Yellow Dog Consulting

Sales & Marketing Consulting for solo-preneurs.

5 Marketing Tasks to Automate (to Keep You Sane)

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5 Marketing Tasks to Automate (to Keep You Sane)Automation is a pretty great tool that companies of all shapes and sizes take advantage of. Are you? It can seem overwhelming to get it setup but once you’ve made the time to automate your systems, you’ll have more time to take your pup to the dog park (or read a book, or watch TV, or get your job done…) Here’s 5 Marketing Tasks you can (and should) automate!

  1. Your Contact Form – If someone reaches out to you on your contact form, you’ll most likely get back to them within a day or two (or a week if you’re not awesome at follow up and have an inbox that stresses me out to think about.) Setup your contact form to send a quick thank you note. “Thank you for contacting Yellow Dog Consulting, we’ll get back to you within one business day.” You can (and should) also invite them to check out a couple of things on your site – a link to your services page, a free download, or a link to your most recent newsletter are great ideas…
  2. Free Downloads – Do you have a snazzy free giveaway on your website that folks give you their email and then magically a PDF appears? I thought so! Make sure this system is automated so that it can happen while you sleep. You should also include a drip campaign with this so they hear from you more than once and really get an idea of how awesome you are so they hire you faster.
  3. Bookkeeping – Sure it’s not a marketing task, but automating my bookkeeping is one thing that keeps me incredibly sane each month.
  4. Social Media – I never thought I’d say this but I finally am. Each week I have a blog post. And I don’t trust that you’re going to check out my website each week looking for it – so I share it on social media. A few times. I talk often about my system but a few simple clicks save me hours of time and increases my site traffic…
  5. Reviews – Yes, you should automate your review process. Figure out the appropriate variable to reach out to new clients and ask for a review, then set that system in place. Maybe it’s monthly when you add your new clients to your newsletter list. Or at the completion of a project. Reviews are such an important part of helping your business grow, make sure you get this system in place!

There are a lot of other marketing (and small business) tasks you can automate, these are just a few that I tend to help clients with and that have helped me stay sane. What other marketing tasks do you automate?

4 Marketing Tasks You Should Do When Starting Your Business

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A couple of weeks ago a good friend of mine asked me if I wouldn’t mind giving some advice to their partner who’s expanding their photography business. Specifically around website and branding. Since I am always happy to give my totally biased opinion to small business owners, I was happy to share my thoughts. Here’s 4 recommendations I made that may be helpful in your own business!

  1. Setup a Google My Business Page. This gets you into the Google algorithm which is the only one that counts. Fully fill out your profile – you can hide your address so it doesn’t show up in search results. (Since you live in the PNW I’d also setup Bing Places. Both are easy and FREE!)
  2. When launching a business the first thing I suggest clients do is send out an announcement email to their network. I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re up to! It doesn’t have to be a huge email – but a couple of specific images and a little about what you’re up to these days would be awesome. I suggest MailChimp if you think you’d do occasional announcement emails – that way people can subscribe AND opt out of communication from you. If you need help setting up an email and building your list – here’s a checklist I created to help.
  3. I also created a monthly marketing calendar that will help prompt you with some ideas of what to do each week.
  4. Finally – start to get testimonials and reviews. Here’s a recent blog post I wrote about it – everyone struggles with this – but once you’re setup on Google you want people to start reviewing you so those stars show up!

There are SO many things that go into starting a new business – but if you have the basic website setup and you’re starting to get clients, these are a few tasks that I recommend to help you grow and start out on the right foot!

4 Ways My CRM Handles My Follow Up

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4 Ways My CRM Handles My Follow UpA few weeks back I had a post about missing your Follow up Window and a friend of mine commented and asked if I use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) and what my process is. Today I wanted to share 4 ways that I use my CRM to help with my follow up window.

  1. Get Contacts in ASAP – Any potential client or colleague gets added into my CRM immediately. I save notes from calls, and with mine (Zoho) you can send emails directly through the platform so it stores the conversations which is handy.
  2. Schedule The Follow Up Tasks – Once I send an email I immediately add in my follow up task. Usually it’s simple like “response?” just to remind me in a few days to check in with them if I haven’t heard anything. If there was a referral involved I’ll make a note to send a thank you note to that person once the process is complete. (Often they’ve made the introduction so I don’t need to let them know I heard from the referral).
  3. It’s on my task list – Every week I have a notebook with all the tasks I need to accomplish for the week. The first thing says BLOG (see, it works!) and the second thing is Zoho (my CRM). I check my CRM a few times throughout the week, if not daily. Sometimes I adjust my tasks that are due for the week, and sometimes I can get them all done in one day. I will add long term client tasks here too which is handy so I don’t forget (which I started doing after I forgot something a few years ago).
  4. It Integrates with MailChimp – This is one of my favorite parts of my CRM, each month before I send out my newsletter I transfer new contacts from my CRM. It’s a quick and seamless process that ensures my prospects get this additional touch point from me. That way if they stop responding or say “not right now,” they’ll continue to hear from me so when it’s the right time, they know where to find me.

Your CRM is a powerful tool to help with your follow up. These are 4 ways that I’ve found they help me to ensure that prospects and clients don’t fall through the cracks. There are a TON of other features in my CRM I’m not talking about here – and a ton of other features I don’t use (and probably should) but this is how it helps with my follow up.

Don’t have a CRM? I had a guest post from a colleague who has some great recommendations.

How do you use your CRM to help with follow up?