Grow With Owwtreach - The weekly digital marketing shortcut for local businesses.
A marketing system does not have to be complicated.
Start with the simple repetitive steps that you often forget or that take up a lot of time.
In the last issue, we set up April's welcome sequence and her speed-to-lead reply (April is a hairdresser who runs a Hair Salon in Northampton MA). If you did the same for your business, you've got two automations running. These are useful, but not necessarily a system.
Here's the distinction:
A system is a process with a defined start, a defined end, and a purpose that connects every step in between. Automation is just one way to run a step in that process without touching it yourself.
You can build a system entirely by hand and have it work without a single automated piece.
You can also stack five automations that never connect to anything and still have no system at all, just five tasks running on their own, achieving no business result.
Most local businesses that "do automation" are in the second category. A welcome email here. A review request there. None of it is connected to a journey.
April's first system
We sat down with April and mapped the actual journey a new lead goes through, start to finish.
It looks like this. Someone fills in her enquiry form. They get an immediate reply with a booking link, the speed-to-lead piece from Issue 20. If they book, they're in. If they don't book within 48 hours, a follow-up email goes out with a specific offer to make booking easy.
If they still haven't booked after a week, they roll into her general welcome sequence instead, so they keep hearing from her without getting hounded.
It’s a 5-step journey: Enquiry, instant reply, booking or non-booking, a 48-hour nudge, and a one-week fallback. Each step builds on what happened in the step before it.
That's a system. The fact that two of the five steps run automatically is useful. It's not what makes it a system.
While you’re busy with other things, your website response system can book clients, answer questions, and send our requested information.
April's second system
Her second system has nothing to do with email, and there is nothing complicated about it.
At checkout, a printed QR code sits on the counter. As a client pays, April or her stylist says something like: "Would you mind scanning that and leaving us a review on Google? It helps people find us." The client scans, lands straight on the review form, and leaves one.
Three simple steps here: The code. The ask. The scan.
April's review system has no complicated technology setup. It's still a system, because it's repeatable and it has a clear job.
What makes both of these systems
Neither one depends on April remembering to do something at a random point in her week. Both have a trigger: a new enquiry, a completed payment, and a fixed sequence that runs from there.
Neither one needs her to think. They need her, or her team, to follow the sequence.
That's the test. If you have to remember to do it and decide how, it's a task. If it runs the same way every time something triggers it, it's a system.
One Practical Move
Pick one moment in your business that happens often, on a predictable trigger; e.g. a new enquiry, completed job, or a payment at the till.
Write down what should happen next, step by step, every single time. Don't worry about automating any of it yet. Just get the steps on paper in order. That's your first system, whether or not a single piece of it runs without you.
One Tool- Google Analytics
A QR code generator. The free one at qr-code-generator.com work fine. Point it at your Google review link, print it, and put it where the moment naturally happens, your counter, your invoice, your thank-you card.
The tool isn't the system. The trigger, the ask, and the result are. The code just removes friction from the last step.
Keep howling!
Fungai
Your Owwtreach Guy
Grow with Owwtreach
www.owwtreach.com