Combining automation and delegation in your content marketing for an excellent effect - Greg ElfrinkIn today’s episode, I have Greg Elfrink as a guest, and together we look into the processes of automation, delegation, and elimination.
Greg is the director of marketing for Empire Flippers and is in charge of goal setting, implementation, and everything in between.
His big goal is to make the Empire Flippers more mainstream and to help investors see the power of digital assets while helping sellers make life-changing decisions.
Are we talking about automating, delegating, or eliminating specific processes today? (06:52)
Greg says their company has expanded dramatically in the last few years, so they are automatically leaning towards automation.
The processes they have automated include; marketing funnels, sales funnels, outreach, and even podcast outreach.
They have eliminated some processes. In most cases, they didn’t eliminate the whole process but rather tweaked parts of it.
The process he decided on is automation, because he thinks it would be relevant for most eCommerce entrepreneurs.
Automation is useful not only for eCommerce but for any business model. There’s always a better way to automate your content marketing, and if you can combine automation and delegation, you can create an excellent effect.
What does the pre-automation process look like? (09:11)
He says before they automated most of it, or even before he was equipped with a team, he used to handle everything by himself.
His tasks included writing blog posts, using SEO tools to find keywords, writing the actual content, etc. One of the most time-consuming tasks was seller interviews; this is the process of interviewing every single seller that entered the Empire Flippers marketplace.
Additionally, he was writing guest posts for different publications, media sites, and magazines. He also attended conferences, which he likes to refer to as dark content.
He describes dark content as the type of information that vanishes after it has been delivered. This is the case with conferences; no one, aside from the people attending, has access to your content after it has been delivered.
He believes that you can’t scale that type of value; someone who does all these things all the time. This is where the process started.
What made you decide whether to automate, delegate, or eliminate the content dissemination process? (17:36)
Greg says he is a marketer at heart, so he always leans towards automation as much as possible.
Automation also provides data that is new and relevant.
With content marketing, there will always be some manual processes involved, someone has to create the content. However, you can create a process that will simplify the creation process dramatically.
Once you’ve perfected this process, you hand it over to your team, so that they also gave the tools to create content fast and efficiently.
Every process should be done manually five times, before being automated. What does that mean for you? (19:25)
He says its not something he has consciously thought about, but they have been doing it that way for a long time.
Iteration is key in perfecting a process. It allows you to recognize which part of the process can be improved on, which can be taken out, and what just needs a bit of work.
He says when they hire new marketers, he tells them to stick with the original process for at least three months. Marketers are dreamers, and he realizes the fact that they might notice opportunities for change.
He wants the new personnel to identify all the little frustrations that were missed during the building of the process. After three months, they are granted the opportunity to name the parts of the process they would like to change/simplify.
Having an outsider give input is always a good idea. When it’s your own process, you are too close, so you tend to overlook the weaknesses.
What process do you use when deciding to automate? (25:50)
Greg says he works on a checklist. Every time a mistake is made, he creates a checklist for that process. As he goes through the checklist, he asks himself whether that step can be automated.
He automated their marketing funnel, for example, by creating a software tool that allows people to get an automatic valuation of their business.
He recognizes the fact that different entrepreneurs have different business models. Ecommerce entrepreneurs, for instance, have different needs than an Amazon affiliate site builder. He wants to be able to communicate with all these people, so he created automation inside the valuation tool based on the different business models.
Based on their respective business model, they receive very different emails with their industry jargon. He gets to speak to all of them at once, using a once-off automation process.
If there isn’t a software tool to automate a process, he looks into delegating. When doing so, he looks for the most automated way to delegate. In other words, finding someone that has the skill and service that can do the best work, in the shortest amount of time.
