Streamline your sales processes with digital sales automation for supervision

How to create outlook signature

there are many skills that small businesses entrepreneurs and content creators need to understand when it comes to digital marketing one of those core skills that may not be as sexy as how to create your latest Tik Tok video or YouTube thumbnail is the topic of marketing automation this is so critical that in my new book that I am still writing but making progress on I have a dedicated chapter on marketing automation because I think it is one of these essential components of any digital first marketing strategy that's why I'm really excited today to have a special guest on where we're going to dive deep into marketing Automation and really the concept here is we're going to simplify your understanding of it I know for many there's a lot of misconceptions it takes a lot of time um you know does my software support it there are many ways to think about it today we're going to simplify it that when you leave after listening or watching this podcast episode you will have a a pretty clear road map as to how to achieve whatever you want to achieve with your marketing automation so today's special guest is the co-founder and CEO of a very very unique company called level up Creator I'm hoping it's level up creater level up creators okay they don't just work with one creater they work with multiple creators Amanda northcut and level up creators is unique and I'll have Amanda introduce yourself as well as they are a professional service firm that help creators so the Creator economy is a business uh whether you are a small business and entrepreneur or an entrepreneur who calls himself the content creator it is a business there are many things you need to do and building a list and utilizing marketing automation is one of those core critical things that can help impact your business in a major way so without further Ado let's bring on Amanda Amanda welcome to the your digital marketing coach podcast thank you so much Neil I'm glad to be here thank you thank you for having me today it is an honor to have you I just uh introduced you myself but I I guess uh you know I give you the opportunity to correct my introduction of you but more importantly how did you come up you know what what prompted you to create this very very unique type of company um to support creators as if they were small businesses and and provide them these Professional Services yeah thanks for asking uh it is level up creators we do help multiple creators just one that would probably not be a particularly successful business model not scalable business right yeah sorry about that it's totally fine uh I love it so I started in the digital recurring Revenue space back in 2005 so I started in Collegiate Sports Marketing um back when online subscriptions were just kind of in their infancy and I had such an amazing opportunity to work with a group of uh guys at texags.com and built out kind of a cash cow within that business model selling sponsorships to companies who wanted to reach those fans and helping with our subscription model where we were selling information about uh Texas A&M University sports and man there are some seriously rabid fans and so we had uh you know again this is kind of early days obviously post like the crash of 99 and everything but early days of digital subscriptions and I just had a great opportunity to get my um well kind of thrown into the deep end honestly I was a second employee there and helped build out the whole membership Community thing and figured out kind of the monetization formula for these online recurring Revenue businesses and that kind of led to Consulting for other businesses along a similar vein and one thing led to another um and I ended up just doing consulting and then fractional executive gigs between now and them which it's been you know 15 20 years and oh yeah we are coming up on 20 years it's almost 2024 huh so my path has been an extremely nonlinear Journey um I am a subject matter expert within like digital businesses with an emphasis on recurring Revenue like membership Mastermind and things like that and um you know I'm just long on creators at this point I believe that creators are the future of direct to Consumer businesses and creators have this very unique opportunity to engender a great deal of trust and um brand Affinity with them through direct interactions on social media and in our in our inboxes I mean we give our emails email addresses to very very few Brands and creators have a unique opportunity to capture those from us and continue to provide value in so many different ways and so um I've helped a lot of big companies make a lot of money uh frankly over the last 10 years and um I feel in my bones that I needed a big shift and I wanted to shift to helping women and people from traditionally marginalized groups create generational wealth and I feel like the way to do that is to help creators who are these people across all walks of life who have demonstrable subject matter expertise who have uh engendered these amazing connections with their communities massive communities online and I feel like those people deserve a shot and so uh my team and I who are the most amazing business op operators on planet Earth are bringing all of our B2B business skills to creators to help them truly level up and build uh businesses with digital and physical product Suites and using marketing automation hint hint uh to make that all kind of like work together and build wildly profitable successful businesses based on their subject matter expertise that's a a pretty incredible story Amanda um we had one comment already that rabbit agie fan are legendary um but taken that aside so you were working on you know subscription based uh Revenue models and membership Revenue models uh what year was that approximately started in ' 05 okay I I thought that was the case so you've been working on these things when they were very much in their infancy so I I see that you've you've seen them grow and it's it's extremely applicable to uh the Creator space totally agree and I love that you talk about how your business operators because most you know whether you're a content creator or another entrepreneur or business owner um you when it comes to marketing there is this operational uh efficiency operational excellence that will make your B your your business uh or make them successful or not as successful as they could be so really appreciate the uh you know everything that you're doing um I want to go a little bit deeper uh into the topic of today which is markeet Automation and when I asked you for your advice on what we would talk about today you said the first thing is let's reframe our thinking around marketing automation so what did you mean by that are we wired differently to think about it are we not thinking about it enough or what's your take yeah my take is that uh I guess what I hear from a lot of businesses is or business owners small business owners in particular is that marketing automation feels icky it is far too complicated um it it's not personal enough um the technical hurdles are far too great to overcome to implement it my business you know basically just this kind of uh POV that it's not for me kind of a thing and I want to dispel that myth for sure and help small business owners and creators understand that it is for you it's a phenomenal level level to lever to be able to pull and there's a lot of rewards to be had with it and you can do it in a way that continues to create trust and value to your audience again without feeling icky So based on that I guess um when business people understand the value that something can bring them they will start to do it when you see the ROI you'll start to do it right so when it comes to marketing automation what are the things that You' like to talk about the of what it can do for businesses or what you want people to think it can help do for their business I think you already mentioned a few but are there any others that you would mention yeah well try and think marketing automation is sort of like the behind the scenes automated Salesforce working for you around the clock I mean really 247 365 and I don't actually even I feel like marketing automation at this point is even a Mis misnomer it's sales automation on um a certain level not I'm not talking about B2B Enterprise businesses who have uh full stack marketing teams and sdrs and account Executives and things like that I'm talking specifically about SMB and Creator first businesses and so um a thoughtful marketing automation machine or sales automation machine will literally connect every digital touch point you have with your customers and prospective customers so social media and email with a back-end tool or two and those tools are carefully configured to take your community of followers on a thoughtful customer Journey that leads to purchases purchases or whatever you're asking them to do whatever the CTA is um and that can be overlaid in a number of different ways but marketing automation should be thought of as to be able to talk with your customers one-on-one at least it feels like it's one-on-one to them to help them solve their struggles and show up as like the trustworthy hero right you're the subject matter expert you know what you're talking about the email sequences let them do those oneon-one let you do those one-on-one conversations and demonstrate value and it's this long-term play that yields sustainable growth long term like you don't have time as a small business owner or a Creator to talk to people one-on-one and to sell them your $299 course oneon-one I mean that's just the the road ends pretty quickly on a amount of time you can spend selling times the number of sales that you make and so you need to take this one to many approach rather than oneto one to be successful long term got it so one of the things you said as we prepared for the interview was having this fresh mindset write down and and really this is a uh something that our listeners and viewers can do write down three things that you'd like marketing automation to do for your business and I'm assuming that everyone listening would probably say increase sales obviously um uh I guess increase relationships with people that have subscribed to my list um and what what would be um you know what are some of the other popular things that you see when when you talk to creators and businesses um of what they are using marketing automation for yeah well marketing automation should just be fuel on the fire of what you already have going and you always want to start with first things first in business and you always want to think from the customer's perspective how are they perceiving this what are you doing for them it is all about them it is not about you business owner or Creator sorry it's about you identifying problems that you can solve for your audience and reverse engineering a way to solve them in a one to many approach again as opposed to that onetoone high touch approach and if you are able to consistently solve people's problems that turns into this self-perpetuating flywheel of maximizing conversion rates customer lifetime value so it's how much people pay you on average over time uh referrals and things like that and so you've got to think about in terms of you know top three things you would want marketing automation to do for you is well what can I do for my customers what are the top three problem problems that I can solve for my customers what am I bringing to the the table and that's what you want your marketing automation to do for you and a lot of that's going to be along the way you know building trust because trust is the great uh risk reducer I feel like and when we are making purchases we want our risk to be reduced as much as possible so that we feel comfortable and affirmed in our purchase right and if that trust exists between a person and a brand they're going to be able to make that initial purchase with a great deal of confidence and then you can use marketing automation to help them make other purchases to solve more problems and therefore furthering that flywheel and maximizing that customer lifetime value um helping your ability to capture referrals and then put those referrals and well ask for referrals get testimonials as well uh and then inject those testimonials back into your marketing and again just feeds the flywheel feeds the flywheel uh and eventually you want to end up with a suite of digital products and services sometimes physical products as well uh that your marketing automation can help kind of guide your customers help them bounce from one thing to the next as it is best for your customer and so sophisticated marketing automation this is kind of taking it to another level you can Implement all sorts of tags and things like that and help segment your audience to better understand their preferences over time based on the type of emails they open the type of links that they click on inside of emails and so you can track behavior and further um curtail the marketing automation that the customer is receiving based on their preferences so it becomes even more specific and even more relevant and you're able to again sell more get more testimonials feed the testimonials back into the flywheel and keep going that was a long answer to your very short question but that's how if I can help someone understand how to think about this they're going to come up with the best answer right as opposed to like feeding an answer yeah no I thought that was awesome because you Focus really on not just the customer but also their paino how can I help solve their problem and in doing so um that's how you're building up the trust that's how you're building I I guess you can get people to somehow subscribe to your email list but if they tune out your Communications your Communications have no value therefore if you begin with that focus on how can I go further in helping them I'm assuming that that leads to a lot of educational content perhaps at the beginning but once we get them on and I think the next thing we should be talking about is this concept of the customer journey and the customer Journey you had already sorted a hint at it where do we want to lead people on this journey but by solving the problems and getting them to engage with our Communications we can then begin to really bring them anywhere we want to obviously or guide them I should say we can't force them to do anything um and I know from clients that I've worked with that have these you know basically okay when someone subscribes to our list you know based on their interest where do we want to take them what what products or Services what education Etc so I'm assuming that's what it is but uh since you do this for a living I'm assuming you have a better way of explaining it um how would you explain for the you know the people that think that marketing automation is somewhat icky or or it's a lot how can we you know I don't want to say dumb down necessarily but make them Embrace this concept of the customer journey and how it could be digitally mapped out with marketing automation yeah well let's um I guess break it down to some more practical examples so social media is probably the at the top of everyone's funnel so to speak that's where people find you whether they've been referred from another social media account or uh someone finds me because I'm on your podcast Neil for instance so this is a top of funnel um space and so if you can move people from your social media account to an email list you're moving that audience from rented to Owned and then you're not so um subject to social media algorithms changes in uh ownership of major social media platforms and Rule changes and all sorts of things like that and so if you can start with the right offer to the right person at the right time and the right way on social media to get them to jump over to your newsletter by offering something of value or well I'll come back to lead magnets in a minute but uh if you can get someone to sign up on your newsletter and then commit to consistently engaging with your community of followers who have signed up to receive your newsletter probably on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and show up and provide value over time that's a great way to start with this whole concept of an email list and something that will enable you to use marketing Automation and I certainly would encourage you I mean like first piece of marketing automation you could put in place here is the newsletter signup and I would recommend convert kit for this um for anyone getting going they've kind of got the the drill down there and they'll kind of grow with you as well um big yeah get people to sign up for your newsletter and your first automation could be a welcome email and it's just a hey welcome I'm so glad you're here here's what you can expect from me and here's an additional little bit of value that you can have right now immediately and then being consist consistent and communicating with your list and the next piece of marketing automation that I would recommend is what's called lead magnet I'm sure a lot of your listeners are already very very familiar with a lead magnet but it's simply a piece of collateral that someone will give you their email address in exchange for and so this could be a top 10 list a white paper an industry report um a guide an ebook anything like that anything you're offering for free and exchange for an email uh address and so uh convert kit allows for this as well they'll set up a really cool landing page and you put your lead magnet offer up there someone and you direct people from social media to that landing page and they provide their email address and then whatever cool thing you offered them shows up in their inbox immediately and then typically you want to associate a lead magnet with something you want your customers or your new email subscribers I should say to actually buy and so if you are creating a course for instance on we'll use uh Aaron Francis screencasting casting.com that's where all my cool lights came from and all the ideas for my ab setup too but uh we use Aaron as a good example because he's a great guy so Aaron put out this course and his lead magnet was here's several videos from the course right so you give me your email address I'll give you access to several of my videos and then there was an email uh automation happening in the background where people who gave their email address they immediately got access to a couple of the course videos and then there were just three or four emails that went from the time that someone gave their email address to the course launch and so those emails helped again in gender trust promote the value offered within screencasting decom it highlighted um outcomes and value not just features right of you know here's the Tactical stuff you're going to get within this course but here's the transformation that you are going to undergo after you purchase the course and watch the videos right and so that lead magnet got people in a funnel they they raised their hand and said hey I'm interested and he provided consistent value over time via email that ended up with a whole lot of people purchasing his course because he was able to demonstrate value create more trust and people felt like oh okay I believe this guy you know he's obviously put a lot of effort into it he's demonstrating that through these emails that I've allowed for him to put into my inbox and I'm going to pull out my credit card and go for it um so that would be like a lead magnet to purchase Automation and then the number three one that I think people should start with is a post-p purchase automation also called onboarding and so an onboarding um sequence you could call it would be like okay I bought it I got a quick confirmation I know that my credit card did not just get swallowed up by the internet and so um Aaron has let me know that you have I've successfully made my purchase and then a couple days later uh an email might include like hey have you started your course videos yet here's what you can expect and then here's my top 10 equipment recommendations kind of a thing and so your onboarding sequence would help um people get the most value out of the thing that they have already purchased which is super important for getting testimonials and helping them purchase your future products and services right so does that kind of like bring it to life I'm not sure if that's what you going for but yeah no I mean it does and I I love the uh the explanation of begins this is almost how I'm I'm structuring this section of my book because it begins with a lead magnet because you need to build the list but after that comes the Automation and then after that comes some Advanced automation some things you already refer to tagging you know triggered based communication what have you but um what I love is that you paint it all on the picture of this relationship with the customer whether they have never purchased from you before or they did purchase and really strategically thinking about these things I think there might be a lot of small businesses or creators that okay I need a lead Manet I need to build a list but they don't strategically construct that welcome email sequence because that's when they're probably going to get the best open rate and first impressions matter right and also after the lead magnet where do you want to lead people I mean there's you know lead magnet is to get leads but it's also you know leading in terms of guiding and what direction if we're going to build a sequence of a few emails how does that fit into our products and services how do we guide them along the line and then as you mentioned um which I thought was awesome as well a lot of people don't talk about is the onboarding sequence um how do we turn them from customer to Advocate or get them to buy other products and I believe this is all part of this huge customer Journey map but it's really thinking strategically and holistically about that Target Persona or Avatar where they are and how what you do what you offer is going to help them so I I think even though and I think you'd agree Amanda that marketing automation seems this extremely technical um aspect it actually requires a lot of creativity to go through all that and then to be able to craft the specific emails the timing to be able to really nail it down um I'm curious and obviously you know level up creators I'm assuming this is part of what you do for creators but is there any additional advice outside of what you just said based on you know my take that you would offer um you know whether they're creators or entrepreneur rurs or or or business owners of how to go about sort of of crafting this so that they can embrace it and not think oh gosh another icky thing I need to do yeah totally that's a big question um I think again I would encourage you to put yourself in your customer shoes we're going to start small here you don't need to go in and be like I'm GNA sign up for active Campaign which is a super robust amazing marketing automation tool you know it's probably not the best place to start if you're doing this yourself yeah um so go sign up for a free convert kit account and um as you're doing that most importantly again you're thinking about what problems can I solve for my community of followers and you need to put yourself in their shoes and think about where are they right now where do they want to be in terms of okay the problem is now solved and what's keeping them from getting there right what's standing between your follower and them purchasing your course or joining your membership or your Mastermind or whatever it may be and start thinking about what those roadblocks actually are put some context and color to them write them down and these are going to be like your most common objections if you're talking about like a traditional you know selling relationships and so if you can identify what's keeping someone in your community from purchasing your course you can really methodically and strategically and simply address those things within a sequence of emails that's you know starts with again that lead magnet uptake leading to course purchase and maybe it's just a three email sequence and you are again strategically kind of knocking down each one of these barriers that's standing between you know where a follower is now and them actually making the purchase and so you want to nurture those leads by both again demonstrating that you can solve their problem you're overcoming their objections and letting them know that you've got their back you're here with them you're here to support them so you're engineering trust you're overcoming objections you're instilling the value that you have um in the product that you are selling and overcoming objections I may have already said that but if you can just I guess it's almost like having a virtual conversation with a potential customer if they were in the room with you how would you guide the conversation what would be the two or three things that you would probably that would come up as part of the conversation right and maybe that's an even easier way of thinking about it yeah I love that and that's really stage advice um for marketing is if you are talk to one person this is that's the whole concept of like an ICP or customer Avatar or target audience you think about one person you fully kind of flesh out demographic psychographic information about them and then all everything that you write is to that one person so it would probably be convenient if your best friend would be like a potential customer of yours and so you could pretend that you are sitting there having a conversation with your best friend what questions would they have uh that may be standing in the way of them making a purchase and so think about the key points that would come up in that conversation how you would address those to kind of reduce risk reduce barrier to entry and increase confidence in what you're selling and once you kind of have that outline you can put that into three emails they need to be short and sweet people do not read much in emails and you really have to grab them at the top of the email for sure um and if you're not good at this or if you hate writing or if you're really not sure and I'm sure you've got 14,000 things to do on your list today there's a lot of people out there who can help you with this but um again convert kit they have actually a lot of templates and help and supplemental materials to kind of get you up and going for those more entry level uh email automations and so again a total plug for them and if you just want it completely 100% done for you that's exactly what my team does I mean from strategic implementation we're going to guide you through making this customer Journey helping you figure out what kind of problems you can solve for your community of followers and then we'll reverse engineer the process of solving those with a suite of products and services and do all the heavy lifting so that you can just create cool stuff um so yeah I think taking it one step at a time is super important if you're going to go at it alone and know that there's a whole lot of content and you know a one to many help out there available for you to get for free and try not to be try not to overwhelm yourself like you you are the expert you can help your followers and so if you take this posture of service and helping others it's a lot less intimidating because then you take the pressure off of oh I've got to sell I hate sales I'm really uncomfortable with this but if you can solve problems for people and you're helping people and that truly is the posture that you're showing up with I think that pressure should you know drain from your body literally if you're really showing up to help then I think it's your focus can become much more clear with regard to what you would need to say to someone to show that you truly do care about them and that you are here to help and that this really awesome thing that you made really really is going to help them I think that's the mental aspect of this if you can kind of turn that on its head from oh my God I have to sell I hate selling selling to I'm here to help here's how I can help I think that's probably a prerequisite to everything we've said thus far in terms of approach that's almost like a separate podcast episode isn't it the mind set of sales um getting over impostor syndrome etc etc but I think that concept of and I I try to do this in my own business but really serving others because if you come to serve you're not it's a natural sale you're serving right yeah um um and you had already answered this but just to confirm so when people think about these sequences they don't need to overthink them you mentioned three emails I know that and once again if people search on Google they're going to find lots of different formulas that a lot of experts have thrown out there but you know the normal advice I've seen is three to five emails um is there particular obviously it depends on the person their their ICP what have you but would you say three to five is sort of The Sweet Spot or just keep it short at three uh three to five is completely fine especially if you're keeping the emails pretty short but it it depends honestly on what you're selling and so again if you can just kind of outline that pretend conversation and see what comes up that will probably provide an answer for you and how many emails it should be and um kind of depends on how close you are to a launch of a specific product for instance but I'm I'm a very efficient person I'm very big on efficiency and standard operating procedures and things like that and so um I think a newsletter and a lead Magnet or what ends up being a suite of lead magnets is a really uh strategic move for a Creator or a small business owner to make but um we're always like recommending having a newsletter out there to capture people whenever they want more information from you they can grab you know they can sign up to receive your newsletter but then if you're creating lead magnets we want to do that with like a great deal of intention where you got the lead magnet therefore you're clearly showing intent and I'm going to send you a three to five email sequence leading up to the launch or postlaunch just you know a regular Evergreen sale um of whatever this corresponding product or service is yeah it's funny uh we have a comment here of someone that has a 22 email sequence and I also sometimes have very very long sequences but they're less about selling a specific product and more about building trust so obviously if you want to focus on selling something that's directly related to that lead magnet you want to keep it fresh of Mind top of mind and if you wait too long um it you know maybe their need changes or they forget about their needs so I think the three to five is H is great advice so you know hopefully people have come away of the value of marketing automation um how to think about it in terms of that customer Journey serving solving problems getting over objections and then those three major automations the the three initial ones the welcome sequence the lead magnet and if not multiple lead magnets and then the OD boarding if not multiple onboarding depending on the products and services they have um what would be you call it the next right action step to level up your automation capabilities uh I'm assuming once you have these in place you're not limited just to these things and there's a lot more than obviously it really we begin to open the Pandora's Box what is possible with marketing automation so I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that that advanced side once people feel really comfortable with this yeah so the next right thing for you well if you haven't already mapped out a customer Journey you need to do that you need to identify problems that you can I know I've said this a million times on just 40 minutes so far but um that is the that is the basis of all businesses we are solving problems for our customers and the more problems you can solve and the more effectively you can solve them the better off you will be that will enable all sorts of horizontal growth uh that's the same customers buying different things from you over time rather than having to find a new customer every single time I always think of Cutco knives for um vertical growth because they have like a lifetime guarantee so you're always having to find a new customer whereas a Creator a small business owner who has a great deal of trust with their community of followers um will have a great end for helping them make the first purchase and then if you nail that and help your customer do Sol you know you solve their problem you have a fantastic opportunity to sell them the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and then their behavior based on your marketing automation data will tell you what the next thing is uh that's a quantitative perspective you can also of course get the qualitative perspective uh which would be just people's opinions and feedback and Survey results that are you know kind of fill-in the blank stuff um and you ultimately want to marry quantitative and qualitative data to further hone in on or home in on your customer journey and helping people solve one problem after the other and you want them to tell their friends and you want them to prompt them you want to prompt them to tell their friends through your marketing automation you want to capture the testimonials and put that back into your marketing a automation again this whole concept of this um virtuous cycle and this flywheel that you're building so I totally forgot the question that you originally asked me I think oh next right action right but but yeah but you're you're sort of uh in the process of doing this and what I love about this as ECT of digital marketing versus when you post something out there on Instagram it's it's here today gone tomorrow is that you're truly building asset right it's 247 and you can you continue to add to it and make value of it and I think that that was where where I wanted to go was what additional value can we get out of this system once we have these these three things in place that's that's the direction of the question yeah I mean the additional value to be had from marketing automation is that it works for 10 people and it also works for 10,000 people and so if your systems are in place you know when your post goes viral or you know some amazing creator with a huge following shares something of yours and it gets a bunch of traffic and your lead magnet suddenly you know 4,000 people have picked it up in one day marketing automation can handle all of that and again that's this huge advantage of having this infrastructure laid it's this Foundation that you are creating for your business for the Long Haul and if you're a subject matter expert or a small business owner you probably are actually a subject matter expert as well if you're listening to this and you're probably creating a lot of digital products if you're in this long term and you're building a sustainable profitable business uh where a flywheel can be created and generate um High profit margin sales for you and therefore a highly profitable business whose customers stay with you for the long time long term and buy a lot of stuff you're pretty good to go here I mean this is like there the sky is the limit sort of a situation if you've identified your Niche on the internet and you can solve their problems strategically through really awesome products and services I mean we're seeing people go from five figure businesses to seven figure businesses in 9 to 18 months implementing these kinds of strategies like leave the onetoone stuff behind or you know that's also for like bigger businesses very high touch high value high dollar sales motions that's a totally different ball game I came from that world and I left it for a reason I love sales I've actually been in sales since I was 16 but um that is kind of not where the world is going at least with creators and small business owners you have to nail this one to many aspect uh of your business for it to really stand the test of time yeah I could agree more I I love when every week I get a you know an update from convertkit this week you sent out this many tens of thousands of emails and I you know I I have a Weekly Newsletter that's part of it but the automated part it's just great the these touch points and they're if they're well thought out you are continuing that conversation so I'm a huge fan and I know we could probably have a separate podcast on these Advanced triggers and automations above and beyond what we talked about we'll leave that for uh you know potential clients here that want to get in touch with you or people that want to read my book where I plan to cover some of that but one final question for you you s hinted at it but I'm just curious because marketing automation has been around um you know when we think at the Enterprise level like the marketos and the paros Y more recently convert kid I think every email marketing software I would say even a MailChimp is trying to create pretty sophisticated marketing automation so most of these inexpensive like convertkit email marketing software also can handle a lot of automation what are some of the biggest Trends or are there any trends that you see as we had or now are in 2024 by the time people listen to this um are there any Trends and I'm assuming that we one word we have not talked about on this episode which is the first time in more than a year is the topic of artificial intelligence and generative AI um which I'd be curious to hear your opinion on but outside of that are there any other trends that you see in the marketing automation space that we should all be aware of that's a great question I feel like I'm trying to pick a category of type of Trends I mean obviously AI is a huge thing and so getting getting AI to help you write your emails for marketing automation is great but um o or maybe AI is the biggest Trend and it is the biggest trend for many things marketing these days so yeah I'm not I'm not seeing AI play a huge role in terms of like building automations yet I bet that's next um I don't I cannot imagine a single Big Marketing automation service who is not um do not have their ear to the ground and trying to get their engineering team figuring out how to do that and make it easier for people because that really is the biggest barrier to entry is um most of these tools are quite Technical and if you are not a particularly technical person it is really overwhelming like I'm not gonna lie it's like if you're going into active campaign you're like what the hell's going on here I suppose that might be you know because there's human communication the AI written emails you know there's a lot of opinions about them but at least ideation in terms of I would like to create a three mail email sequence this is the pain these are the pains how do you recommend I would craft you know using it as this really intelligent assistant of yours I think can really have a big value whether or not you use it for the actual content creation right yeah I think that's a great idea I think my company should build a template for that for here's how to use chat dtp that's a separate that's a new product right there and every it's funny I talked I was at vidsummit last week and I talked to someone who works at one of these video tools companies and he created a you know a prompting solution for YouTube titles and descriptions and I showed him what I currently use he's like oh I go way beyond that and the results are much better I'm like dude productize what are you waiting for so uh I think you know we're in this new age where it's it's possible to do that right um and to use everything we've been talking about here to to help you grow your business so so Amanda this has been really awesome and I know that we have just uh touched the you know tip of the iceberg when it comes to Market automation we can go really deep on this but I'm hoping that people people got uh a good taste of what it's about what it can do for them and most importantly how to get started lots of resources out there obviously level up creators being one of them so Amanda if people want to uh find out more about you know level up creators or want to get in touch with you where should we send them yeah our um website is we lupc creators.com and we have a podcast the LevelUp creators podcast which is a video podcast you can find it on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts uh you can join our news newsletter from our website as well and if anybody's listening to this and thinking man I would really love to get into marketing automation I'm well positioned for it but I don't know what to do next and I'm still really confused Reach Out Amanda we lupc creators.com I'll get on the phone with you for a half hour just mention that you listen to Neil's podcast episode and um see if we can I'll just help you I'll just help you I'm not going to like I'll let you know if I think my company can help you but otherwise um I would love to to lend a hand no problem yeah man I love how um there's a lot of people who talk about you know marketing automation email marketing but technically they're brilliant but they don't seem approachable and I love how approachable um and and will and really you know uh drinking your own medicine of helping others and being a problem solver and serving so really appreciate that I urge all of you if you are interested uh check out we lupc creators.com and uh definitely get in touch with Amanda Manda this has been awesome thank you so much for your time any uh parting words of advice that you'd like to offer anyone out there oh if you're not thinking about a suite of products and services as opposed to just one you're missing out on so much income that has to be partnered with marketing automation but you need to be thinking Next Step Next Step Next Step what's the next problem I can solve and what's the best way to deliver that whether it be a course a membership one-on-one coaching group coaching a guide book whatever it is if you're a Creator or a small business owner in the digital space you need a product suite and you need marketing automation to link those together to maximize LTV you got to get the same customers paying you as much money as possible to have a sustainable business so start thinking along those lines amen I want to share with you all uh I am getting ready to haven't finished writing my next book but um this time I I do plan on self-publishing it instead of working with major Publishers like I have in the past and been listening to a lot of podcasts on self-publishing and one had an interview with the great Brian Tracy and Brian said look when I go to your store and all I see is one book that's not enough I want more of you I want to consume you I need your help in so many areas so you need to have this and I I I've been absolutely thinking about the same thing that you mentioned Amanda which is why it's so TP you need a you know an a plethora of products and services different ways just like you produce short form videos long form videos you know tweets uh images carousels you need to give people different ways of consuming your content you also need to give people different ways of of you helping them right um and if you're only thinking that one course what about the Mastermind what about the group coaching um what about um you know bite-size courses or that second or third course um and I think that and I think you'd agree man is where the marketing automation when you have these multiple products and services and when you can create linkage between them as part of that customer Journey it becomes extremely powerful and I'm sure that's one of the reasons why you've had these people go from five to seven figures so really great advice I'm and I have my own Mastermind my digital first Mastermind I know we have some members listening in today and I'm always like we all we need to be creating more products right like the marketing part is not the easy part but once you get it it has no value no matter how much you invest in doing you know creating reals or Tik toks if you don't have product to sell you're you're sort of wasting your time let's get the products down and then let's use digital to push those and I think a lot of creators as well that might be listening might not have those products yet and uh maybe we'll have to have you come back because we could talk about you know even selling without a product and test marketing using everything we talked about today but anyway there's so many directions we could go man this has been an amazing conversation uh thank you so much yes uh Dr V more more more I cannot uh agree with you anymore um so Amanda thank you so much uh really appreciate your time and uh everyone out there you know thanks for listening and definitely uh check out we lupc creators.com and Amanda northcut Mana thank you again thank you Neil