with Joey Boyer, Founder - Ignite Marketing Automation
Are you looking into using automation to get valuable time back into your business? Joey Boyer, founder of Ignite Marketing Automation, and Susan Tatum discuss the right way to integrate automation and when it can go wrong. Joey shares his philosophy behind automation and his 3 big questions for getting your automated message right.
Notes from the Show
Is it possible to use automation in your business and maintain human connection? Joey Boyer is the helm of automation and workflow strategy and founder of Ignite, Marketing Automation. His strengths in individualization create a custom approach to automation for his clients.
Automation can be fit into internal processes for better workflow or marketing communication for existing clients. Automation is best suited for those daily or weekly repetitive tasks, but is not meant to replace or give the illusion of human interaction.
Joey’s 3 has three big questions for creating the best automated content.
What do you want the client to feel?
What do you want to tell the client?
What do you want to know from the client or for the client to do?
When using automation, be intentional. Remember to keep in mind how it can improve your business and client relationships.
What’s Inside:
How Automation can help professional services experts get their time back while generating more leads.
Where does automation fit in? What does it do well and what does it not do well?
What’s wrong with the way most people approach automation?
Importance of a personal/human/one-to-one relationships even with automation.
Three questions to ask to get your messages right.
Transcribed by AI Susan Tatum 0:03
Hey everybody, and welcome to stop the noise. This is where we get to hear from some of the most interesting and experienced minds offering us advice and some great ideas about why and how to stop wasting money looking and sounding like everybody else. You know in business, being the same won't keep you safe, it will make you easy to replace, and even easier to ignore. I'm your host, Susan Tatum. Let's get started.
Hello, and welcome back to stop the noise. I'm Susan Tatum. And today we're talking with Joey Boyer. And Joey is the helm of automation and workflow strategy, and also the founder of ignite marketing automation, which is changing its name, and I'll remind you of this later, but he's got a really cool domain name weignite.io. I like that name, Joey. Welcome.
Joey Boyer 0:58
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Susan.
Susan Tatum 1:00
So what exactly is a helm of automation and work workflow strategy? What does that mean?
Joey Boyer 1:06
It is, as I kind of mentioned before, I've always wanted to do something that was a little bit more approachable and different than just saying I'm the CEO or president. But the helm being somebody who is, is leading that the tip of the spear, if you will, but my passion has always been in leading the actual strategic workflow and implementation behind those workflow processes, both on the front of actual internal processes, and then marketing automation, which we'll talk about.
Susan Tatum 1:37
Yeah. Okay.All right. So your value proposition, or what you mentioned to me several times was that what you do is to you help professional services providers get their time back, and you use automation to do that, right?
Joey Boyer 1:52
Correct.
Susan Tatum 1:53
How does how does automation help professional service person get time back?
Joey Boyer 1:56
So that's an interesting question, because we continue to find is that there really is no one size fits all, right, there is so much complexity behind every business case, and every individual and what they really do best and what time means for them and how they generate leads. So I'll give you an example. We we found that first of all, there are a lot of monotonous tasks or drudgery, as one of our clients puts it, that stand between them, and their best work where they can put all of themselves into and really move that needle. So with that said, there are some individuals you found who really enjoy the face to face time, like networking, going to events, talking to clients, taking the lunch, playing golf, and they get referrals that way, and that's really great for them, some individuals enjoy going to speaking events and making content becoming a thought leader in their space, and they get a lot of business that way. And some individuals actually enjoy the cold calling. And yeah, so even well, right. So that's, that's, that's where you really start to think about, okay, where is this person? And where's this automation really gonna be best leveraged for this particular person and their business?
Susan Tatum 3:07
So what do you have a lot of people that don't like doing any of those things, they really, they, what they like doing is spending time with their clients and providing whatever services it is that they specialize in, I mean maybe they're just they're not natural networkers.
Joey Boyer 3:21
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's something that we run into a lot, is that some people might not be natural networkers. Although I will say the majority of our clients have some form of networking that they do. And sometimes we've even helped them kind of find that was what does that mean for you? Right? How do we get you to that place, but like you said, some people just want to do the work and don't want to be working outside of that. And sometimes we recommend this solution, like get a getting an assistant or getting a sales person. And then we kind of automate things around them, or we recommend thinking that way.
Susan Tatum 3:53
So what the work that you're doing is way more than simply saying, okay, we're going to put in a CRM, or we're going to put in some marketing automation. It sounds like you, you're really, you know, and I hate using the word holistic, because it gets overused to the point of being meaningless, but you kind of are right I mean, you're looking at the your client, their personalities, and what they need around them in terms of a team. And also where that where the automation can fit in.
Joey Boyer 4:22
Yeah, absolutely. We really look at two important aspects of each of our clients business that is processes and then marketing. And so we become kind of this fractional marketing automation and workflow team and extension of their team and we own what their mission vision is to a core and then we've individualized and that's one of my top five strengths from Gallup is is Clifton strengths is individualization. So I really believe in that customization, individualized approach and methodology
Susan Tatum 4:54
for each of your clients.
Joey Boyer 4:57
each client, each business each, each of their clients. All their clients are also individuals. And that's how you start thinking about how you, how you make things more human.
Susan Tatum 5:06
Okay, so that that is a great segue into what you and I've talked about both before we started recording here today and in a previous call, and that is, where does automation fit in? And what what does it do well? and what does it not do well?
Joey Boyer 5:23
there, I think it partially that does depend on on how you end up using it. But again, the two places that I see it do really well is in internal processes. So the workflow side of things, and then also marketing, I guess that kind of goes back to the original question you asked about the helm of marketing automation and workflow processes. Those are the two places that we see the most. So where's automation most effective. So from a process perspective, getting rid of your repetitive internal processes, whether that's you sending out, if you're sending out hundreds of emails per week, and the same thing, you're actually already copying and pasting from a document or you have a drafting lead, just keep using these put their name in, that's something that that could save you hours that you should just get rid of that process. And automate it, right. So that's one thing of processes and tasks, like let's say, you always after you do X, you send your assistant this or you assign a task to yourself, you put a reminder, a sticky note, whatever, you know, remove that. And then the second aspect of where automation is really effective is in the marketing side of things where and this is where I personally see the most fruit and also enjoyment from all parties is when you already have existing clients or customers. So that then becomes this place of transactional messages could be content distribution, because it gets really effective, there, personalized onboarding, or welcome series, drip campaigns, education on your business reminders, cross selling, selling, testimonials, and referrals, etc.
Susan Tatum 6:51
So it sounds like you're describing, that's the that it fits in at, it's not the end of the process by any means. Because they're your clients, and you want to continue to keep your clients happy and keep serving them. But you're having a one to one human relationship with them in some other way, as you're as you're providing the service for them. And then with the emails, and that that could be email as well. But let's call it top of the funnel marketing with that type of stuff and content distribution that you mentioned that we and I'm using the Royal we people don't really expect those to be one to one messages anymore. We know that what marketing messages look like, and we don't expect that to be somebody talking to us, right? So it doesn't there's no potential problems there, top of the top of the funnel, and then once their clients. Okay, so where does it not work, then? And I have my opinion on that. But
Joey Boyer 7:52
yeah, absolutely, I think we're, you're not going to see ineffective use of automation. And I think this kind of goes into what we were talking about before, when we were talking about what what happens when people will use it in the wrong way. And I think that's really where you start to see it not be affected. But at the end of the day, you're not using it effectively or it's not an effective use. If you're trying to be more human right. If you're if you are intentionally trying to connect with your audience in an intentional way, automation is not going to work. But then on the technical perspective, there are times you will run into actual roadblocks that are from a you know, privacy policy standpoint, like the all the changes that came out this month, and last month from Google and also the new OS update from Apple, which is about 35% of the email clients they're OS 15 is going to drastically change the landscape. But that's that's like a whole another call. But so those are things that we all as automation experts have to be thinking about consistently.
Susan Tatum 8:51
Oh, so that's interesting. I never even thought about the technical aspects of I mean, I know about the laws and that sort of stuff, but but you're saying that there's, there's gonna be way over my head. But there's something that that's going to have to change about the way emails are are sent, built and sent,
Joey Boyer 9:08
build, sent, and especially the way you measure your performance, because when Apple releases this, users will have the ability to opt in to mask a lot of information on emails, so your open rates will no longer be accurate. So you need to have these KPIs set before and after your expectations. In addition to that, you're going to see stuff on social media that's going to change a lot. We've already seen that this year. But sticking with automation and email marketing, that we're really gonna see a change there. In addition to that, we have you know, Microsoft with the demark. You know, you have to be able to you have to have that if you want to get through to Outlook, you know, if you want to get to those email clients, Gmail is adding something new that I haven't yet dug into yet. And it's some kind of authentication with your brand. So eventually, you're going to start getting more Spam potential spam marks on your your email if you go into Gmail, so there's a lot to think about.
Susan Tatum 10:05
Yeah, there is wow.
Joey Boyer 10:06
Especially if you're doing cold. So that's why inbound methodology is going to become really, really important very soon. I mean, it has since 2008, you know, HubSpots, I believe, founder, he started bringing this methodology. We're really gonna start seeing the need for it.
Susan Tatum 10:21
Well, you know, so there, I think I'm just gonna say this. I think HubSpot ruined inbound marketing. And I know that it was them that came up with the term. But so there's so many people that believe because of HubSpot preaching that inbound marketing will fill your pipeline. And there's not a lot of people really that can say that that happened including HubSpot, because they're one of the most aggressive outbound sales call, you know, download a white paper from them. And you're guaranteed to get a sales call if you if you run an agency. And so I find it interesting that I can I can totally understand why you say it needs to be more important if because we are going to have to, if I understand you correctly, we're going to have to attract people to us, because our ability to reach out to them in mass is going to be restricted a lot.
Joey Boyer 11:19
Yeah, you have to use a combination, right? Like you have to use a combination and HubSpot knows their audience as well, their audiences agencies right now I believe they're 50% of their revenue base at the time of when I spoke to them comes from agencies, they want to change that to 90%. But they know that I believe they're, you know, multi billion dollar company as well, I believe, when we spoke to them, and that comes from agencies and reseller programs, right?
Susan Tatum 11:43
Believe me, I get put back on their call list every time I look at some of this. But I guess what I see is that HubSpot has done a tremendous job of training agencies. And what they've created is a whole lot of look alike agencies that are doing basically the same thing. And now that create that becomes noise, because there's so much of it and trying to get through it.
Joey Boyer 12:12
That is where I completely agree with you is that we have too many I'm you know potentially at fault here as well is that we have too many agencies, where we are focusing on the formula and we start focusing on the money instead of why are we even in business in the first place, which is what you should be asking yourself when you're doing any kind of automation anyway, business period. But you know that that's the biggest thing is that they'll say here's the piece of paper you follow. And that's what we're not doing our job if inbounds not working, which does have to have a combination of outbound. But if it's not working for you, then you're not doing something right, we're not doing something right. We can't all just templatized ourselves and then become resellers. There's no value in that you're not bringing value, then at the end of the day, it's on us.
Susan Tatum 12:55
Yes, more power to those words, I wish everybody would pay attention to that, you know, I do, I do think inbound and content marketing and marketing period are extremely important. And the work that I do with helping to fill pipelines would never succeed. Without that marketing support. I think it's just it can be dangerous when people start thinking that that's all they need. And there are people out there that have been able to do that build build a pipeline through inbound and content that feeds their kids, you know, I mean, it keeps day after day providing what they need, but they've been at it for a long time, or they're in a really unique niche. So I so I see a lot of people that get disappointed when they invest money in inbound, and then they're and they're, they're busy counting white paper downloads, but it doesn't turn into opportunities really, or revenue
Joey Boyer 13:48
100%. And that comes down to strategy. And like you said, You can't just have you know, only inbound some people do it. You know, there are business coaches who are very successful, and all they do is inbound. But you know, just like any army, you got to have your air force, you got to have your you know, you got to have you know, all the navy... everybody
Susan Tatum 14:08
Yeah, that's true. It's a team, isn't it? It's got to be an effort. You know, I think it would be helpful if you could describe what you do in working with a client, just if you give us an example, like because because we've talked conceptually about drudgery work, or just things that you don't want to take time doing. But how in the real world, what does that look like?
Joey Boyer 14:30
sure that it can, it can look like a lot of different things depending on the client, depending on where they are. So I'll give you an example of one of our CPA clients right now, who was actually our first client from the professional services sector, if you will, and he he called me and he said, Joey, I really want to scale my business. And I know you do automation, and I'm just so bogged down with all these monotonous tasks. Can you help me and I said, Absolutely. Yeah, we can absolutely help you, we'd love to look into it. And so for him, he was more focusing on, you know, middle of the funnel. And we'll talk I have another example that's top of funnel. But he was a lot of focus was on his current clients and a lot of outreach. So that came down to he had so many Excel spreadsheets and notepads and notebooks trying to manage all these different clients. And it was just a lot. And so we we made a custom CRM, because we've been trying to play with CRMs. But out of the box, they don't, they don't always work for everybody, you know, they're they're not one size fits all. So we made him a CRM that allowed him to have these these customize things up front and center that applied to him in his business, and gave him that centralized location. But in addition to that, these custom fields or properties, allowing him to be able to make those little changes, whether it's a client lifecycle, what type of client they are, just like, let's say they're a bookkeeping client, let's say they're, you know, whatever type of client or they're an escort versus an LLC, or exempt, right, you start to see custom emails, or welcome emails, or reminder emails, let's say for stuff for franchise tax, you know, those kinds of things that take a lot of time that are already copy and paste kind of things, were able to eliminate those from a process perspective, internal process.
Susan Tatum 16:15
So you're taking a somewhat broad client base doesn't even have to be broad. But you're, you're able to put them in buckets that makes sense so that they would be interested in the same topics and would find the same information valuable.
Joey Boyer 16:28
Exactly. And then when there's something that's slightly dynamic about it, that's when we talk to the client about hey, we really, really go in deep with them talking about how would you approach this person, if it were one on one, we talked about cloning yourself, right? We have with my, with my, with, with one of our coaching clients, he's a business coach, executive coach, he calls himself, you know, digital, his digital self. And so we talk about how would you approach this scenario? How would you talk to this person, if you had all the time in the world, we talked about that. And that's what we use, in that case with the front or the top of funnel rather with him, because he does his prospecting through us.
Susan Tatum 17:06
So you know, I find that that approach works really well, too. We, I will have our clients, I'll say to them, what would you say to this person in this situation if you were talking to them, and that nine times out of 10 turns out to be good messaging,
Joey Boyer 17:21
yes. And to piggyback off that, what I want to encourage people to do, if any, you know, if your audience or anyone else is looking to write a message, no matter the platform, something that I've found so valuable in the process, but we ask we ask three questions, sometimes for first one is, is what do you want them to feel? Let's, let's pretend your whole audience is in a room, right? Your keynote speaker? What? What do you want them to feel when you walk into the room? Right? So you know, is it formal or casual? Or that you know, what does that feel? What does that look like? And that gives us the idea of the email when it should that the tone or even the look is a text tone? Does it have graphics, etc? The second question is, what do you what do you want to talk about? What are you going to tell them? Right? And that gives us a good idea on the messaging, we can tailor it from there. So to ask yourself that question as well. And then the third item is, as you're leaving, what do you want to know from them? What do you want to gather whether it's passively because then that gets us more information? Okay, this is how we can start approaching these tactics. Or you know, what, what is it that you want to directly ask them, right? So then you get into your CTAs. And so that that's something that I recommend for anybody as they're thinking about messaging.
Susan Tatum 18:27
So that's what that's so usually I'm asking, what do you want them to do? What action Do you want them to take? But the way that you phrased it? What do you want to learn from them is a little bit different. And it's and that's interesting.
Joey Boyer 18:40
Well, those those are two you want to ask what do you want to learn? And then what do you want? What actions do you want? Like the learning is really important because that's when you can really start leveraging automation you can start using these you can do surveys, you can do quizzes you can there are a lot of things going to sentimental landing page, there are ways that I mean, of course, we can track our individuals but what what what what do you want to learn more about you want to learn more about if you're interested in a product, you can do that by saying two different, even ebooks, there are just these little nuances and actions in psychology that you can use that bring value your client while also understanding your client or customer more.
Susan Tatum 19:17
So where did you get your interest in psychology?
Joey Boyer 19:20
I'm not sure I've always just been interested in I've always loved psychology and love the way people work the way I work mentally. And why do I think the way I do? Why do other people think the way they do and those relationships maybe it has to do with developers my second strength from Gallup, going back to that, and with that mixed individualization, maybe that's where it came from.
Susan Tatum 19:42
So I have to say, I have the same interest and the way that it came to me was when I was in college, and I was studying marketing, I was studying advertising and persuasion was a segment of courses that you had to take and it was just fascinating. You know, I think persuasion can be used in psychology can be is for evil, but I think it's a critical part of success and communication these das=ys
Joey Boyer 20:05
Absolutely, yeah. And I appreciate you bringing that up. Because there's, we always try to ask ourselves, are we being monsters are being evil here are we being, you know, good and bringing light for lack of better words, you know, to this world into our environment. And that's kind of where you start thinking about what's wrong with the way people approach automation. And that's, that's where I think that's where you start to see, look into those.
Susan Tatum 20:31
I have one last question for you, Joey, before we wrap this up, and that is, how do you see automation being misused most?
Joey Boyer 20:39
Yeah, this is a passionate topic for me, but I'm gonna do my best to keep it concise. But the thing even I, myself, when when we first started using automation, especially for top of funnel was we often get too excited and too ambitious. And we just train things up way too fast. And that results in two different bad things. Number one is your your audience, the way you connect with them is just it's not positive, right? People can see through your automation that you're not human. And also the biggest thing and this is what I would strongly warn against is the reason warning against you from straightening things up. Whether you're automating LinkedIn, or emails is that you can get blacklisted you your social score can drop, and you'll have to warm up a whole new email, there's a whole process technically behind it. But the other thing is, sometimes we just automate for the sake of automating or just for the sake of automation. And I just so strongly recommend remembering always like, why are you doing things in the first place, don't forget why you're doing it. And don't pay just be intentional, be human, and then scale, you can use this as such a powerful tool to scale but use it in a way that allows you to be more innovative, and more intentional in the way you connect, and more meaningful in the way you connect with your employees and bring them value. Because at the end of the day, that is truly the most important thing above everything else, in my opinion
Susan Tatum 21:59
to that point, what I see is a lot of people, they immediately go to the biggest possible number, like how many? How many prospects can I reach out to. How many people can I get to, and for some, in some situations, that's a valid goal. But most of us are the professional services firms that I work with don't need a gazillion clients. And they're not going to be a best selling authors or anything like that, they they just want to help a certain number of people that they want to help. And so when you talk about starting small or not starting too big, that makes me think the same thing that I tell people is, first of all, figure out how many people you really need to be talking to, and keep it as small as possible that allows you to be more relevant to them and more personal to them. It sounds like you're you're taking the same approach.
Joey Boyer 22:54
Absolutely. And it's partially because what we've learned hands on with one of our business coaches in some LinkedIn, automation we've been playing with, and you really do want to be human, you want to be intentional, and just just from a technical perspective, like you can get banned and blacklisted so quickly, and like you said, you don't need to have a million clients. I mean, not even, we need to have a million clients. We just want to have, you know, a handful of really, really great clients understand the value that we bring. And I would say the same thing for for your listeners is think about, think deeply about who you are, and why your business exists. And then think about your true like your most desired client, filter those clients and hone in on them, and then reach out to them in a sincere way.
Susan Tatum 23:43
And yeah, figure out what works.
Joey Boyer 23:45
Yeah, there's a lot of testing all for sure.
Susan Tatum 23:47
Well, you're a very thoughtful guy, Joey, and I could pick your brain for a long time. But we've run out of time.
Joey Boyer 23:56
No problem.
Susan Tatum 23:58
So quickly tell people how they can follow up with you to learn more about what you're doing.
Joey Boyer 24:00
Absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. Joey Boyer. That's, that's probably the best place right now. Otherwise, when we get we're kind of revamping our site a little bit, and that's going to be at weignite.io. And those are those are probably the two best places to find me.
Susan Tatum 24:16
All right. So all you professional services providers out there that want to do automation the right way. Call Joey. Thank you, Joey. Have a great day.
Joey Boyer 24:26
Thank you. You too, Susan.
Susan Tatum 24:27
Take care.
Joey Boyer 24:28
Thank you. Bye.
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