Automating Your Growth

Absent Systems Hold You Back

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

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Automated systems help you:

• Reduce busywork (for you & your team)
• Improve customer journey
• Reinforce trust & create psychological safety
• Increase conversion rates (and generate more revenue)

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I'm all about strategies that help you work less, spend less, and make more money. Your WeeklyTraction this week will help you clean up some of your marketing headaches, reduce tech expenses, and automate your business growth.

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Systematizing Your Marketing Strategy

Optimized and automated growth systems are central to all of my consulting engagements. These systems have been key to creating massive growth at scale (eg. an 8-figure pipeline in less than 12 months) 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 very straightforward once you cut through the noise online (which I'll do for you now).

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Step 1: Map Out Your Touchpoints

The key to automating your growth is simple: map out the buyer journey for prospects purchasing services like yours:

• How do they find out they need a solution?
• When do they hear about your offer?
• What steps do they take 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 customers' current lifecycle?
• How do you encourage repeat purchases?

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When you have the journey completely mapped out, you'll have 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.

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Step 2: Create an Automation Plan

Each of your touchpoints 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 questions:

• Is this a step we need to complete for multiple prospects/clients?
• Does this step require lots of personalization?
• Is this a new step we're testing?

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The Marketing Automation Decision Matrix below outlines these questions and how they inform which tasks you should automate.

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Step 3: Begin Automating

The final step in your plan is to begin automating your outlined steps based on your customer journey and your decision matrix.

While automating will take some time initially, the more your team automates marketing touchpoints, the less busywork they will have, meaning your team will have more and more time to focus on work that moves the needle for your brand.

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A Note on Automating New Channels

After your automation is set up, you will be tempted to automate everything, even if it's a new channel you're 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 of growth for your brand.

Once they pass that test? Automate away. 😉

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My Favorite Tools for Automating Growth

So far, we've talked about the strategy behind automating growth. Now let's combine that with some of the tactics I use when automating marketing strategies for myself and my clients.

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Dashboards & Data Connectors

The foundation of every great marketing strategy is great data. Yet, this is one of the areas I see brands struggling with the most.

The good news is that straightforward tools exist to connect and visualize all of your marketing data in one place.

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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). I use Porter Metrics as a data connector for many clients due to its ease of use and cost-effective plans.

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AgencyAnalytics

For those of you who don't use G-Suite, AgencyAnalytics is my go-to solution for founders who don't need a data warehouse and who want a straightforward, user-friendly solution.

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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.

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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.

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All-In-One Solution

I'm currently migrating my entire ecosystem to Kajabi to seamlessly integrate email, newsletter, website, products, and more. I like that Kajabi is an all-in-one solution that meets the needs of my consultancy.

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Automation Tool

If you're not currently using an all-in-one solution (or if you're using tech outside of your all-in-one), 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.

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Other Tools

Any list I make about systematization would not be complete without recommending my favorite email tool, StreakCRM. Streak is a Gmail plugin that helps people manage pipeline from their inboxes (but that's not 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 button.

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I currently have snippets set up for my podcast and the discovery call process, and have been adding new snippets almost every month.

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What I'm Systematizing in 24Q4

I'm practicing what I preach in this email. 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:

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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 migrating away from my current ESP, and hosting all new email sequences in Kajabi (my all-in-one marketing solution).

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Tech Stack

Speaking of an all-in-one solution, I'm working on migrating a few things over to Kajabi this quarter. This includes the website for The Growth Directive and this newsletter. I'll also complete a few funnel optimizations that have been on my "to-do" list for most of the year.

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Your Next Step

Now it's your turn! Start mapping out your customer journey, asking the above questions, and creating a plan to systematize your marketing. This will free up important bandwidth for you and your team and create an automated growth system that works without you.

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I've helped clients achieve profitable and predictable growth by implementing automated growth strategies on their behalf. Automated strategies are key to success in all my engagements (and have created some amazing results, like 8-figures in pipeline in <12 months). Not sure where to get started when systematizing your growth? Let's chat.

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Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links to products I enjoy using. Should you choose to use these links, I may earn affiliate commissions at no additional cost to you.