Be Cautious When Automating Aspects of Your Business

Have you ever added automation in your business where automation was not needed? We have here at Array Digital. In episode 179, listen in to Kevin as he shares a couple examples of how we realized that you must be careful with what you automate within your organization. One aspect of our business we tried to automate was the marketing for ourselves. We are a digital marketing agency, but when marketing for ourselves, Kevin came to the realization that we went a little overboard with automation through using gated content, funnels, and other automation tools. The reality was that we did not gain enough leads to deem this automation successful. We are a very personable, face-to-face, relationship type of company. If you hire Array Digital, it is a partnership: we sit down with you, spend time figuring your company out, and we understand that hiring us is a big decision. We understand when you hire us, you are putting faith in us with your entire marketing and advertising budget. Because of this we can’t gain these types of deals by someone downloading an eBook. Yes, it will get people in our funnel, and grow our awareness within the industry, but all the work to gain this is not worth it. From the expenses of HubSpot, the content we push, and the team creating it, this automation just did not pay off. We ended up abandoning this automation about half way through, but we were stuck paying for the software. We still ended up using HubSpot for sales, but that is a high price to pay for just a sales service. Finally, the bleeding of the payment has stopped, and we learned a big lesson. Marketing was not the only aspect of our business that we were thinking about automating. We were considering automating our sales process as far as appointment setting, tasking, and reminders to call prospects and what not, but stopped ourselves ahead of time. The reality is, that Glen (our sales manager) and Kevin are the only people on the sales team. They are not yet overwhelmed by sales and leads to the point where they can’t take care of these tasks themselves. We now understand, before Array Digital goes and invests into another piece of software, it is important to take care of these tasks the hard way with the systems that we already have in place. This might be a little bit more difficult, but it’s what we must do for now. As we grow we are going to hire more sales team members, and then maybe we can put some automation in place. The key here is to be careful about adding automation too early and in places that you do not need it! — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is the also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.