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We are living in a time where everything that we do is digital. If we can get something right now, we get it now, and we don’t like to wait around for anything. When you add this culture of “I want it now” to technology, you get smart thinking homes and businesses where technology is being used to make life easy.

As a business, automated marketing is going to make your life easier. It’s essential to know how to do it because if you want to grow your business online, you cannot do it all. You may be a business superhero, and that’s wonderful, but it’s just not possible to do what you want to do without help.

Plenty of businesses choose to outsource pieces of their business puzzle, and it’s a smart thing to do. With the right systems in place, your business can run correctly, and automated marketing allows you to “set and forget” certain areas of your business while being able to test out what’ll work best. It will enable you to change what you want to change to improve areas of your business, and automation is the perfect way to keep business moving while this all happens.

You may choose to outsource your online marketing, as it will free up your time and money in the same way that automation can. Companies like FATJOE offer outsourced SEO services that are usually reserved for SEO Agencies to resell to you for a higher price. However, there’s no qualification process, so you can sign up for an account yourself and start ordering all of the outsourced services you’ll need for your marketing. As a business owner, you’re already trying to wear too many hats and do everything possible – but you don’t have to. You don’t need to understand systems to be able to set your online marketing to autopilot – or outsource it.

Automation isn’t about software; it’s about getting your business processes working together in a way you can benefit. You want to drive your business forward, and putting your online marketing on autopilot is going to help you to do just that. You can figure out the processes that will make your business more successful, and you can then get those processes working correctly. You don’t have to follow everything manually for your business. With your online marketing strategies on autopilot, you can focus on the other pieces of your business that really matter.

So, with all of this in mind, let’s talk about the steps that you need to take to set up your online marketing so that it’s on autopilot.

Set Up Your Funnel

What do you think your clients want to experience? One of the best things that you can do for your clients is to imagine working from their perspective. What would you want to see from their perspective? Think about how they interact with your brand and what they want to see from your brand when they are interacting with you. From the beginning of the process to the completion of a sale, you need to outline the process in a way that keeps it all simple.

You have to be absolutely clear on your target audience and who you are planning to sell to if you want to automate your marketing correctly. You will spend far too much money if you haven’t set up your funnel correctly, so you need to know exactly who your market is and what they want from you so that you can target them correctly!

Start Building Awareness & Gaining Traffic

There are plenty of ways that you can get your website out there in front of the right audience. In step 1, we talked about identifying who your audience is, and you want to make sure that you are building awareness for those at the very top of your sales funnel. This will encourage the right traffic to your website, too, and there are many ways that you can create the traffic that you want to drive to your site. Some of those include:

• Paid ads on social media
• Retargeting ads
• Traditional advertising
• Blog posts with lead magnets built right in!
• Social media commentary and engagement
• Excellent content (vlogs/infographics/blogs, etc)
• Email marketing

Each of these should be measured and tracked. Doing so will enable you to check your return on investment over time. These measures will run while you’re not actively working on your marketing, allowing traffic to build automatically.

Taking Action

Getting the top of your sales funnels to your website is just the start. They need to be pushed right through the funnel to take action. You want your website visitors to take action once they get to your website, whether that’s signing up to your email list, clicking on a blog or buying a product. Those little conversions all add up to the bigger picture. For example, if your client is looking for a product, but their visit only signs up to the email list, you’re still making conversion as part of your sales funnel. You can use their email address to offer them a lead magnet – people want something to hook them enough for their information! Lead magnets can be anything from video tutorials for baking a cake to an ebook!

If your website has enough call-to-action spots to attract attention, you’re going to bring people to you without having to do much. Think Hansel and Gretel: if you leave breadcrumbs, people will come to your gingerbread house!

Nurture Your New Relationships

Once you have the information you need from the top of your sales funnel, you need to nurture that baby until it grows! You don’t want to spoil them with information and freebies, spam emails and blogs, but you do want to flip them from a passing interest to a purchasing customer. Nurturing your leads is a vital piece of the puzzle. It’s not going to be an overnight change, so you need to start small. Offering the product they want at a discounted price, or offering discount codes to use on your website can make a big difference to whether your clients choose to complete the sales funnel.

Save Time & Money

When you are invested in your online marketing, you need to get it right the first time. If you do this, you can avoid wasting your time trying to get it all right. Taking the right steps to put your marketing on autopilot will mean that you have more time to do other things to further your business to reach your goals!