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Tanya Smith of Mindfully Marketing

Tanya Smith

Online Marketing Strategist of Mindfully Marketing

Tanya has grown her social media presence with intention and purpose since 2010. She has helped hundreds of marketers create practical strategies to grow their business by leveraging online tools.

Article

How To Automate And Balance Your Online Marketing

I have six principles I use to be more mindful in my marketing. I see successful marketing as an outgrowth of my intention to live as a successful human.

That’s what led me to develop these principles that I’ve returned to over the years throughout the various ups and downs of both business and life.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Tanya’s success

Automating and balancing online marketing

Result if you follow the steps in Tanya’s session

A more balanced and mindful approach to your business, marketing, and life through applied principles

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

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Transcript

And the first one is people over process. And you know, I had to remind myself of this Liam because I was getting into the mode of really just trying to pull myself out of the business, and to put things on autopilot.

In fact, I used to say that a lot to people and until I realized that it was a big fat lie that you can put your entire business on autopilot and we’ll see people market and sell that as a true idea. When it’s really false. You can’t do that and be a successful business owner.

You have to be able to keep in mind that any process, any automated tools, any things that you put on autopilot, are also going to, they should be there to supplement you as a relationship builder and not take over your company.
You should still be in your business, you should still be working with people and interacting with them on a personal level.

Yeah, there’s all these trendy online tools that we can try and run, wants to go out there and automate their business. But as we’ve kind of heard from a lot of our experts in the past, it’s really about building personal relationships with people.

And if you’re automating everything, and you’re not complementing that, or adding the personal touch and actually being there as a person, I think you’re missing out on a ton of sales and the ability to connect really, and get to know your prospects.

Absolutely. I mean, I had gotten to the place of really just kind of putting my social media to give you an example. But in my social media completely on autopilot when it came to Twitter, for instance, and I saw as much as I had grown my audience to a point where I thought, wow, you know, this is a really good group of people were engaged and etc.

When I did that autopilot thing, I started losing attention. And not only did I started losing, I started losing people, followers, but I also lost connection like real conversation. And that matters when you’re creating a business right now.

That’s the thing that differentiates us and keeps us distinguished as a true professional, is if we’re really out there actively communicating and engaging. That’s what social is supposed to be all about. And I think I’ve forgotten that.

Yeah. So when it comes to, you know, systems and processes, and obviously, we need to maybe outsource things or hire someone or, you know, maybe use some tools at some occasions, when others occasions that we should maybe be looking to process things, but we should all and then what other things we should always keep, you know, personalized, we should be always doing ourselves?

I think that’s a great question. And so one of the other principles, and I’ll bring this up because it’s the very next one, is the three bucket rule that I talked about. And the idea is that you’re going to separate things into things that you can act on directly. Things that you can automate and things that you can assign to other people.

So when I think about the things that you want to act on and always be personally engaged with, one of the things that I would definitely put at the top of the list would be service. So I think there’s always a great entry point when you’re using things like chat bots, for instance, that’s the new thing, the new hot thing.

There’s a great way to have people enter into that service conversation with you, but you shouldn’t leave them alone with the bot. You should be getting involved and having conversations so that you can better understand and define what’s the real problem, and how can I improve this for that individual person, but also for the next time for my entire system. And so I think there’s nothing like having a true conversation with people that will help you to provide excellent service.

On the automation piece, I think it’s anything that you are repetitively doing. So if there’s something that you find yourself and your business doing over and over and over again, then those repetitive processes can really be done through some type of automated tool.

And I would give you one of the things I think that I find is easy to automate, would be scheduling. So if you’re scheduling people through a calendaring system, you shouldn’t have to do that on a manual basis. If you’re giving people an opportunity to meet with you say for a discovery session, so many of you might be coaches or trainers or people that have that one on one upfront consultation.

What you can do is create an automated system that allows people to connect and create that appointment that then syncs with your calendar so that it’s always going to give you that space and time that you need. So you block it off when you know you’re not going to need appointments.

And then you keep it open and available for those times when you know, you can gage. So I think that’s a great way to automate is using systems like that that are repetitive, and that you need to get quick connection with build quick connections that assign peace.

As far as delegating to other people and outsourcing, you only want to assign or delegate to other people when it’s a situation where your reputation and your relationship is not at, is not in peril. So from a service aspect, for instance, I can go back to that example. No, you’re not going to be available 24/7, and there are going to be some times when you can outsource certain types of questions.

But when they get to be a little bit more complex, you need to get your hands dirty. You need to get in there and be the one who is saying, look, I’m going to guide you through this and I’ll help you. Because a lot of times when people are hiring your company, they want to deal with you.

So I, as a coach would not outsource to someone else, my coaching. I would want to be the direct person who’s facilitating and leading, training and coaching, but not give that to my assistant to do because they’re hiring me for that. I hope that helps to give a couple of examples.

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