Ever wonder if there’s a better way to market yourself and to show up in your business that doesn’t rely 100% on you showing up 24/7? Well, if so, make sure you check out this video. We’re going to be talking about all the best practices when it comes to evergreen marketing strategies for you to automate and scale your business online.
Creating An Evergreen Business: Identifying The Steps Before Marketing
My name is Soph. I am The Sacred CEO Founder, and so excited to be here with you today as we dive into this blog. So let’s get into business. First things first, before we can talk marketing, we need to talk about everything else that happens before the marketing. When I look at a company, I look at a few different pieces. One, client delivery. Two, sales. And three, marketing. Why? Because if we don’t take care of each of these pieces in that consecutive order, then we will have a whole mess on our hands. So if we’re thinking about how we can actually create an evergreen business, we need to make sure that each one of these components are taken care of and handled. Let’s dive in.
Evergreen Marketing Step One: Client Delivery
First step is client delivery. What is happening when it comes to your clients and how you are showing up and delivering said results for said clients. What we want to look at is, what things are you repeating again and again? What things can be turned into templates and are completely automated? Are put into an area like a membership area, like a course, a Google Drive folder, organized more easily so it’s easy to access and share out to clients, instead of feeling like you constantly have to recreate everything every time? Can we record videos? Can we simplify the onboarding, the offboarding? What can we do inside of the client delivery process to make it much easier for the client, but also for you so that it’s not as time intensive?
Why do we want to do this? If you have a limited capacity of time and energy, then you have a limited amount of clients that you can support based on the time requirement for the delivery of said client. Point being, if we want to create a business that is scalable and sustainable, we need to make sure that you can actually sustainably take on an exponential amount of clients, or at least increase your capacity for more clients. Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck based on the number of clients that you currently have.
Evergreen Marketing Step Two: Evaluate Your Sales Process
So what is our next step? Once your client delivery is handled and you’ve started to streamline as much as you possibly can, our next step is going to be looking at your sales process. Your sales process is the second most important thing, because this is where the money comes from. If you are spending 10, 20, 30 minutes at a time sending emails, sending payment links, sending contract links, following up with people, this is time that is being taken away from other aspects of your business.
So what are the most important things that you can do to automate your sales process? One, create a checkout page. It is the easiest thing in the world, whatever software you prefer, I don’t care. We have The Sacred CEO CRM that we recommend to all our clients. If you would like a 14-day free trial, you can link it here and you can try it out for yourselves. We offer a ton of templates in there. Otherwise, things like Kartra, things like Kajabi, things like Thinkific. These are all different platforms that you can use that you can easily create checkout pages with or on. All of them obviously come at a fee, but the fee is well worth it when we think about the amount of time that you’ll be saving and what you can do with said time. For contracts, you can also use something like Hellosign, like Adobe, like DocuSign, where you can import your contract templates and make it super easy for people to go ahead and sign without you having to go and custom create it every single time.
Evergreen Marketing Step Three: The Onboarding Process
Once you have your checkout process done and it’s easy for people to go ahead and in one click pay you so you can get paid and they can sign their contract, the next step is going to be for you to automate the onboarding experience. Now, the onboarding experience is the crossover between sales and client delivery. It’s that transitional process that takes them from being a potential client to an actual client. And the onboarding system can be really simple.
You can automate it by simply having a welcome email. This can be a template that you just send out every single time, or you have a VA or other team member do for you, so that that emails get sent out to the client. It has all of the links and the details about next steps and getting started, whatever that looks like for your program or for your course or for your service. And once they get that email, it takes them through the next few steps so that you’re not having to go and sit there and explain everything, but it’s completely done. My personal preference and dream and what we do for our agency clients, is we automate that whole process. There is a sales page that leads to the checkout page that leads to the thank you page with the next steps and the email and the payments and the contract. And it is beautiful. That is where you want to go.
Evergreen Marketing Step Four: Setting Up Your Sales Page
The final step is the sales page. This is the thing that does the selling for you, so long as you are pushing traffic to it. And we’ll talk about that next. But the sales page is this piece that essentially has all of the details, all of the information, everything that this person needs to make their decision about whether or not this is the right fit for them. They go to the checkout page, they purchase, and voila, you are making money. Clients are coming in. If your client delivery is optimized, you can continue to scale. And now your main focus gets to be marketing. And this is where we get into the good stuff, evergreen marketing.
So, a few things we want to set up here. One is your email list. Oh yes, I went there. Here’s the thing. If you’re on a platform, like Instagram or Facebook, which tend to be the top two platforms that most entrepreneurs find themselves on, that means that you are living in a life of constantly needing to post, constantly needing to be on. Especially if you are not leveraging tools like reels on Instagram that get traction through more than just 24 hour lifespan periods. What this means is, when you’re posting on Facebook and Instagram, it’s based on a chronological feed, meaning what’s new. So if you post something, it’ll be hot for a few hours, max, a few days, until the engagement drops and then it disappears into the black hole of social media, never to be seen or found again by anyone, specifically to Facebook. Instagram, a little bit more leeway there.
If you’re doing something like reels and you have things on there like hashtags or other metrics that will support you in being able to have it be found, then there’s more possibility for it to gain consistent traction. But you want to be really strategic about your contact. This is why, personally, I do not recommend only relying on Instagram or Facebook for your business marketing. It is the epitome of burnout, because you have to always be on, you have to be showing up, you have to feed the machine. And if you don’t feed it, you don’t get fed, you don’t get paid, you don’t get to live your life.
So what do we want to do? We want to encourage people, our potential clients, to get on to our email list. And the way that you do that is fairly simple. One, you’ll need a CRM. And a CRM is a lot less scary than it sounds, I promise. If you want to use ours, it’s an all-in-one platform, The Sacred CEO CRM. You can click here again. You can get a 14-day free trial. Alternatively, things like MailChimp is a free one. Things like Kajabi have it, ConvertKit. You can try any of them. Again, I have my personal preference. You do what you want to do, not judging. Just get a platform for email list building, please. When you have your platform, two things, that’s it. Two things you need. One, some way to incentivize people to actually want to exchange their email for whatever you are going to be giving them. If that is the promise of incredible value and free content, amazing. Have them subscribe to your newsletter. All you need is a very simple opt in page with an email and a name.
Once they opt in, they click that button. It goes to a thank you page and it says, thank you for opting in. If you want to be an A+ student, what you can do is you can create a double opt in. Now, what this means is that when somebody subscribes and they opt in and they say, here’s my name, here’s my email, send me things. You set up a system and/or you use a system that has it already set up for you, where it sends them an email and it says, hey, click here to confirm your subscription. And why that’s important is because it’s going to support your email reputation, your email deliverability. We won’t get into all of that today. Watch future videos for it. But it’s an important piece to have. Not 100% necessary, but important. They click on that, now they’ve double opted in, and now you get to start to build an email list of people that are going to continue to receive things straight to their inbox.
Email marketing is not done. If you want to take it a step further, you want to have something on the back end already set up. So that instead of you having to show up every week and send out emails every week, you have a system that’s doing it automatically for you, that you’ve already set up in advance. You have a sequence of 10, 12, 20, 30, 40, 50 emails. You don’t have to do 50 at once. Start small, start with 10, and just have it be a nurture campaign so that anytime somebody opt in, they get an automated sequence from you connecting and following up and sharing stories and adding value to their inbox. And anytime you send new emails out, add it to the back end of your email sequence so you can consistently build your email sequence again and again and again. And it becomes this incredibly beautiful, incredibly long process of nurturing and inviting and selling and warming up and connecting with your audience. And it’s going to allow you to start to take a step back from having to be on social media 24/7.
The other option, which I would highly encourage and recommend, is finding other SEO platforms that you can start to leverage for your growth. These are things like YouTube, what you’re seeing here. Things like Pinterest, blogging, TikTok to a certain extent, which are all based on what we call search engine optimization. These are things that are going to have traffic be pushed to you based on the way that people are searching for things online. Finally, the last thing is, if you are planning on continuing to leverage social, because likely you will need to for a while, spend the time batching your content so that you can have more time, more space and more freedom, and your content can be scheduled to go out automatically without you having to always be on. Spaciousness is the key to sustainable scaling. And we want to create space in your life and in your business.
So if you would like to go deeper into figuring out exactly what step is necessary for you right now, and not continue to struggle between picking all of the things and feeling overwhelmed by all of the options, click here to take the Business Bottleneck Quiz now, and you will be able to get a custom scaling strategy specific to you and your unique needs and situation, based on your answers. It takes two minutes. Go ahead, enjoy.
