overcome, but actually getting them to show up or show to their appointment is the next challenge that we have. So we want to automate that process with reminders and appointment notifications for our customers.

[00:09:04] Sean Garner: What I typically like to do is whenever somebody books, I like to send an immediate reminder, immediate reminder notification so they can add the event to their calendar. If they're using like iCalendar, Google Calendar or Outlook or anything like that, then I'll typically—based upon what the industry is, but for me specifically—then we'll typically send another reminder 24 hours before the appointment.

[00:09:27] Sean Garner: And on these, it's typically a short message. "Hey, this is just to remind you about your appointment, making sure it's still good for you. If you need to cancel, click here. If you need to reschedule, click here," because we don't want to waste our time or our staff's time for making them show up to service calls or appointments if the customer is not actually going to show up.

[00:09:41] Sean Garner: So we do initial, we do 24 hours. And then I will typically also do one an hour before. And then for me, because I do lots of video calls and for other clients that do video-type appointments, I'll also do another reminder anywhere between five and 15 minutes before, just as kind of like, "Oh yeah, I got to log on real quick and get that thing set up."

[00:10:00] Sean Garner: If it's in person, like somebody who's driving to a med spa or something, you know, 15 minutes before they're, they're going to miss the appointment anyway. So that's typically we'll do it like an hour before on that one. So, but we want to have those appointment reminders set up with options for them to reschedule if they need, because you don't just want them to cancel.

Rebooking for Canceled or No-Show Appointments

[00:10:16] Sean Garner: We want to make it very, very easy to reschedule those appointments, which leads me to automation number three, which is rebooking for canceled or no-show appointments automation. So we've done all this work to get somebody to come through our funnel. They've gone through the lead generator, let's say, and gone through the email sequence.

[00:10:34] Sean Garner: They've gone on the second automation of booking a call with us, but they didn't show up, or maybe they needed to reschedule or they had to cancel. Well, we don't want them to cancel and just fall off into nothingness or not show and just fall off. That's one reason why I like visually seeing in that CRM pipeline.

[00:10:52] Sean Garner: So I can actually tell how many leads I have in what stage, and, "Oh, wow, this call was booked. They didn't show." Well, one of the things that we want to do is we want to follow up again. We want to find out, you know, make sure everything is okay. Was there a reason that they didn't show up? Are they just not interested anymore?

[00:11:08] Sean Garner: Did something come up? Would there be a better time to explore this in the future? But we want to automate that so it just doesn't get lost and fall by the wayside. We don't want to waste or lose leads. We've done all of this work trying to create this sales funnel to capture these leads and to fill the sales funnel and to optimize the sales funnel.

[00:11:26] Sean Garner: We've got to make sure that we're staying on top of all the work that we're bringing in. So we want to create an automation set based on— it can be done either automatically or a manual trigger— if somebody doesn't show up to the appointment, the staff could flag something so it instantly pulls them into another pipeline or automation sequence.

[00:11:51] Sean Garner: Typically, it's going to be following up, reaching out to them, seeing when we could get them booked again, staying on top of mind, and putting them into another stage of your pipeline. So that way your staff knows, "Hey, we need to manually reach out to these people because they had a service or an appointment booked with us, and they didn't show. So let's get them rescheduled."

[00:12:00] Sean Garner: So that’s the first recap real quick: number one, lead gen follow-up; number two, calendar booking and appointment reminders; three is appointment rebooking for cancels and no-shows. And number four automation, which I think honestly makes people a ton of money whenever they set it up correctly, is something that's called missed call text back. So remember, you're a small business owner, you're busy, you're talking to customers, you're dealing with customers, you're serving customers.

Missed Call Text Back Automation

[00:12:29] Sean Garner: It's difficult to always be able to answer the phone. And whenever you have a local service business, where companies are where people are just going down a list on Google and they're just calling the next one on the list, whether that be like a hairstylist, a plumber, electrician, home services, med spa services, they're just going down the list.

[00:12:47] Sean Garner: Well, that's exactly what they're doing. If you don't pick up, most likely they're just going to the next one on the list and they're going to go find your competition. So one of the things I love doing is called missed call text back. So what this does is, let's say a customer or potential customer calls your business and you don't pick up because you are with another customer.

[00:13:08] Sean Garner: Well, we don't want to lose that sale. What we want to do is we want to instantly fire off an automation that sends them a text for every time that you miss a phone call. The customer would receive a text like, "Hey, this is Julie from Sunday Edwards Homes. I'm sorry I was unable to get to your call. How can I help?"

[00:13:24] Sean Garner: And we want to start that conversation, just that follow-up, especially with my clients that are in the home service industries, real estate agents, home inspectors, home appraisers, plumbers, stuff like that. They get so much business just from that because the customer is looking to get an assessment or a quote or set up an appointment. And if you wouldn't have responded back, or they wouldn't have had any type of follow-up, they would've just gone to the next person on the list and just having that one reminder that sends out immediately when you don't pick up is huge for service business owners. Now, you can take that up on a whole other level, which I would like to talk about a lot more in a future episode, by leveraging AI. I've got one client in particular that has trained his AI bot that we've created for him all about his business.

[00:14:10] Sean Garner: So whenever he's with another client, and then that missed call text back fires, well, then the AI is able to take over and get them booked while he's actually serving another client. So that's a much more advanced automation, but I just want you guys to kind of have a little seed in your head of just thinking about your business and what's actually possible.

Google Review Automation and Replies

[00:14:28] Sean Garner: The last automation that I think every small local business owner should have, and this is one that if you do this... I shouldn't say "if" — you need to be doing this if you want your business to grow and dominate online. Most businesses are not doing this. This is why I 100 percent think that this should be automated.

[00:14:49] Sean Garner: It should be consistent if you truly want to win and dominate online. And that is Google review automation and replies. We've talked a lot about, especially for our local service businesses, how important getting Google reviews are. It's difficult, though, to remember to ask the customer, though, so your staff's probably not doing it on a consistent basis.

[00:15:09] Sean Garner: I mean, honestly, you're probably not doing it on a consistent basis. So what we like to do is we like to automate the ask and then also automate the follow-up, and then also automate the reply. So this is what it would look like for, let's say, a med spa business, for example. Customer comes in, whenever we build out the automation, so whenever the invoice is closed, payment's received, whatever the business is or the initial trigger, the automation will fire typically about five, within five minutes of that purchase.

[00:15:53] Sean Garner: We're going to ask them for that Google review on a text or an email. Then what we do is we will wait three days. And if they have not responded to that review, we're going to ask again. We're going to send another reminder for a text and for an email. Then wait three days. If they have not responded to that one, what we're going to do again is we're going to send them another text and another email.

[00:16:00] Sean Garner: So we're going to have three touchpoints that are three days in between. And if they are not going to do it by that third time, well, then what we do is we just remove them from the sequence.

[00:16:10] Sean Garner: So the next time they come in, we can ask them again. Now, this, what we do in the backend to kind of supercharge this, and one of the ways that we help our clients get Google reviews so quickly and so many, is we actually build this into a CRM pipeline. So we have three different stages. We have, you know, review asked, they clicked on a link.

[00:16:31] Sean Garner: And then also they left a confirmed review. So what we'll do is, there's going to be a lot of people that will see the text, they'll click, and they're like, I got to log into my Google account. I'll do that later. And then they'll forget about it. What we like to do is we like to show our team, and what we can do to help them is, they can see that CRM pipeline. They can see all the people that have been logged in as a potential ask, who's actually clicked, and then we're going to follow up manually with those people that clicked, whether that be on a phone call, a text, or another specific personalized email. It's like, Hey, Tom, I saw you started to fill out your Google review request, but for some reason you didn't. Would you mind taking 30 seconds and just leaving us a review?

[00:17:07] Sean Garner: It really helps our small business. That right there skyrockets reviews just by the ask, because your customers, 99 percent of the time, they genuinely want to see you succeed, especially with these local service businesses that we work with. And so a lot of times, it's just having that ask to follow up.

[00:17:24] Sean Garner: So we automate the ask. We automate the follow-up. And then the third thing that we do is we automate the reply. So a lot of times, you might be getting reviews. That's awesome. But are you actually consistently replying to the reviews? When you reply to the reviews, it's very important that you just don't say things like, “thanks,” or “You too, have a great day.” Like we want to be specific and use context because that context and those keywords can actually be ranking factors to Google of the type of service that you provide. So again, let's use a plumber as an example, we would want to say, you know, Hey Dave, thank you. Say somebody just left the five-star review. It'd be like, “Hey Dave, thank you so much for your five-star review about the plumbing service that we provided for you in Tulsa.” What we want to do is those keywords now help show up on Google map listings. You can actually see that whenever you're looking at Google rankings, how often a word or a term is mentioned.

[00:18:21] Sean Garner: So if we're able to use our product services and our location in that, it helps show up higher on the ranking. This is a small ranking factor, but it's still, why wouldn't we want to help ourselves out? So what we would do is we actually would automate this process with an AI reply, and we would train our AI bot to reply with the service that we provide with each one of the responses.

[00:18:43] Sean Garner: So it natively throws it in there. It reads their review and plugs that response in for context. So that way the reviews are including with those keywords in there, and we make sure everybody gets responded to. Customers, if they see that you're responding to reviews, are also more apt to leave reviews, and it just helps your Google business listing rank even higher and show Google that you are committed to growing in this listing.

Final Recap of Top 5 Marketing Automations

[00:19:00] Sean Garner: So quick recap, five automations that I love and I think every small local business owner should have. Number one is lead gen followup. We want to make sure that we're following up with all the leads that are coming to our website that didn't book a call or aren't ready to buy. The second one is the calendar booking and reminders.

[00:19:21] Sean Garner: We want to make it really easy for somebody to book an appointment with us. And we also want to remind them of that appointment, so they actually show up. Three, if they don't show up, we want to have rebookings for cancels and for no shows so we can recapture them and get them back on our calendar. Four, we want that missed call text back.

[00:19:39] Sean Garner: If somebody calls us or our business and we're unable to answer the call, we want to make sure it immediately fires off with a text message to them to keep that conversation going so we can help them get their problems solved. And then the fifth one, after we've done all of this amazing work for them, and we've served those clients, we want to ask for that review.

[00:19:55] Sean Garner: We want to follow up for the ask until we get the review, and then we want to automate the reply so that way our business can continue to grow. So I'm going to. I hope this series of episodes over this whole marketing domination framework has been valuable to you guys. If you want this implemented in your business, you don't have to do it alone.

Final Thoughts

[00:20:13] Sean Garner: This is what we do at Sean Garner Consulting. This is our marketing agency that serves local small service business owners just like you. Love the opportunity to talk and see how we can implement this for you in your local market. We do only work with one industry per service area, so we want to make sure that you call us before your competition does.

[00:20:43] Sean Garner: Because once we get an industry locked in for a service area, we're not like a big agency that's, you know, signing up a thousand plumbers all over the country or anything like that. We work with just one specific service area, one specific service per service area, so that way we can truly help that business owner grow their business and dominate.

[00:21:00] Sean Garner: Love the opportunity to connect with you guys. Just go to seangarner.co, schedule a call and talk to me, and we're going to go a deep dive over your business. Okay, go through these different steps, the funnel, see how we can help you grow your business and dominate your industry. Super excited to keep the podcast going. It's not stopping, but now what we're going to do is we're going to be doing more, more specific topics for small business owners.

[00:21:15] Sean Garner: We're going to bring on some guests and everything, but I wanted to spend this first series of episodes just laying the groundwork of what I believe small business owners need to dominate their industry because it's kind of going to serve as like a teaching course for anyone that listens to future episodes.

[00:21:34] Sean Garner: It's like, you need to go back to the beginning, listen to, you know, the first 14, 15 episodes, go over that framework so you understand what you need. And now in the future episodes, we're really going to show you how to put it to work. So guys, thank you so much for watching. Please, please, please do me a favor, share this with other small business owners and yeah, we'll see you on the next one. Have an awesome day.