10+ AUDIENCE BUILDING And Marketing Automation Best Practices
One of the first things you need to learn about when you start marketing your business is how to build your lead list. For new entrepreneurs, this can be frustrating and time consuming. But did you know that lead and audience building shouldn’t have to be complicated?
With the right tools, strategy, and guidance, you could grow an online audience and still have time for other aspects of your business. And no, you won’t even have to work 24/7 to achieve this level of productivity.
Today, I will share with you how to build an audience and some marketing best practices for small businesses.
You will learn:
- The importance of understanding your customer’s journey
- How to get to know your audience
- Why videos are an important element of your content mix
- The key to being consistent
- How to use A.D.P. marketing automation strategy for your small business
- The importance of tracking and regularly optimizing your strategy
Whether you’re a new business owner or a seasoned entrepreneur, these tips and tricks could be the gamechangers you need for your business. Start doing these today and you’ll be surprised at how much it would contribute to your business’s success over time.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
“In this episode, you’ll find out about 10+ audience building and marketing automation best practices that have HUGE benefits for any small business that uses them the RIGHT way.
Besides those best practices, we’ll also go through a REAL life example that reveals the BEST hack anyone can use to make their audience grow SEVERAL times faster than normally possible.
My name is Istvan Bujdoso and welcome to The 47 Marketing Show that helps entrepreneurs like you to get more done in less time…
…grow your business, and gain freedom through marketing automation, delegation, and processes.
If these topics are interesting to you, then make sure to subscribe on YouTube and hit the bell button so you get notified of the NEW episode every week. And now, let’s get started.
Just a quick note, this is a special collection episode, which means we put this together from previous episodes so you can find the BEST audience-building tips conveniently in ONE place.
With that said, let’s queue up the content. Enjoy it!
Let’s quickly start with why build an audience? Why grow an online audience? Well, the simple fact is, complete strangers will not buy from you.
People need to know you, like you, and trust you quite a bit to pull out their credit card and give you their hard-earned money. And that is what building an audience does for you.
It turns strangers into a group of people who know you, like you, and trust you to a certain level. With that said, let’s dive to the list of the marketing automation best practices for small businesses.
Number 1: Understand The Journey Of Your Customers which starts with strangers and ends with regularly RETURNING clients.
Although in this episode, we are focusing on the first stage only: how to build an audience from scratch it is still important for you to have at least a basic understanding of their entire journey.
So, these are the five main stages. First, strangers turning into your audience. Then, some of your audience transforming into warm traffic, into visitors of funnels.
The third stage is when some percent of your visitors turn into leads. Then, some of those leads buying a product from you. And the fifth stage is when one-time customers turn into regularly returning clients.
Okay, the next marketing automation best practice is… #2: Start With The End In Mind. ALWAYS know upfront what you want to achieve in the area of audience building, what your end goal is.
From that, work out backwards the sub-goals that will help you to reach the end goal. And after that, choose the relevant marketing automation strategies to get there.
Marketing automation best practice #3: Know Your Audience. Create an avatar of your ideal customer, who they are, what they do, how they feel and think, and so on.
The more clear you’re about it, the easier things get and the more effective your marketing will be. And in every single content you create, talk to THAT avatar.
That way your content will grab the attention of the right people and will build you an audience of your ideal potential customers.
Number 4: Leverage Videos. This is an absolute fundamental best practice. Video content is a form of marketing automation because you create every video once, and after you publish them…
…they are working for you 24/7/365 days and are building your audience without you being there. Videos have a lot more marketing automation benefits than that.
With a smart hack, that anyone can do, it’s possible to grow an online audience SEVERAL times faster than normally and here’s how.
Marketing automation best practice #5: Be Smart. Another reason why creating videos is a really smart practice is because you can easily repurpose them.
Which means, each video you record can be turned into multiple videos, podcasts, blog posts, social media posts, emails, and so on.
You record ONE video and with smart repurposing you can turn that into SEVERAL content assets which will help you to grow your audience on multiple platforms and a lot faster than normally possible.
Let me interrupt for a moment. If you’re enjoying this episode so far, then give us a thumbs up. That supports us to create more content for you just like this one. Thank you for your “like”.
And with that done, let’s continue.
The next marketing automation best practice is #6: Do It Step By Step. Growing your audience with marketing automation systems is a HUGE and complex activity.
It can be overwhelming at first glance. And the only way to avoid that bad experience is doing it step-by-step.
Which leads us to the next best practice, #7: Be Persistent. It’s not only a huge and complex activity. It is a long-term and ongoing game.
Which means, if you want to successfully and consistently grow an audience, you gotta be persistent…
and keep taking steps after steps UNTIL your audience building can run WITHOUT your day-to-day involvement.
Number 8: Be Consistent. Publishing content here and there, every now and then, is not going to build you a valuable audience.
Be consistent with your content production and publication to keep growing your audience that ultimately will grow your business as well.
Although consistency is KEY, you’ll see it in a minute, there’s a smart way to do the content creation so it doesn’t eat up your time every day, every week.
Okay, the next marketing automation best practice is #9: Use The A.D.P. Strategy. This is the 3-step marketing automation strategy.
When you’re setting up marketing automation systems with the purpose of building your audience, the rule of thumb is to automate as much of the activities as possible.
Delegate the parts that are not possible to automate. And the most important step: processes.
Clear and detailed guides on what needs to be done by an automation or your team, how and when in order to get things done the MOST efficiently WITHOUT your day-to-day involvement.
By using this A.D.P. marketing automation strategy you can TRULY replace yourself in MOST of your audience building and at the same time keep growing your audience and business.
Later, you’ll see a REAL life example on how to build an audience with the A.D.P. strategy.
And now, let’s talk about best practice #10: Track And Optimise. From the very beginning, track the performance of each part of your audience building.
Avoid guesswork on what is working, and what’s not. Use the numbers, make decisions and optimisations based on those.
Now, let’s go through the REAL life audience-building example. This is how we publish multiple content items DAILY WITHOUT me being involved in it every day.
Although this is an ongoing work of a team…
…let me remind you of the ultimate purpose of every marketing automation system having various assets that can replace you in certain parts of your marketing…
…and business can help to generate you cash flow and can grow your business WITHOUT your day to day involvement. And that is EXACTLY what published videos and other types of content can do for you.
The REAL life example, we are about to go through, covers three KEY parts the tools, the process, and most importantly, how much time it can save you.
Let’s start with a few really useful tools for content creation and publishing. In the automation part, Trello with the Butler extension is great for managing all the tasks and related team members.
And automating a SIGNIFICANT part of that process.
Another REALLY useful marketing automation software is a social media manager tool that saves us a LOT time and helps to keep up the schedule of publication.
There are many social media manager tools available, SocialPilot is one of the bests in that area.
Social media platforms don’t allow 3rd party tools to schedule everything in those cases, if available, we use native scheduling on the social media platforms.
I love doing things efficiently, at the same time keeping them as SIMPLE as possible.
And that’s why we use Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Spreadsheets to manage all the media assets, videos, images, copies, guides, and so on.
If you remember, the most important part of the A.D.P. Strategy is processes.
Clear and detailed guides on what needs to be done by an automation or the team, how and when in order to get things done the MOST efficiently WITHOUT your day-to-day involvement.
And to create those guides, I use Loom, which is an easy-to-use screen recording tool and bullet points in a Google Doc or multiple Google Docs.
Before we go through the steps, one last tool, which is Upwork. It is a freelance portal where you can hire the right freelancers easily.
The biggest ongoing benefit of it is the AUTOMATED timesheet-based payments.
That saves me hours of time each week because I do NOT need to MANUALLY collect the invoices, check the details, make the payments for each freelancer, and so on.
Upwork automatically takes care of all that.
Let me interrupt for a moment. If you’re enjoying this episode so far then give us a thumbs up. That supports us to create more content for you just like this one.
Thank you for your “like”. And with that done, let’s continue.
Now, let’s go through the STEPS of how we use the A.D.P. Strategy for audience building. These are kind of like BONUS best practices.
Step 1: Ideas. We collect content ideas in a Google Doc. Anytime we have a new idea, we can just drop it in easily, and use it later or throw it away if I later think it’s no longer a good idea.
Step 2: Planning. The ideas doc is a brain dump without any specific order. So once a month, I sit down and strategically PLAN what the upcoming contents will be to grow our audience more.
Currently, I do this. And later on, I’ll delegate it to free up my time.
Step 3: Research. Depending on the content I’m planning to do, researching can take a lot of time. It is a step that is definitely worth delegating.
Step 4: Script. Depending on your style this can be a full-blown script, word-to-word what you’re going to say in the videos. Or slides. Or simply the bullet points of KEY elements.
I tried all, and I prefer full-blown scripts that I can put onto a teleprompter app.
Currently, I write the scripts for the videos, because I want to improve my writing skills and to find my own voice. But long term, it is a best practice to delegate this.
Step 5: Preparation For Recording. This is preparing the teleprompter scripts, or the presentations, setting up the sets for recording, and so on.
With the mindset of the A.D.P. Strategy, this should be done by your team.
Step 6: Recording. Ultimately, this is the ONLY ONE step you should do, to be the star of your videos. And the rest of the steps can be done by automations, delegations, and processes.
At the beginning, I recorded one new video each week which is the hard way to do it because that required me to be involved in the process more ongoingly.
The much more efficient way I’m doing the recording now is recording in BULK, 4-5 videos in one go. So each month I have ONE recording day.
And the rest of the month, I’m free from the actual content creation.
Step 7: Preparation For Post Production. This is about organising the video parts, the images, adding notes, uploading everything to Google Drive, and so on.
Basically, preparation for the next steps. Ultimately, this is another task for your team.
Step 8: Transcription. We do this for two reasons.
First, to add subtitles to our videos, which helps the platforms to understand more of the content of the videos and makes it understandable for viewers even without the sound on.
There are some life situations when viewers watch videos without sound.
And second, the transcription is used for repurposing the videos it is the base of any written content like blog posts, emails, social media posts, and so on. This is a step that my team does.
Step 9: Graphic Design. Images like thumbnails, covers, social media images, and more. Images that support the video, audio, and written contents. Also, a step that best to be delegated to your team…
Step 10: Video Editing. It’s about creating different video and audio formats for different platforms. This can be time-consuming depending on your videos and the level of your video and audio editing skills.
From the very beginning, I delegate this part of the process to my video editor on my team to free up my time and get better results.
Step 11: Copywriting. From the transcription and the video notes creating different written variations of the same content.
Like blog posts, emails, social media posts, podcast notes, video descriptions, and so on. Although I like copywriting, I delegate this as well so I can use my time to do other things.
Step 12: Sharing The Content Assets. From ONE video and a few photos, we create 25-30 content assets each week.
Those are shared on various platforms throughout 10 weeks. As we’ve been doing this consistently, each week, there are 25-30 content assets to share.
Which you can imagine takes quite a lot of work and time each week even with using marketing automation tools.
That’s why I fully delegate this step to my team, so I can focus on other marketing and business activities.
Step 13: Analyze, Optimise, and Adjust. One of the best practices I mentioned in the previous episode is to track the performance of marketing automations…
…and optimize based on that. So from time to time, I check on the numbers to decide what to optimise and adjust. Ultimately, this is worth delegating as well.
In a moment, I’ll share with you how much time the A.D.P. Strategy saves me on this process,
But before that a quick important note As you can feel it, it is a LOT of ongoing work and time overall to create content, repurpose it, and publish everything, and do all that consistently.
The reason why I’m investing time, money, and energy into it is because every single content piece we published is a marketing automation asset…
…and is working for us 24/7/365 days to build our audience even the content that we put out there years ago. Some of our content didn’t perform well, while some videos got tens of thousands of views.
The BIGGEST result comes from the compound effect, in the past about 2.5 years, we reached hundreds of thousands of people in total.
And day by day, our audience is growing, even when I’m not working. And it has a REAL positive effect on the rest of my business.
To circle back to how much time the A.D.P. Strategy saves me on content creation and publishing, every week, the marketing automation that are in place and my team do over 40 hours of work.
By myself, it would NOT be possible to do all this work. It took about a year to step-by-step build up this entire content creation and publishing system with the A.D.P. Strategy.
It’s absolutely worth it and we keep scaling up.
If you’re starting out now, I want you to understand that this is a step-by-step process, it takes time and the best to do it with the A.D.P. Strategy in mind from the very beginning.
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Thank you for watching. And see you in the next one.”
END OF VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
