Understand the value of having all your tools “under one roof” and working in tandem, the Ontraport way. Get the big picture of what this could mean for the future of your business.
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The big picture
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- The problem with having a handful of different tools to run your business (and how Ontraport solves that)
- What you need to provide targeted, personalized experiences for your customers
- The power of a flexible database
- How automation saves you time and effort
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Transcript
Welcome to Ontraport University.
As you make your way through these courses, we’ll get into the detailed features and strategies that you’ll use to grow your business with Ontraport.
But before we dive in, it’s worth taking a minute to understand the big picture here: what’s the big goal? Why so many features? How does it all fit together?
So let’s talk about it.
Here’s what happens: when most small businesses get started, they figure they need a website, so they get one set up and boom, they’re off and running. Then you realize you need to capture leads and grow a list, so you get an email marketing service. Then it’s one thing after another, taking payments, managing leads, tracking, personalization, and on and on you go collecting tools, trying to build your vision by stringing together a bunch of parts. The people selling all these pieces even gave it a sexy name – the ‘startup stack.’
And look, entrepreneurs are nothing if not problem solvers, so it makes perfect sense to solve each challenge with a new tool as it comes up.
But there’s a real problem here that they don’t tell you about, and most of the time entrepreneurs don’t see it coming until it smacks them in the face: when you use a dozen different tools to run your business, you end up with important data about your prospects and customers spread out between them all.
This might seem like a small detail, but it’s not. In fact, this is the exact reason why you NEVER see a bigger business run things this way! It just doesn’t happen, because once you’ve been around a few years, you realize how impossible it is to manage – and especially to do modern marketing – when you don’t have a central set of data about everyone who touches your business.
Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean, starting with something simple.
Say you want to send a promotion to people who have visited your site in the last month but haven’t purchased anything yet. That seems like a good idea, and it’s a piece of cake in Ontraport that would take 5 minutes.
But if you have a website separate from your CRM system and both are separate from your payments system and your email system… well, you probably can’t even get this project done at all. You don’t even know who visited your site, let alone which of them are customers or not.
And that’s just one little example.
The bigger picture is this: in today’s business landscape, trying to stand out in the crowded marketplace is hard and expensive. Those who succeed do so by making sure they’re always perfectly matching their ads and marketing messages to highly targeted audiences.
Think about it.
Most of the biggest companies in the world got that way because they’re not just sending the same message to everyone.They’re delivering perfectly targeted, personalized experiences to each person.
Netflix doesn’t show the same suggestions to everyone; they show exactly what they think YOU’LL like based on what they know about you. The same is true for Amazon, Google, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram and a million others.
And they can create those targeted experiences BECAUSE they have a central database that stores information about each prospect and customer — and then they use that data to tailor everything from their website to their ads to their emails.
Now, you aren’t going to get as fancy as Amazon right out of the gate.
But to make marketing work well today, you need to be moving in this direction – focusing on each person’s problems and interests and delivering high-quality, relevant, targeted experiences.
And Ontraport is designed to help you do that.
To make that possible, we’ve spent the last 15-plus years building the most powerful, integrated platform designed for entrepreneurs who are serious about growing their businesses.
At the heart of the platform is your data, stored in a powerful, flexible database. Around that, we’ve got the most important tools you need to COLLECT that data — like forms and APIs — and then the tools you need to USE that data to deliver those targeted experiences — on the web, in email and text messages, and even on the phone with your team. From lead capture through fulfillment, Ontraport covers the entire customer lifecycle.
And the heartbeat of the whole thing is Ontraport’s Automation engine that makes it easy to create business rules and processes to take the load off your shoulders and let our computers do the heavy lifting so you can scale.
Running your business on Ontraport puts you in a position to launch ideas faster, see what’s working and what’s not, and set important systems on autopilot so you can focus on creating what’s next instead of worrying about the day-to-day.
Ontraport University is a big course, and you’re going to learn a lot. What you’ll have at the end is a business that’s set up for long term success and some serious internet superpowers to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever before.
So thanks for being here, and let’s get started.
As you make your way through these courses, we’ll get into the detailed features and strategies that you’ll use to grow your business with Ontraport.
But before we dive in, it’s worth taking a minute to understand the big picture here: what’s the big goal? Why so many features? How does it all fit together?
So let’s talk about it.
Here’s what happens: when most small businesses get started, they figure they need a website, so they get one set up and boom, they’re off and running. Then you realize you need to capture leads and grow a list, so you get an email marketing service. Then it’s one thing after another, taking payments, managing leads, tracking, personalization, and on and on you go collecting tools, trying to build your vision by stringing together a bunch of parts. The people selling all these pieces even gave it a sexy name – the ‘startup stack.’
And look, entrepreneurs are nothing if not problem solvers, so it makes perfect sense to solve each challenge with a new tool as it comes up.
But there’s a real problem here that they don’t tell you about, and most of the time entrepreneurs don’t see it coming until it smacks them in the face: when you use a dozen different tools to run your business, you end up with important data about your prospects and customers spread out between them all.
This might seem like a small detail, but it’s not. In fact, this is the exact reason why you NEVER see a bigger business run things this way! It just doesn’t happen, because once you’ve been around a few years, you realize how impossible it is to manage – and especially to do modern marketing – when you don’t have a central set of data about everyone who touches your business.
Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean, starting with something simple.
Say you want to send a promotion to people who have visited your site in the last month but haven’t purchased anything yet. That seems like a good idea, and it’s a piece of cake in Ontraport that would take 5 minutes.
But if you have a website separate from your CRM system and both are separate from your payments system and your email system… well, you probably can’t even get this project done at all. You don’t even know who visited your site, let alone which of them are customers or not.
And that’s just one little example.
The bigger picture is this: in today’s business landscape, trying to stand out in the crowded marketplace is hard and expensive. Those who succeed do so by making sure they’re always perfectly matching their ads and marketing messages to highly targeted audiences.
Think about it.
Most of the biggest companies in the world got that way because they’re not just sending the same message to everyone.They’re delivering perfectly targeted, personalized experiences to each person.
Netflix doesn’t show the same suggestions to everyone; they show exactly what they think YOU’LL like based on what they know about you. The same is true for Amazon, Google, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram and a million others.
And they can create those targeted experiences BECAUSE they have a central database that stores information about each prospect and customer — and then they use that data to tailor everything from their website to their ads to their emails.
Now, you aren’t going to get as fancy as Amazon right out of the gate.
But to make marketing work well today, you need to be moving in this direction – focusing on each person’s problems and interests and delivering high-quality, relevant, targeted experiences.
And Ontraport is designed to help you do that.
To make that possible, we’ve spent the last 15-plus years building the most powerful, integrated platform designed for entrepreneurs who are serious about growing their businesses.
At the heart of the platform is your data, stored in a powerful, flexible database. Around that, we’ve got the most important tools you need to COLLECT that data — like forms and APIs — and then the tools you need to USE that data to deliver those targeted experiences — on the web, in email and text messages, and even on the phone with your team. From lead capture through fulfillment, Ontraport covers the entire customer lifecycle.
And the heartbeat of the whole thing is Ontraport’s Automation engine that makes it easy to create business rules and processes to take the load off your shoulders and let our computers do the heavy lifting so you can scale.
Running your business on Ontraport puts you in a position to launch ideas faster, see what’s working and what’s not, and set important systems on autopilot so you can focus on creating what’s next instead of worrying about the day-to-day.
Ontraport University is a big course, and you’re going to learn a lot. What you’ll have at the end is a business that’s set up for long term success and some serious internet superpowers to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever before.
So thanks for being here, and let’s get started.
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