Jorge Gasca founded Three Steps Business as a product of his obsession for creating better and more efficient processes. The natural conclusion was marketing automation with the goal of scaling and amplifying the impact of service businesses in the community.
Jorge has been working with coaches, consultants and service providers as a marketing automation consultant implementing systems using ActiveCampaign since 2013.
Since beginning his entrepreneurial journey, he has successfully helped hundreds of businesses grow and scale and continues to be at the forefront of next-generation automation systems that can help you build a next-level business.
Understanding Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is a pretty complex concept for most people. If you have a services business or you are a coach or a consultant who is keen to reap the benefits so you can spend your time on high impact tasks this article will give you a simple yet powerful structure to finally get automation implemented.
First of all, you need to understand what the whole automation concept is all about. Marketing Automation is in a nutshell, the art to send the right message, at the right time, to the right person.
So, you need to understand that to be able to do this, you need to program the experience you want to create for your audience.
Although ActiveCampaign is an automation system – a system often perceived as the solution to everything – it should always be considered a blank canvas. This is so that you can design the system based on your unique customer journey.
So what do we do with a blank canvas?
The truth is that ActiveCampaign is a blank canvas, and you need to put a picture within it.
This meaning, you need to have the following elements:
- A Vision (Strategy)
- A Plan (Tactical Execution)
- A system (ActiveCampaign will cover this one)
This means sitting and thinking…
- What does systems mean to you?
- What processes are repetitive so we can automate those first?
- Planning and thinking is the beginning of everything. You will not build a house without an architectural design would you?
The system itself wouldn’t help you, but what you need is the vision of what you want the system doing, so it can be set up that way.
Understanding your customer journey
A quick way for you to think about your plan is understanding your customer journey.
I divide this experience in four steps:
- They Find You
- They Talk to You
- They Buy from You
- You Deliver
In between these steps there are few steps that I call black boxes that allow us to fit automation in. These are 4 key systems:
- Attraction System: This is your first impression for a new contact in your database plus other campaigns you run to build your database.
- Conversion System: This is your sales process and CRM.
- Retention System: This is all about onboarding new clients and delivering the service.
- Ascension System: This is your upsell system, are there other products your client might be interested in?
Remember that automation is like oil in an engine and its main objective is to make the whole thing flow smoothly from when they find you until you deliver.
It looks like this.
From here is for you to sit down and download the processes that happen within these main systems and what is repetitive so you can automate it.
Once you understand this simple process you can repeat it several times for each of the different elements of your customer experience.
As the title says, this is a super simplified version of the process. If you’d like to know more details about this process, I’d like to invite you to watch this masterclass, which covers the process in a lot more detail.
