7 Proven Tips to Grow Sales with a Digital Marketing Process
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
Your growth goals are unlikely to be achieved without a marketing system (habit) to get there.
And if by chance they are achieved, then those results will eventually come crashing down.
Back in 2021, we saw a drop in our average revenue per client subscription. Some sort of “funnel drift” was happening, but what?
Then I realized, “Wait a second… Mid-march where we see the data peak is when we stopped publishing content and only focused on ads.”
Due to high demand then, we’d turned-off a key part of our marketing processes which was working: content!
But the bigger point was, when you do something repeatedly (systematically) that’s working:
- #1 - keep doing it consistently
- #2 - the consistent, systematic marketing actions cause a build-up consistent sales and lead flow over time
- #3 - Keep doing it consistently! (and Don’t talk about Fight Club…)
Many professional services businesses, like agencies, are familiar with the phase “feast and famine” cycle.
This refers to big up and down swings in your sales and profit (it feels like a rollercoaster YAY … except without a seatbelt ). The cause? Inconsistent marketing actions.
For SaaS companies, the phrase “The SaaS slow-sales ramp-of-death” was coined by Gail Goodman, former CEO of Constant Contact.
For all business types, the root cause is the same:
- Inconsistent marketing actions (or lack of) causes inconsistent leads and sales flow.
A lot of trial and error went into creating the marketing system(s) we have in place now. So I’m eager to share these 7 proven tips and insights for your benefit.
- Marketing Systemization Tip #1: Inconsistent Marketing = Flat, Choppy Growth. Do This Instead…
- Marketing Systemization Tip #3: Track Metrics to Stay Motivated—Your Success is in the Numbers
- Marketing Systemization Tip #7: This Tip is Where You Ultimately Need to Go, as Well as The Future of Marketing In General
All right let’s go, and if you prefer watching, check out the video with today’s article.
Marketing Process Tip #1: Inconsistent Marketing = Flat, Choppy Growth. Do The Opposite…
Over the last 15 years I've seen firsthand that consistent effort, not sporadic “marketing campaign” bursts, is what drives sustained sales growth.
Let's break down the evidence.
How Consistency Helps You Scale Your Marketing:
1. Expanding Your Reach: Regularly publishing content grows your audience. It's not just about volume - it's about consistency. By methodically publishing daily social posts, one company gained 100k+ Facebook followers in only 9 months:
“As Dronetech’s social media manager, I used Google Alerts to get up-to-date news on everything drone-related sent to my inbox each morning. I would then pick out the best stories and schedule them to be posted at optimized times on Facebook (using either Facebook’s scheduled posts or Buffer), giving our audience a consistent stream of informative and engaging content throughout the day.” (case study)
More Proof: Check out Buffer's consistent guest posting strategy. This rapidly expanded their awareness and user base in 9 months after publishing 150 guest articles.
This article detailing their strategy is a bit dated, but quality guest posting still works today.
I’ve used guest posting in the past to gain valuable links for AutoGrow early on, as well as grow our client roster.
Many people are pitching us for the same in our inbox today but we reject almost all because quality is paramount.
2. Building Trust and Loyalty: When you consistently deliver value, your audience comes to rely on you. This trust leads to more sales, shares, and overall loyalty.
Proof: HubSpot found brands that publish 16+ articles per month get nearly 3X more traffic than those posting 0-4 times.
We’ve experimented a lot with different volumes of article creation / updates at AutoGrow.co. From 1x per week to 5x per week, we always saw the best results the more we published.
The challenge is to maintain a balance of both volume and quality. At this moment, with over 500+ articles on our site our focus is on updating our existing content.
I’ll share some of the results of doing this in the future (subscribe if you want to hear about it).
3. Data-Driven Optimization: Consistency allows you to analyze patterns and optimize your strategy.
For example, as marketers and entrepreneur Noah Kagan once said, you want to look at your data (e.g. Google Analytics) and “scale the peaks.”
But you will only see that data after you start taking action and following your digital marketing process consistently.
When I first started writing content for AutoGrow, I noticed that Tuesday were giving us the best results for publishing and promoting. So we scaled that peak and adjusted to consistently publish on Tuesday mornings as a result.
This helped our traffic to climb higher, and faster, as well as drive more email subscribers.
How You Can Commit to Consistency:
- Pick Your Platforms Wisely: Focus on just 1 or 2 marketing channels that align with your audience's habits - SEO, email, social ads, etc. Don't spread yourself too thin. If you focus on one channel and it doesn’t at least start to trickle in some growth results within 4 weeks? Consider either shifting to focus on another channel or figure out what you might be doing wrong.
- Create a Content Calendar: Plan out your content schedule in advance to hold yourself accountable. Start with an attainable goal like 1-2 posts per week. Then work your way up as you see results.
- Stick to Your Timeline: Your audience should know exactly when to expect content from you. Consistency is about quality AND predictability.
- Track and Analyze Results: Look beyond vanity metrics. Analyze data to find what's truly moving the needle with your audience.
- Optimize Based on Insights: Use feedback and metrics to continuously refine your strategy. Build on what works and cut what doesn't.
In closing, consistency is the silent workhorse of marketing.
While not flashy, its effects compound over time. By taking a data-driven, audience-focused approach, you can leverage consistency to grow your business.
Marketing Process Tip #2: Focus Your Efforts Strategically—Stop Wasting Time on Tactics That Don’t Deliver
Likes, re-tweets (re-X’s?), impressions, “interaction”?…
This data (often vanity metrics) has value in the right context. But you want the data that points you in the direction of more leads and sales.
Where you put your focus matters because it’s either going to grow those “bottom-line” stats that you care about most, or not.
How Strategic Focus Helps You Scale:
1. Efficient Resource Allocation: You can't be everywhere at once. If you focus on one or two high-impact marketing channels / strategies, you're not just saving time—you're using it to your advantage.
In my early days with AutoGrow (even up until recently) I focused exclusively on content marketing for organic traffic and email. That’s all, and it worked.
Focus doesn’t mean you have to do something complex. It means doing less and doing it better.
2. Faster, More Reliable Data:
If you’re only testing 1-2 tactics, your data isn't diluted by other variables. That means you can trust your results and act on them faster.
For example, say you are running an ad campaign to funnel traffic to your website. If this is your primary focus (no other campaigns or funnels) then the data you see in Stripe, your CRM, or Google Analytics is going to be directly tied back to your ad campaign.
You don’t have to filter it or think about other variables. The data you need to decide on next steps is right there.
How to Implement Strategic Focus:
- Audit Your Options: Identify 2-3 marketing channels that align with your target audience, and 1-2 strategies (e.g. ads, SEO, content, etc) that align with your brand and budget.
- Test: Keep it to a 3-4 week period for each tactic.
- Review: Look at the raw data. Are you getting leads? Traffic? Conversions? If yes, keep going. Don’t stop.
Focus isn't about limiting your options; it's about amplifying your impact where it gets results.
Up next, we're diving into why numbers should be your new best friend in creating your digital marketing process.
Tip #3: Track Metrics to Stay Motivated
Metrics (or KPIs, Key Performance Metrics, more specifically) are the scorecard of your marketing efforts.
But more than that, no matter where you are at in your growth journey, seeing the feedback these numbers give feels encouraging. Plan it out right and you can even “gamify” the experience for yourself.
The Reasons Tracking Metrics Accelerates Your Growth:
1. Decision-Making Clarity:
Data provides you with a logical basis for your marketing decisions. It eliminates guesswork and “Bobby, I’ve got a hunch!”-based moves. And I have no idea who Bobby is…
Proof: A report from Mckinsey shows that data-driven companies are 23x more likely to outperform competitors in acquiring customers.
As the report states:
In terms of strategic KPIs, some of the findings are quite extraordinary. Intensive users of customer analytics are 23 times more likely to clearly outperform their competitors in terms of new- customer acquisition than non-intensive users, and nine times more likely to surpass them in customer loyalty. Our survey results also show that the likelihood of achieving above-average profitability is almost 19 times higher for customer-analytics champions as for laggards.
2. Keeps You and Your Team Driven: Imagine doing something but receiving no feedback. And then you do that thing (marketing tactic) over and over and over… Or maybe you just stop, or quality plummets…
Without feedback, you’re in the dark. You don’t know and it's easy to care less too.
This is why monitoring your progress with key metrics keeps everyone encouraged, motivated, with all eyes on the goal.
Proof: American Psychological Association research shows that the more often you monitor your progress, the greater the likelihood that you will succeed in achieving your goals. Additional analysis revealed that monitoring progress had an even greater effect if the information was physically recorded or publicly reported.
This is something we’re doing better and better on our team too. We have all our sales funnel data in one spreadsheet. We share it twice in our marketing chat for the whole team to see 2x per week.
We know what our KPIs are, they are highly visible, and we’re all focused on them.
How to Get Started with Tracking Metrics:
- Identify Metrics: What’s important and worth tracking? Choose key performance indicators that align with your top growth objectives. If your goal is to grow top of funnel awareness / traffic, consider if any of the above metrics might help you in that goal.
- Weekly Check-ins: Review your data at a minimum weekly to track progress.
- Keep It Highly Visible: make you and your team have access to the numbers on-demand and when sharing, share them in a way that you and your team are accountable, for progress or a lack of.
With your digital marketing process running consistently, your KPIs established, and your efforts focused, it’s time to get ready to delegate…
Marketing Process Tip #4: Documentation is “Boring”, But It’s Your Blueprint for Scaling
It’s not sexy.
But it works: simply write down what you’re doing that works, and how you do it in detail.
It should be easy for someone with basic marketing knowledge to follow.
Avoid doing it all at once. Instead, do it over time, progressively. And use it, just as the person to whom you will soon give it to will use it.
How Documenting Your Marketing Process Helps You Scale Fast:
1. Delegation Becomes a Breeze: When you document what works, you create a reference that helps you efficiently hand-off tasks to team members.
Proof: At AutoGrow we would not have been able to scale to be a multi-million dollar company without detailed documentation.
And our “company manual” is never done. It’s like a living document, always evolving.
It’s always put to the test each work-day and tweaked to make it better. The documentation has saved us 100s of hours of training, as well as made transitions from old hires to new hires much more streamlined.
How to Document Effectively:
- Start Simple: Write down step-by-step processes for each successful marketing task.
- Use It Yourself: As stated at the start of this section, the documentation you create you should first test by using yourself day-to-date because considering it ready to hand-off.
- Explain the Why: Context helps your team understand the rationale behind each step. Knowing “why” it’s done a certain way helps the reader to learn, remember, and do it as expected.
Pro Tip: keep your documentation / system organized. It will pay dividends in the form of easy onboarding, training, and fewer headaches long term. Use tools like Google Drive, Spreadsheets, GDocs, and even Zapier to help automate.
You might also like to check out the Process Street if you are a bit further along (I heard a rumor they are super smart and subscribe to our email list like a number of successful companies )
Marketing Process Tip #5: Hand Off Responsibilities—Get Comfortable With Letting Go
This tip overlaps a bit with the previous you might say.
But it deserves it’s own separate section.
The reason is that many business owners know all about delegation in theory, and its benefits.
But as Michael Gerber wrote in his book, The E-Myth: Revisited (great book by the way, classic), because they’ve been doing the work themselves for so far they can still struggle to hand-off the work.
This is because, Gerber says, that in every owner there 3 people:
- The manager (the one who want to build a house and live in it… forever)
- The entrepreneur (the one who lives in the future: bright blue skies!)
- The technician (the one who does the work, hands on, and thinks no one else can)
More on this and what to do about it below…
How Delegation Accelerates Your Scaling:
1. Allows Strategic Focus: Delegation frees you up to work on strategic tasks that only you can do. Most marketing tasks? They can get done well and without you.
Proof: According to past data from Gallup, CEOs that effectively delegate saw a 33% increase in revenue.
This is a correlation, which doesn’t mean causation. But it’s worth considering why it’s the case.
I believe it's at least partially causation though based on my experience.
How to Delegate Successfully:
- Peace of Mind: Going off of the “problem of the technician” at the start of this section, the technician in you might have resistance to delegating anything. The cure for this? Simple. Whomever you hand off responsibility to, make them responsible for 1-2 KPIs / Metrics that they have full influence or control over. This will give you peace of mind.
- Start Small: Delegate tasks that are time-consuming but not mission-critical. Do them one at a time and keep updating the documentation as you do it. Train the team member you’re handing off to how to update the documentation as well.
- Train and Trust: Educate your team and then trust them to execute.
- Monitor: Initially, oversee the process to ensure it aligns with your standards.
Marketing Process Tip #6: “Set It and Forget It” Never Works
It is easy to take it easy after some quick wins start rolling in.
And that’s where many of your would-be competitors will rest or quit. “Job’s done!”
But not you. Because after this section you know the painful lesson I’ve learned over and over again:
Business and markets are dynamic, especially today. Everything keeps changing and that probably won’t change.
Therefore, “set it and forget it” will not work. Everyone on your team benefits from valuing continuous self-improvement: “The job? That’s the art, and it’s never quite done. We can do better…”
How Constant Optimization Helps You Scale:
1. Better ROI Over Time:
Optimization ensures that you're not just doing things right, but you’re doing them better and better.
As Ben Franklin once said: “Compound interest if the 8th wonder of the world.”
The “proof” for this one is simply the logic of it. If you / your team keep doing the same thing over and over, you’re going to develop your ability to do it, do it a bit faster, and a bit better.
For instance, our recent 13% boost in conversions on our pricing page is a result of us operating by this principle:
How to Optimize Continuously:
- Analyze Metrics: Regularly review performance data.
- Test, Test, Test: A/B testing (or sequence test if you have less traffic)
- Conduct Surveys: Do not underestimate the value of survey data. Just don’t knock your website visitors over the head with surveys too aggressively and it’s all good.
Pro-Tip: implement a survey funnel to dramatically increase your brand awareness, leads, and sales.
Marketing Process Tip #7: Omni-Channel – It’s the Future. It’s a Competitive Barrier Too.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good strategy, especially in marketing.
Why? Because marketers ruin everything!
(haha just kidding but you know what I mean… Someone figures out how to game Facebook’s newsfeed algo. Then the next thing you know? There’s an algo update and every marketer needs to re-adapt their strategy because results aren’t what they were a week ago)
So it’s good a defensive move to diversify the marketing channels you invest in over time (especially if you want to grow and gain a larger budget, more time, and/or a done-for-you marketing team).
Ultimately, your goal should be to go “Omni-Channel” that means to be on every platform, network, channel etc where you can get a positive ROI from marketing there. Perhaps we’ll write a more indepth article about why this is the future for all businesses coming up…
However, more marketing channels requires more work, maybe a lot more…
Ah, but that is the opportunity! More below…
How Channel Expansion Helps You Scale:
1. Defensive Diversification:
Expanding channels allows you to tap into different customer segments and protects you against volatility in any single channel.
How many times has Facebook or Google changed their algorithm in the last 10 years? A lot.
Interesting Data: According to a HubSpot research, 92% of marketers leverage more than one channel. In 2022, 81% leverage more than three…
What this data doesn’t tell you though… can you guess? Most of those leveraging 3 or more channels are doing a poor job at it. Perhaps because they skipped tips #1 and #2 unlike you, dear reader.
2. The Obstacle Is The Opportunity: What is “not easy” (more work) for you is also more work for your competitors. So even if some of your competitors do invest in a new marketing channel, the chances they won’t execute as well as you is high.
This friction (more work) and this obstacle (new learning curve), is your opportunity.
Do what others are unwilling or unable to do and you will have an endless river of leads and sales slapping at your door.
How to Expand Your Marketing Channels:
- Assess the Market: Research where your target audience spends their time.
- Start Small: Test new channels with a limited budget. “Fire bullets, then cannonballs” as Jim Collins once wrote in his famous book, Good to Great.
- Monitor: Use data to decide whether to scale or cut the new channel.
- Copy What Works: Do this when starting out for fastest results, but evolve your own style and tactics over time.
Conclusion
Quick recap of the most important points for you:
- Consistency: Be regular and reliable in your marketing efforts for sustained growth that compounds and STACKS results.
- Strategic Focus: Prioritize one or two high-impact marketing channels to start with and expand fully off of those until you’re in the $1-5MM range.
- Metrics / KPIs: Know what yours are, and focus on them. Use them to drive decisions and keep your team focused and motivated.
- Document: Create a roadmap for success and easy delegation.
- Delegate: Free yourself for more strategic work (working on your business). Whomever you delegate to, make them responsible for “owning” 1-2 KPIs that they have full influence or control over. You’ll use this to access their performance.
- Continuous Optimization: Keep refining your marketing machine for better results.
- Go Omni-Channel: Expand into more (and then all) marketing channels for maximum reach and market domination!
Now, this article was “nice” but I have a challenge for you.
Will YOU be part of the 1% reaching this article who will actually put these ideas into motion and get a positive result?
If so, what's one thing you're going to change in your marketing strategy today?
Share your thoughts in the comments below and kindly share this article on social media.
Keep AutoGrowin', Stay Focused
Image Credits:
- https://quuu.co/blog/case-study-how-to-get-100000-facebook-followers-in-9-months/
- https://zenpost.com/blog/how-often-post-to-your-blog/
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blogging-frequency-benchmarks
- https://learn.g2.com/vanity-metrics
- https://www.monsterinsights.com/crucial-ecommerce-kpis-to-track-in-google-analytics/
- https://learn.g2.com/vanity-metrics
- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/five-facts-how-customer-analytics-boosts-corporate-performance
- https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-key-social-platform-metrics-to-track-infographic/631187/
- https://www.process.st/
- https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280
- https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182414/delegating-huge-management-challenge-entrepreneurs.aspx
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-channels
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/35-best-business-books-2022-entrepreneurs-creatives-read-balasanyan/
