Hi I'm Troy. Along with Tim Fullerton, my business partner, we own and operate 2 Brands inside the turf industry based in Northern California. The first business, Heavenly Greens, is a 22 year old 100% installation company. At its peak we managed 17 different, 3-4 man installation crews including vehicles and equipment, we also manage 15 sales reps and over 70 employee's. Back in 2015, I started our retail brand Artificial Turf Express, which we run out of the same building. Both Tim and myself started as Sales Reps for Heavenly Greens back in 2006, a little over a decade later, in 2018, we had the opportunity to buy the business from its Founder, Dan Theis. Today, these businesses have generated over $300MM in sales. If there is one thing that running these kinds of numbers has taught us, it's that you absolutely need to have a system in place to manage all the moving parts. We manage each of these businesses with a digital marketing stack, or multiple platforms integrated into one big operating system. The Heavenly Greens marketing stack consists of; JivoChat (for live chat into our own 4-member Call Center) > Invoca (call tracking and recording) > Hubspot (content and marketing automation) > Salesforce (CRM, sales management, production & installation scheduling) while Artificial Turf Express uses the CRM/Marketing AGM App and Square for our Point of Sale system. Without a system, its nearly impossible to manage the business efficiently. I know this first hand, because that's how I used to feel before I understood how all this stuff works. Inside the Free Course AGM's Guide to Digital Marketing, located inside the Classroom Tab above, we will show you the systems and content strategies we’ve successfully deployed to drive leads, educate prospects and to ultimately create more qualified buyers for Heavenly Greens.

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.

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.

The Framework you need to find Baseline. We need to get to a place where your marketing data is clear and actionable. I call this beginning phase your Baseline. I’m going to layout all of the data points I look at it as it relates to our entire marketing funnel outlined in this course. All of the the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) that I track for the digital marketing plan we have in place for Heavenly Greens. The Core KPI (top level) numbers I ultimately focus on to prove success will bubble up as a result of the cumulative general data points below. All of our calls and webforms are tracked and a specific phone# for each marketing channel. All Ad-outlets (Core KPI's) - Paid Traffic (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Youtube, FB) - Website Traffic  - Total Lead Flow - Total Phone Calls - Total Appointments set - Total Appointments ran - Closing percentage  - Total Sales  The folks that didn’t set an appointment that came in as a lead, or the folks that did not buy from us, are still in our marketing automation systems and will continue to get our monthly published content. This will continue until they do become customers (which we see happen a lot, sometimes a year or more later) or opt out of our marketing messages altogether. Finding Baseline (Core vs. General KPI’s) Typically I will focus on 2-types of KPI groups: 1. Core KPI’s 2. General KPI’s  There is a certain feeling of calm that will come over you when you are in command of your marketing data. Once you're in a place where baseline has been established, your marketing budget is easier to plan for as it relates to forecasting on next year's sales. I tend to use all of those data points that I outlined above to measure out baseline metrics for YoY (year over year), MoM (month over month) or quarterly success metrics. looking above, notice Leads are not part of my Core KPI list? I really don’t care about leads. Sure leads are vital, however leads are just a byproduct of marketing. Leads typically stay locked inside marketing automation until they move to the next step in the system and become an appointment, an income generating activity.

The first thing you have to do is take a look at the systems you already have in place. Is your system as simple as a lead flow "phone call to clipboard or a notepad" I referenced earlier? It really doesn’t matter, because even if you think you don’t have system in place… you have a system. What I want you to do is visualize your current lead flow process. When a lead comes into your business (we will start with the easy one) in the form of a phone call, what happens? - When your phone rings, who answers it? - What happens with the call information? - Does it go right into an Excel file? - Does it get typed into your CRM software (Customer Relationship Management) tool? I love exploring this process when I first meet with and ask the owners about this process. Every time this process is introduced, owners see the business like never before. Mapping out your Business Most business owners have never done this. It's amazing what happens when you take the time to map it out. I use a simple cloud tool called Draw.io to map out clients. Using API’s I can connect these drawings to Google Drive, Box.net among others for maximum sharing input. Take look at the images below, for this example; it's not important to be able to see what it says on each box. What I want to illustrate to you is the power of this process. Actually visualizing your current lead process, call process, sales process etc. Looking below you will notice the map is detailed on each step of the process. Draw out a diagram of how that inbound lead turns into a sale for your business and share it with your management and ask for feedback. You may find little inefficiencies that can be corrected to increase productivity. You may not realize it, but you do have a system in place. When you take the time to draw it out, you will see things differently. At the end of the day, whatever your map looks like is the current system you have in place. This is point A, where you are at now.