So excited to have everyone joining us here in the AGM Community! Here at Artificial Grass Marketing we are rolling out new services and strategies in 2023. What are your plans for this year to make it even better than 2022? Share below what your plans are... - Add digital marketing services - Hire a Sales Person/People - Set up systems to track leads and sales - Bring on another crew for installations - Start a retail sales department/business

Think about this for a second. In your business do you have a Production or Installation department? Most companies do, it's typically where the hands-on part or fulfillment of sales takes place. Depending on whether your business provides professional services or sells physical products, you're running another system to fulfill the products or services that you’ve sold. Its interesting to talk with business owners who know they need an operations system and then refuse to put the same emphasis on creating a marketing system. Operating Systems vs. Marketing Systems Your business is actually just one big operating system broken down into departments all working together as one finely tuned machine. At least that’s what we tell ourselves as business owners. The obvious and more fun part of the business (I’ll admit I’m bias) is the marketing system you need to have. So let's take a look at the components needed to run a content marketing program. The System Tools Often times when this process begins, mapping out your business and assessing the current systems, it’s easy to lose track of just focusing on what you need to get started. If you wanted one succinct short list, minus the details - it would look like this: - Content Marketing - Social Media Marketing - Video Marketing  - Media Buying/Traffic Acquisition - Testing & Optimizing - Email/Marketing Automation  - SMS/ Text Automation - Database Marketing These are the mainstays of today's digital marketing world. However, getting your business up and running without a clear roadmap can turn into a colossal waste of time if you're trying to do this on your own. That's why we created the community, to help you grow your business. What are your thoughts? Share below in the comments. Lets Get Started with the Course! PS: If its still locked for you, you need to go back into the posts of the community and start making comments so you can get some likes... you can't Level Up and advance to opening the Digital Marketing Course until you stop being a Procrastinator.

Hey all! We've been working like crazy behind the scenes to create some amazing new upgrades to the AGM App! Stay tuned!

The biggest shift I've seen most small business owners have to adapt to, is moving off the spreadsheet, whiteboard or yellow pad and to finally accept the fact that they need to create a marketing system. Another major issue I see is committing what I call “Random Acts of Marketing”, which means they turn on and off their marketing in sporadic rhythms. They turn it on, get leads and then stop. I understand and there are lots of reasons for this. Seasonality of their business, production capabilities or company bandwidth. Here's the truth, the single most powerful action a local business owner can take is committing to advertising all year long. Why? Because when you leverage paid advertising your reaching tire kickers, researchers and potential buyers that may not be ready for an appointment, but could ready to enter at the Top, Middle or Bottom of your marketing funnels. When you develop a monthly content publishing cycle you can actually fortify and create an active growing list of prospects you will nurture into buyers using marketing automation. You can also answer many of the questions that the non-committed “tire kickers” (the group of non-buyers just doing research) and give them opportunities to actively engage in your content. Once we understand the dynamics of this, we found that we could still market in the slow months, when sales actually fell off and still benefit from the folks in “research mode” who would search out our solutions and then opt-in to our content offers which gave us a way to stay connected with them. Over time I began to see the true value of developing “Marketing Systems” rather than looking at my marketing as just paying for and buying leads. A prospect, custom branded to Heavenly Greens, thru our content was much more than a lead. Properly nurtured, a high percentage of these folks would eventually become buyers.