As a kid, I watched the futuristic cartoon The Jetsons. I was sure by the time I grew up, we’d all be riding around in flying cars. 40 years later and transport still remains terrestrial.
While modern cars have some nice bells and whistles in their basic form and function, motor vehicles haven’t really changed in the last 100 years.
We have the technology for flight. But why aren’t we all zipping around in personal flying machines?
Simple. There’s no infrastructure to support personal flight. Modern houses, buildings, and cities are all built to accommodate cars.
This brings me to your business.
It has access to everything it needs to scale rapidly and become a multi-million-dollar success story. Only without the right infrastructure you’ll experience little growth.
That’s why I’m going to show you how to build an effective marketing infrastructure. I’ve used this method to scale and sell two businesses for more money than I could ever have imagined. And now I’m giving it to you.
So let’s begin.
What is a marketing infrastructure?
A marketing infrastructure is the systems and processes businesses use to constantly bring in new leads, follow up with, nurture, and convert them into raving fan customers.
It’s the foundation on which your marketing and advertising are built.
And it’s the reason why some businesses get a constant flow of leads and prospects while others struggle to get any.
There are four vital components of a successful marketing infrastructure.
What are the elements of a marketing infrastructure?
1. Tools
Technology is key to building an effective marketing infrastructure. Leverage its power, and it can augment your abilities. You’d never have to worry about repetitive and menial tasks again.
- Forget manually adding meetings into your calendar.
- Or setting reminders to send monthly invoices to customers.
- Stopping throughout the day to send a welcome email to every new subscriber. Too damn disruptive if you ask me.
When used wisely, tools and software can make doing business with you and building relationships with your prospects so much easier. Plus, it allows you to focus on revenue-generating projects and ideas.
For example, every online small business needs a website customer management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM) tool, payment gateway, and social media tools like LinkedIn and Instagram.
But you also need to track the performance of these tools. You need data. That’s where Google Analytics, social insights, and email analytics come in handy. You can quickly see which marketing assets bring in new leads and where to double down your efforts.
Are you leveraging the power of automation?
CRM Examples:
CMS Examples:
2. Assets
An asset is anything of intellectual value. It establishes your authority and industry credibility, builds your brand awareness, and gets high-value leads to self-identify.
For example, it could be a cornerstone piece of content like a blog, book, guide, or report. It can also be marketing collateral such as your website, a brochure, or an email sequence that consistently converts prospects to customers.
Assets are not only valuable to you, but they can increase the saleability of your company.
One of my most important assets is my email list. I cover 6 reasons why it’s the fuel to your inbound marketing strategy here. Check it out.
3. Processes
These are the systems and procedures you implement to ensure vital day-to-day tasks get done. Also known as a standard operating procedure, these processes outline who will do what and when.
For example, it can help you plan content marketing. What marketing articles, resources, or images do you need?
If you decide to post a blog article once a week, the process will outline
- who will write and edit it
- who develops it
- who designs visual content
- who takes it live
- who adds internal links
- who submits it to Google Search Console
- who tracks the data
Processes save you time and money. But they also help you scale.
You can share your business processes with clients so they can implement them into their companies, improving customer retention and satisfaction. And new employees can use your processes to learn a system quickly and easily.
4. People
As a solopreneur, it’s difficult to scale your business alone. You may reach five or six figures, but you’ll burn out trying to do it alone. If you’d like to retain control of your advertising and marketing message, you’ll want to build a team of marketers, sales, and tech experts.
And you’ll need systems. Get my free systems template here.
These four components are fundamental to your marketing infrastructure.
Why An Effective Marketing Infrastructure Is Vital To Your Business Growth
There are four main reasons you need to invest in building infrastructure to market your company.
1) It reduces the cost, time, and effort of customer acquisition.
Most businesses do what I call “random acts of marketing.” They’re not building an infrastructure. They throw up an ad here and there, perhaps a website or a brochure.
These sporadic, one-shot acts of digital marketing usually cost more than they bring in, which is demoralizing. It also sometimes leads business owners to say ridiculous things like “marketing doesn’t work in my industry.” In a nutshell, it’s expensive.
If you don’t have a system to generate new leads, prospects, and clients, you have to replace it with manual labor: cold calling, cold emailing. You’re wasting hours following up on unqualified leads. It’s exhausting.
Now, imagine you had a machine that does that for you. It’s powerful. Here’s why.
2) It optimizes your sales and marketing, which influences business growth
You have a better understanding of what the market wants. It tracks the data.
You can see where a lead came from, what information they’re interested in, and what content to produce. Give this data to your sales team, and they’ll know what message to push, what objections to overcome, and when to cut a prospect loose.
3) It makes your life more pleasurable.
You don’t have to wake up and hustle all day. Automating much of your infrastructure ensures you start to get leads in-bound. I’m not saying outbound is wrong. It’s just more difficult.
With a sound marketing infrastructure, sales know exactly what to do, marketing has a proven growth plan to follow, and you can go on holiday without worrying things will stop.
How to build a marketing infrastructure
To build a system, we need to think it through from start to end. We need to understand how it works and what resources we’ll need to run it.
Here are a few examples of successful marketing assets in my marketing infrastructures:
- Lead capture websites
- Free recorded message info line
- Newsletter
- Blog
- Free report
- Direct mail sequences
- Email sequences
- Social media
- Email auto-responders
- SMS auto-responders
I continue to build bigger and more sophisticated assets, but these are some of which make up my core. Each one of these has a place and purpose. All the ads I run are designed to plug cold leads into this system and convert them to raving fan customers.
It does take time and money to build a marketing infrastructure. But just like building physical infrastructures like roads or a railway network – the bulk of the time and cost goes into the initial build. After that, it’s just maintenance.
And here’s the exciting thing – thanks to advances in technology, much of my marketing system is automated, which gives me enormous leverage.
When I find a combination that works, I can redeploy it repeatedly and reliably get the same results.
Step 1: Complete your marketing plan
Without a marketing plan, you’ll continue to waste time, energy, and dollars on random acts of marketing. A sound marketing plan details every step in attracting a cold lead to churning out a raving fan.
It’s the foundation on which your marketing infrastructure is built.
Download our free 1PMP Canvas here to get started on yours.
Step 2: Identify the crucial next steps in advertising your company.
Implementing an infrastructure can be overwhelming for time-strapped entrepreneurs. You want to start building that database of leads, so focus on getting your website and CRM operational.
Step 3: Document your processes
Even if you can’t yet afford help, you need to document your processes. It can be as easy as filming Loom videos while you work. This way, when you can hire someone, you won’t have to spend time showing them how to do things. It’s already done. They just need to follow your instructions.
Step 4: Assign KPIs and track your data.
An essential component of your infrastructure is data. Business growth requires you to stay on top of your marketing numbers. Speak to any marketer, and they’ll tell you they frequently review every piece of data they receive.
- Can we A/B test an email subject line to see which performs better?
- Opt-ins for this marketing leaders report are down. Check historical analytics to see if this is seasonal or a messaging problem?
- Leads from Instagram are non-existent. Clearly, our audience isn’t there.
Knowing your numbers allows you to cut the tools that aren’t delivering, saving you time and money.
Step 5: Optimize, optimize, optimize
Marketing is never done. So get into the habit of testing and optimizing regularly.
- Make time to review your marketing plan every year. Ask yourself, is this still true?
- Review your campaigns. If it’s still converting, don’t change the message. Often business owners think their messaging is old and tired. But remember, someone somewhere is seeing this message for the first time. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
- Be open to trying new technology. There may be more sophisticated means of automation that can make your life even easier.
Are you ready to start building your infrastructure?
Are you building your marketing infrastructure?
Are you constantly adding to and improving your marketing systems?
Doing so is what will put you far ahead of your competitors, who’ll be just fluffing about with their random acts of marketing. Use the steps listed above.
Craft your marketing plan. Identify which systems and assets you need to build. And get it done.
As a business coach, I continue to update my marketing infrastructure, and my results continue to improve. If you’re looking to grow your coaching business, reach out. I’d love to help.
Great post, Alan! This paragraph was absolute genius: “These sporadic, one shot, random acts of marketing usually end up costing more than they bring in, which is demoralising and sometimes leads business owners to say ridiculous things like ‘marketing doesn’t work in my industry’.”
I completely agree that a system is the solution! As much as possible, a marketing system needs to be automated and scalable and needs to lead the prospective buyer deeper into the sales funnel toward multiple purchases.
One mistake I see a lot of people make is blindly copying more successful systems rather than creating a new model that works best for them or innovating an existing model. Rather, we end up with a mass of copycat businesses whose owners can’t figure out why they aren’t raking in the cash like the success stories.
Thanks Aaron,
In this previous article I expanded on the trap many small businesses find themselves in: https://successwise.com/why-marketing-like-a-large-company-will-kill-your-business/
As you rightly say trying to copy other successful marketing systems rarely works because you don’t have all the information they have and your circumstances are likely to be very different than those being emulated.
All the best!
I m in habit of marking good points while reading books and alike…..after reading yours book I realised that I have marked each and every line to read it again….Really Great….Thanks
Good stuff as usual.
Hi,
I would like to ask, so do you not follow a calendar for the marketing infrastructure?
How do you make one?
Or you just fire away the contents (blogs, email, newsletter, social media and more) in a random manner?
Thank you!
That is really interesting, You’re a very skilled
blogger. I’ve joined your rss feed and stay up for in the hunt for extra of your wonderful post.
Additionally, I’ve shared your site in my social networks
What´s the size of your team each time you deploy a new company or do you use your existing team because to implement all strategies at the same time it takes a lot of time and a lot of work
Thank’s you! It helpful for me
It helpful for me.
Thank you!