3min
We recently recorded a new video on our favourite subject, marketing machines!
At Marketing Machines, by Real Inbound as we know call our business, we specialise in building these marketing machines, so just what exactly is in one? Well, feel free to watch the video, but here is a short précis of what I talk about in the video if you'd rather a quick read!
The Tech Stack
Your marketing machine is in essence the technology you use to promote your business. Everything you might use or think of using would be part of it. A CRM system, the CMS you use to power your website, your hosting platform, your email provider, office or admin technology, sales and marketing tools, customer service tools and so on and so on.
Most of us have them, and many of us have what we like to call a FrankenSpot Technology Stack. That is a tech stack of a load of different platforms and tools, that if even connected together are done so a little ad hoc and intermittently.
One of the things we talk about as a HubSpot partner is of course the benefits of having a fully integrated stack where everything is connected together, natively or through powerful integration tools, and where the data that swishes about is up to date and correct in every tool you use.
Attract
One of the most important tasks that your marketing machine needs to perform. Its job is to attract the people most likely to buy your product or service and bring them to the place where they ultimately will buy from you.
There are two main ways we can do this.
Organic content
Blogs, videos, articles, guest posting, podcasting and so on and so on! The choice is yours but consistently creating great and valuable to your audience content is the main stay of your marketing machine.
Paid for advertising
While there are a number of tactics you need to be familiar with in order to get your content to 'move', there is no doubt that the short cut to success is to buy audience through pay per click adverting, sponsored social media posts or other paid for means of driving views of your website pages.
Engage
What are we going to do with the audience we create though our attract strategies? Well, we can leave it to chance that they will immediate buy our stuff just because they turned up to the website. But its statistically far more likely that they will simply bounce back out! Especially if they arrived there through social media which is notorious for short lived attention spans!
The marketing machine has a focus on retaining, engaging and bringing your audience back. There are lots of ways to do this, but you must do it, otherwise the 'attract' effort is wasted.
Taking your readers / visitors through the buying journey from awareness to interest, desire and finally purchase should be the focus of this part of the overall customer journey.
The number one tip I can give you here, is try things out and test and test again. Bring the learnings you have back to the site and keep it fresh and interesting.
Delight
The final part of our users experience is after they have become a customer. A funnel seems to forget that customer as they drop through your sales process, but with a marketing machine approach we want to not only retain them, but treat them so well that they come back and buy again, and even advocate for our businesses as brand fans.
Think of how powerful customer advocates are and how effective they can be at adding 'force' to your flywheel. That in itself is strong enough reason to look after them and delight them with every touch.
The technology exists and is now cheap enough that everyone can run chatbots and create tickets for their clients, to make sure their issues are being resolved.
There it is, your marketing machine!
If there was a way to sum up a marketing machine it's that it's all in 'one place'. It's integrated so that it's all connected together in one simple customer view. It uses technology, but is focussed on the customer, and ultimately their overall satisfaction.
Its a lot to take in, and we hope the video helps you understand the process, but nothing beats a chat! Give us a shout and we would be more than happy to set you on your own path to marketing machinery!
