Hook, Nurture, Convert: The Power of Marketing Automation

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James. And today we're going to a beautiful part of England called Suffolk. It's over on the east side, north of London, and we're going to meet Seb Brantigan, who has a business called DBSS Digital. And Seb is going to help us to understand about marketing and marketing automation and how we can use AI to save time when we're mapping the customer journey, because often we have so many different touch points with a customer whether it's online, offline, through social, through a marketing campaign for an event, for example, that it's really, really hard to track all of those and to ensure that we've got timely and appropriate responses. Seb's also going to tell us about a number one mistake that he sees people making when they organize virtual events, and he's got some goodies for us at the end. He's going to give us a free download to some top-performing funnels. So Seb, thank you for coming on the show today and and sharing your wisdom. Tell us about you, Seb.

Of course. Thank you again for having me on. I really, really appreciate it. So a little bit about me. So as you say, I live in Woodbridge, Suffolk. I've always lived in Suffolk, great little place to, to be. I've been involved with digital marketing for close to 10 years now in numerous different formats, such as a freelancer, now as an agency owner, which I'll get into how all of that works and a bit of my my journey, but I've loved digital marketing, social media, automation. You know, a big part of why I do what I do is to help other business owners to buy their time back, which is the most important asset. So that's a very little bit about me, and I'm looking forward to today's podcast.

Well, Seb, you've mentioned the magic word, buying time back. And for all business owners, regardless of how big the company, you know, time is the one thing we can't buy again. How are you helping with a company that maybe has, you know, maybe 10 to 20 people now and has to work on inbound marketing, you know, but also has some outbound marketing and they've got some martech, they've got some content, they've got some activities. Quite quickly, it becomes very complicated and quite disconnected too, Seb, doesn't it? So take us through what you at DBSS Digital do when you first meet a company that needs your help?

Yeah, of course. So what we do is we perform a marketing audit, which is broken into 2 parts, which I'll explain each of those 2 parts. But the first part is we go into— within the audit is the marketing strategy. So that's step 1. Step 2 is we go into the marketing tech. So if I start with step 1, which is the strategy, so we look at how that company is currently generating leads. So what's the strategy behind it? Are they doing a lead magnet strategy? Do they have a webinar? Maybe they run an event. So we look at that process, so the what's happening at the front end. Then we go a little bit deeper into what happens when someone becomes a lead and they get to the stage where an offer is presented. We also look at the offer, which is very, very important. A lot of businesses don't have a compelling enough offer, or it's not compelling enough to the audience they're looking to attract. And then we'll look at what happens after someone has seen the offer. We know that for a lot of people to buy, we need to have multiple touchpoints. And so those are some of the things we look into on the strategy side. Now, switching gears to the technical side, we would look at what digital assets this company has already or what they're looking to use. So we would look at what digital assets they have, whether it's a CRM system, whether they have some website or marketing funnels. Do they have any testimonials? What digital assets do they have? And we do a bit of an audit on those as well so that we assess that and see. And in some cases, an ideal client has a lot of these things. They have the digital assets, And a lot of clients we've worked with, it's oftentimes just been a 1-degree shift to get results flowing. It's almost like turning a tap on. And that marketing audit is really important so we can assess that and see what it is we need to start working on. And the biggest thing we're passionate about is that return on investment when people, business owners work with us.

Seb, that's wonderful. And I love the way you break that down between the audit Um, and then the strategy. But you have mentioned there about the, the tech as well. What would you say is the ideal setup for a business? Do you think that they should have one hero platform like a HubSpot, for example, or a Zoho, or should they build a collection of best-in-breed like AWeber, for example, for email? Um, And, you know, maybe an SMS gateway. What's your view on that?

Of course, for me, it depends on the size of the business and where that particular business is at. In a lot of cases, it's difficult to have that all-in-one solution when you're growing at scale. So if you're 7 figures and above, you probably are gonna have multiple softwares. The solution to that is a platform called Zapier. And Zapier is effectively like the glue between one software and another. Say for instance, someone inquires through your website about one of your offers or packages. You can use Zapier to take that information about that inquiry. So about that person, that lead, and you can move it to a Google Sheet or some kind of other document. So it's somewhere multiple people can access it. You can then connect that to a service like Mailchimp or AWeber where it sends that particular person an email saying, thank you for your inquiry, someone else will get back to you. You can then go a step further and use Zapier to contact your team member, your sales team, let them know that this inquiry has come through. Because if you get an inquiry, especially if it's about pricing or packages, that's someone who probably you want to get back to very quickly and you'd want your sales team to be aware of that to really get that process moved along as quickly as possible, right?

Yeah, Seb. So that's fantastic. So as you say, you really have got this, or we used to call this a middleware, you know, in the IT game back in the sort of '90s, we used to call these sort of glues like middleware. Seb, you did mention before we talked about the different platforms, that sometimes it's just a 1% change to create, if you like, leverage and growth. Is there a recurring theme? What would you say has been your observation about what makes that 1% change create incremental growth in either leads or sales? Yeah, of course.

So the biggest one I'd say is the strategy, making that change there. So, you know, it could be And there is the technical side that goes along with that. So it could be, for example, on the strategy side, it could be that your marketing is too broad and you're trying to reach a message to too many different groups of people, too many audiences. So you might potentially change some of your advertising copy or your funnel copy, email copy as well, potentially your front-end marketing. You could tweak that. So for example, for my business, when I first started my marketing agency, I was targeting all business owners and it was too broad. I didn't know who to target, so I just went with business owners just to get going. But once I started understanding there were certain business owners that I could get results for quicker, that's when I started working with service-based business owners. So that's an example of the 1-degree shift. It's a small tweak, And it's a small tweak that I made in my marketing. I literally added service-based to business owners to complete that circle, and I was targeting the right people from then on. I wasn't reaching as many people en masse, but I was reaching the right people, and that's what's so important.

Seb, I think that's brilliant. Thank you for that. As you say, it doesn't actually cost anything to make that decision either, does it? So it's a free action that creates amazing difference in revenue. Seb, we, we talked about, um, you know, customer journeys, and most people really struggle— most business owners struggle with the different touch points. What guidance can you give my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs about mapping out their customer journey? Because the technology that you're deploying is there to meet customers when they're on that journey at different places with different if you like, stages of awareness or motivation to take action. Can you give us some guidance on mapping that out?

Yeah, of course. It's definitely a process of— I would map that out in a few different ways. Firstly, I would get a big A2, A3 piece of paper and just start drawing it out, ideally using a pencil because you can change and edit things as and when. And something that I always recommend to anyone creating this automation process, this strategy, is to simplify. One of my marketing funnels at the moment is someone requests access to one of my giveaways, they fill in the form, they get the giveaway, and then the step after that is they book in a call with myself or with my team to discuss working together and purchasing our digital marketing services and inquiring about that, then the purchase happens over the phone. And so with that simple process, starting with less steps but achieving the same thing is definitely the place to go. What the big mistake that I see a lot of business owners make with automation is they try and automate a 15-step process When they don't actually need the 15 steps. Now, obviously, if you're a bigger company, if you're selling a high-ticket product, you'd probably need more steps in that process within the automation and of course the sales cycle. But if you're just starting out, you know, what's the path of least resistance, not just for you who's setting up the automation, but for the customer as well? We talk about customer journey and that's really, really important. So it's about— removing the steps that we don't need or automating them as well.

Seb, I think that's wonderful, wonderful advice as well. A topic that, you know, everyone's thinking about, but you haven't mentioned yet is AI and the impact of AI on either automation or identifying the program or even the tools. What's your view at DBSS Digital on using AI?

It's definitely been very impactful for us and also for our clients. For example, I know, you know, one client I'm working with is always releasing new products and new courses in order to keep his audience engaged. And it's— he's almost in an internet marketing/business training niche, so it's kind of a necessity in that niche for the most part. And the struggle that he had was, oh, I've gotta sit down for half a day and write out an offer, create this product and do all of this. Well, AI can generate all of that for you. You could get AI to generate the logo for the offer, the details behind the packaging, the pricing. And of course it's not gonna do 100% of the work for you. You'll still need to sense check everything and probably add your own personal flair to it. But it's able to do probably 85% of the work. So the advantage that we've seen is you're able to get things out there a lot quicker as business owners, right? And, you know, we've all had that where we've had a great idea, oh, we should do this event, we should do that product launch, right? Or launch this new offer. And the thing that stops us from doing that and stops the momentum is having to sit down and spend the time creating it. Well, AI removes a lot of that, those barriers and those issues because you can simply have an idea, use ChatGPT to generate a lot of the content behind it and the concepts. So it just saves you a lot of time. And, you know, in order to succeed quicker, it's important to have that momentum. And that's what AI helps you to get into the flow of.

Yeah, that's wonderful, Seb. And Seb Brannigan, I think also you're at the end of the show gonna give us a URL which has got some tools and some templates that people can download for free to get access to some of the recommendations that you've got as well, aren't we?

Oh yeah, 100%. I've got something very exciting in store that probably what a lot of other people would not give away for free, but because I'm so passionate about what I do and helping business owners, I'm definitely happy to do that and share that as well.

Yeah, that's wonderful, Seb. So, you know, stick around and then you get that link at the end. Seb, you've, you started this business, DBSS Digital, with a partner who's in London and you're in Suffolk. So, you know, not too far away, but you're not in the same building itself. Tell us a little bit about how you've managed to get the brand of DBSS Digital noticed and what have you been doing as an entrepreneur to get clients? You referenced that just a little bit about niching down. But tell us about how you're overcoming the obstacle, because in those first couple of years, I know from my own experience, those first clients are so hard to get.

Definitely. So getting my name out there was definitely not easy. A big part of it was getting noticed on social media, so creating content there, really looking to build my own brand, what I could offer, why people should listen to me. That was a lot of what I was generating within my content. Then I started to eventually get clients just from being active and being out there. The other thing I did more of, as much of as I could, was getting to networking events and having a lot of conversations with people, having as many conversations as I could. They weren't always sales conversations, or a lot of them didn't lead to a sale, but I was having as many conversations as possible, whether it's a podcast like this, whether it's a Zoom, whether it's face-to-face for a coffee or a beer or whatever it was, it was having those conversations and getting my name and my face out there. In terms of where I'm at now and fast forwarding to that, I've gone from being a solopreneur and a freelancer to working as part of an agency. And of course, that comes with challenges as well, making sure we have clear communication internally, making sure we are you know, managing customer expectations and making sure we're on the same page ourselves. There's always going to be those little challenges that, you know, they're easy to overcome by having, again, the right tools, the right systems in place. So one tool that we use a lot of is Slack for communication, and that's a great way for all of us and our clients to stay in the loop and on the same page. So there's, there's always solutions to those, these problems that I see a lot of business owners you know, going through. And, uh, you know, automation and systems are a great way to combat a lot of those, those issues to some extent.

Seb, you mentioned sort of getting out there on social media. Um, perhaps we just go a little bit deeper into that. When you say going out there, what, what sort of content were you publishing? What sort of frequency were you using? And was this in general, or did you create a group, for example?

So the main type of content I was creating was video-based. So I would create a lot of videos sharing a couple of tips on something that I've learned about promoting your business or about marketing. And I started to build a bit of a following on my personal page, which I then moved to a business page soon after. And I was posting very frequently. I was probably posting multiple times a day at one point, but normally I post once a day. It wasn't always video. Sometimes it's images, sometimes it's just, uh, you know, here's a couple of tips on marketing and there was no image. So I try and vary it, make it interesting. and useful for my ideal audience and my audience I want to work with.

Yeah, Seb, that's wonderful. And I think that comes across that, you know, sharing your knowledge openly and freely has been the right thing to do. But from a business point of view, it's also very much in line with your values. Seb Brandigan, we know that as entrepreneurs, we also do things that don't work out. Is there anything that you have done yourself that you would say not to try at home, that isn't really that successful? Yeah, of course.

So there's all kinds of things. I feel like I've tried everything at this point. But I think something I mentioned earlier was just not trying to overcomplicate things. Think about where you're at in a business right now. A lot of people get very confused with things like automation because they feel They have to have all of their ducks in a row. So that's a mistake I've definitely made in the past, which is, although I did get out on social media, I probably was a bit hesitant at first doing so. So one thing I'd recommend is just jump in the deep end and learn as you go. From the automation perspective, it's definitely a case of keeping things simple and realistic. And I see a lot of business owners, another mistake I see, and it's something that I've done a lot of as well, and I advise people against, is trying too many different CRM systems, too many softwares at once. There's so many softwares coming out every single day. You don't need to try all of them. Just try one or two that work for you, that you can find useful and they work for you. They're reliable. They work for your customers. That's definitely the main focus. It's like driving a car. We all either drive a car or we're passengers in cars. We're trying to get to a destination. And ultimately, yes, one car can get you there faster. Another car probably gets you there more smoothly. But ultimately, as long as you have a vehicle to get to where you need to go, that's the most important thing. I see people procrastinating around having the right software or having the right this, having the right that.

And I think that's absolutely right, Seb. And I think that, um, there are so many new tools and especially AI-enabled tools now. It's, uh, something I had, um, Scott Brinker on from, uh, MarTech. He puts the MarTech landscape together. He calls it the second generation or second golden generation of MarTech, and he has over 2,000 MarTech tools. And that was a year ago, so I can only imagine how that has blown up. What about if people are organizing events, Seb, Because I know you're working with service providers and companies that are organizing events. Any sort of advice or things that you've seen people need to focus on? Because events can be quite expensive, but they're, you know, really a great opportunity to build a lead funnel. Any mistakes you're seeing there?

Yes, a very common mistake that I see is not planning the marketing around the event from start to finish. So one client I was working with recently, who, he did very well at his event, it was a much better turnout than we expected. I think he had 160 people in the room and he aimed for 100. And it was a partnership event with NatWest. So it was a very great successful event. One thing that could have been improved with that was having a succinct host event sequence, because with that type of event, they weren't allowed to do much. selling on stage or because it was hosted by NatWest. So there needed to be a more succinct process to produce that return on investment in other ways. Now, they did have a post-event sequence, post-event follow-up to capture that return on investment. And I think they did have some success from the event and they have actually managed to recoup that return, but it wasn't something that was planned out before the event started. It was very much a case of the event finished, now we have to— oh, now what do we do? Whereas we could have had it all set up, planned, ready before the event. And it probably would have been a bit not only less stressful, but it would have taken less time overall because we could have slotted in with other planning. So that's a mistake that I see is we go to all the trouble or the expense of putting on an event or Creating a webinar, hosting a webinar, or even down to generating leads. We all put so much effort into generating leads and we don't have that post-follow-up sequence to make sure that we nurture those leads because we need those multiple touchpoints in a lot of cases to generate sales.

That's interesting. Yeah, when I was a kid, we used to write a card to say thank you for having us at a party, and people used to say thank you to people that attended a wedding. You know, that kind of after-event follow-up was really, really key. Seb Brantingham, um, if there's, um, people that would like to know about this special offer, what have you got in store for people? Yeah, of course.

So what I've put together as a thank you for everyone who's listening— I really appreciate your time— is I'm giving away 2 things. So the first thing I'm giving away is my 3 top-converting marketing funnels and campaigns. So these are basically my, my best converting funnels for generating leads, call bookings, and, you know, more potential buyers within your business. So that's the first part of this. And then the second part is my 3 best converting email templates. So these are again very, very powerful when it comes to generating more potential clients and getting more appointment bookings. And it's really my best converting stuff. I thought I'd rather give something away that's actually useful rather than an ebook or a video you won't read, you won't watch. You might not want to read another ebook or watch another video, right? We've all done that so many times. So this is my actual proven digital assets I mentioned earlier that you guys can copy and reference when it comes to your business. So all you need to do is go onto that page, uh, fill in your information, you'll get immediate access to all of that.

Okay, and that page is marketwithseb.com, and that's a £994— Seb, you've given us a funny number there— £994 value, uh, that Seb is kindly going to be sharing with us for free today if you go to that site, marketwithseb.com. And Seb, presumably people don't have to be in Suffolk to work with you. You'll work with service-based companies across the country and across the world, I guess.

That's correct, yeah. So predominantly we are working with UK-based businesses, but we have expanded over to the United States, so we've worked with US-based companies as well. Again, predominantly service-based business owners. One of them is in credit repair, and they are, You know, absolutely loving automation. They've got a large sales team of about 8 to 10 sales people, I think. And so, you know, you're not able to do that efficiently without the right automation. And so that's a very, very powerful thing for business owners in that situation.

So, Brendan, again, if you want to find out more about you, where can they do that?

So you can do so via my website, so www.dbsisdigital.com. You'll see on there it has a summary of what we do at DBSS Digital, and there's more information about if you wanted to reach out to us to learn a little bit more about that, you're able to do that within the website as well. You can also find me on Facebook. So if you type Seb Bramtigan into Facebook, you'll be able to find me there if you wanted to reach out to me that way. I'm always available if you wanted to message me. And so yeah, predominantly through Facebook is a great way to reach me and through my websites as well.

Seb Brantigan, thank you so much for joining me on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur today.

Awesome. Thank you again for having me, and I really appreciate it.

Well, it's my pleasure. And we've learned in a way a lot, but also what Seb has told us, which is reassuring, is that the best strategy is simplification. That if we focus on a particular niche, we will be able to turn the strategy from being too, you know, diffused to be more focused. And if we make our funnels And our automation more simple, then we will shorten the steps that we have to take to get into the journey with the customer, but also that we need to do follow-up. It is so easy to think the job is done when we've had the first call, and actually the relationship is often made or broken with the follow-up. So thanks to Seb for joining us today. If you've enjoyed this, do please follow the show. That's really helpful, and review the show on your favorite player. And until we meet again, you've been listening to me, Jim James, your host. Thank you very much for joining me, and I just encourage you to keep on communicating.