Automation is huge for scaling a company,
and I got this question the other day.
It was, "What are all of the tasks
"that can be automated in running a digital agency?"
And it's more tasks than you think,
so what I did is, I broke an agency
into its three parts, and I want to run
through what all of these tasks are,
that you can think about automating,
or hiring someone to fill.
So, there are three sections of a digital agency:
sales, marketing, and production.
I put them in this Google Sheet.
Under sales, there's everything that sales does.
If you want to think about automation,
you want to think about automating
each individual part, and I would say,
sales does, basically, three things,
that could be automated: lead generation,
cold emailing, and cold calling.
Lead generation, you can automate
finding the leads with some of the tools
we talk about on this channel.
You can automate doing the leads
by going to Upwork, and hiring a freelancer, all that.
Cold emailing is the same way,
there are tons of companies out there
that will help you automate your cold emailing.
Experiment 27 is one of them, if you're a digital agency.
Cold calling, the same way, there are plenty
of phone farms, there are plenty
of cold calling companies that will help automate that.
And the way to think about automation is,
how can I break these tasks into the smallest parts,
and then find companies to fill those roles,
or freelancers to fill those roles?
And what I'm doing here is breaking down
an agency into these parts, just to show you the mindset.
Your business might not be these exact same things,
but you can think about automation in the exact same way.
And that brings us to marketing.
So, for marketing, there are three things.
Finding channels that work, whether that is
cold emailing, or cold calling, or PPC, or directories,
or SEO, the wide swath of things,
finding channels that work.
Pitching yourself in emails to the press,
or to podcasts, and then creating the actual content.
And all of these three can be automated, or hired for.
Finding channels, there's a great agency
in New York called Ladder Digital,
and all they do is use PPC to test
different channels for software as a service startups.
That can totally be automated,
you can also hire for this one.
The other one worth automating are pitch emails.
Getting you in front of the press.
There are PR companies that are way better
than what you have internal, that you can hire,
to help pitch yourself to the press.
Or you can hire somebody to do it, internally.
Creating content is another one.
You know, some people hire an intern,
I like to create the content myself,
for this channel, because I think
the founder of a company has a unique insight,
and should be creating content.
But you can also outsource it,
and there are plenty of companies that do that.
And then the other part of marketing
that we're missing is the execution of the actual channels.
Hiring somebody to do PPC, or to do SEO,
once those channels are found for your specific company.
Because each company is going to have
different success with different channels.
Cold email might not work for you, after you test it.
LinkedIn marketing might not work for you,
Twitter might not work, so it's all about
testing different channels, and that's why
I have that as the most important thing,
on the marketing side.
And then, finally, if you're in coding,
or you're in a development agency,
production is also broken into three parts
that can be outsourced, as well.
Tech architecting is one of the most important,
and the highest value activity
when it comes to planning out code.
So choosing what language to code it in,
choosing how everything is going to be lined up,
and where the data is gonna be stored,
and all of the testing plans, and what to run it on.
That's very important, but it's also something
that you can hire a consultant for, you can outsource that.
Coding and design, if you're in America,
look at South America, or Eastern Europe.
Try to find a designer or coder there,
you can get similar quality.
Or, if you're in a big city, like New York,
people are charging $150 to $250 an hour,
look at the middle of America, right?
Look where I am, right now, Wichita.
You can find good designers for
$15, $20 an hour whose quality rivals
that of the big cities, so you can outsource that easily.
And then quality assurance is the same way.
There are companies like Applause,
or User Testing, where you can go,
and have all your testing handled.
There are also companies out there
that will outsource their labor to you.
So, using a site like Upwork, you can outsource
your quality assurance that way.
So, that's just something to think about.
A good thought exercise for you to go through
is to break down the type of work that
you're doing, similar to what we did,
in this Google Sheet today, and think about
what do you not like doing, or what
could somebody else easily handle,
and then think about whether it makes
monetary sense for you to outsource that sort of work.
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check out Experiment27.com, thanks.