Author Kenda Macdonald
It was a pleasure to meet with Kenda Macdonald from Automation Ninjas, a dynamic company helping other businesses in understanding consumer behaviour. Kenda shares below some insights that could help you to make a success of your business ideas.
Can you give me a snapshot of what your business offers?
I run Automation Ninjas. We are a multi award-winning agency that specialises in Behavioural Marketing Automation. We help businesses understand consumer behaviour, plan and build customer journeys – everything from the strategy, to the implementation to the content and the marketing automation. Our focus is on helping create marketing automation that gets better quality leads, higher conversion rates and longer customer lifetime value.
What were some of your first steps to getting your business up and running?
The business we were working for shut down, and we jumped at the opportunity to start our own business. At first, we just focused on getting a few clients on board, we went networking, spent time in groups on Facebook and LinkedIn helping other businesses.
Soon we started creating content to help the kind of people we knew needed our services and put that up on social media. This was what really helped us build a name for ourselves – it was the catalyst for success. After that we doubled down on honing our methodology and processes, set up a website and started to really focus on building our network.
How have you identified potential areas to develop into?
We realised that our audience was having a really hard time getting online. Those people that may have paid us for help before couldn’t necessarily do that – so we did 13 free webinars teaching everything you needed to know to get started with marketing automation, and created a low priced membership to help people get started. This meant that we could help people and keep the lights on!
I predominantly use journals and market research resources to help me keep ahead of industry trends. These have been instrumental to research for my book – that catapulted us to much higher heights of success!
Do you have any advice for first time small business owners?
You will need to work weekends and late nights and get things done. But don’t get caught up in the entrepreneurial hustle! Just because you’re not working hard 100% of the time doesn’t mean you’re not doing what you need to do to get ahead. Give yourself breaks to be at your best, and strive to have an integrated worklife, not one dictated by work. It’s ok to take your kids to the park in the middle of the day etc.
From a marketing side:
Get to know your customer audience as best as you can. This means you know what they care about and you can stay relevant. From a fellow business owner: build your support network – it can be stressful, but having people around you to support you can mean the world in dark times Check out the website to make contact with Kenda and her colleagues, and to find out more about their business offer www.automationninjas.com
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