Ben Jones, Growing with Ontraport

BJ: There are so many ways I could answer this question — I could probably speak for a few hours on just this one topic!

We start by adding marketing tracking and UTMs. There’s heaps of info on the Ontraport website and online about what UTMs are, so I won’t go into that here. But this is such a great way to find out which campaigns, offers or ad platforms are working and even see which individuals are taking action inside Ontraport. And if you wanted to, you could even use this information to score leads or segment your contacts based on behaviours they’re taking outside of Ontraport. But what about all the people who aren’t in your database? You can see the UTM data in Google Analytics, too.

We also add contacts to Facebook Custom Audiences automatically. This is a killer feature built right into Ontraport — everything you need to know about this is in the Support Center along with an excellent use case so I won’t go into great detail here. If you’re doing Facebook ads and you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

Ontraport is very powerful when it comes to segmenting your database, and this is critical when it comes to working with PPC. The amazing thing about both of these advertising platforms is that you can take your audience and upload it directly to the ad platform to advertise to. This is extremely advantageous for a number of reasons:

• Your database is always going to be your most cost effective audience to advertise to. In most cases, they're going to be much warmer than prospects who have only just heard of you.
  
  
• Next level hyper-accurate targeting. Let’s say you have a few thousand people in your Ontraport account who have purchased something from you. You can add this group of people and say, “Hey Facebook, create an audience of people that look just like my buyers” and it will! These people are SO much more likely to engage with you, it’s almost unfair.
  
  
• Build out the sales pipeline for your marketing funnel. Using a campaign, you can visualize the value of contacts at different stages of your funnel and get a helicopter view of the overall system and how contacts flow from one stage to the next. As well as highlighting where things are going really well, perhaps more importantly it helps to spot problem areas where contacts may be stuck so that we can go in, make an adjustment to that part of the process, and get the contact moving forward again. We can even add alerts.

We also work with clients to scale their business. It’s easy to deal with customers one at a time when you’re starting out, but there comes a point when you’re looking to step up and grow your volume. We’ve got clients who are so in-demand that their sole reason for implementing Ontraport is to leverage their time. In fact, they got so busy that they asked us to switch off their ads! The point is, when you start advertising you need a way to keep your finger on the pulse without losing the plot. Ads will give you the volume you’re after and a well set-up Ontraport account will leverage your time by being the scaled delivery platform that lets you run your business on autopilot.

MO: What’s next for you?

BJ: The truth is, we can only help so many people as we work with them one-on-one. What we’ve found is that while suggesting that “digital marketing feels like you just got handed a big box of legos with no instructions” provokes a laugh, it also gets heads nodding every which-way in agreement, right across the board. So now, behind the scenes, we’re working on a top secret program to empower more business owners to piece together their own digital marketing journeys … Watch this space …

MO: Anything else you’d like to share?

BJ: Understand your customers intimately. Most people don’t know anywhere near enough about their customers or clients to market to them effectively. I love being part of the lightbulb moments our clients experience when we go through this piece of analysis with them!

Know your numbers. Know what it costs you to acquire a lead and a customer. Know how much you can afford to spend to acquire a lead and a customer. This is freeing.

Keep things simple. Often, simple funnels perform just as well as elaborate ones!

Always be learning. Approach all of your marketing with a learning or curiosity mindset.