Today, marketing automation is a key part of any advanced organization’s marketing, sales, and demand generation program. It’s helping marketers (particularly B2B) hone their customer relationships. In this age of digital marketing, marketers must invest resources in online channels that allow them to have a direct conversation with the customer, but there is openly room for improvement.
According to a survey, marketers are betting on website, branding, search engine optimization and social media technologies; less on paid promotion or, more essentially, marketing automation.
Studies show that only 13% of automation projects are productive. There are a number of reasons for this: unclear lead management methods, lack of customer lifecycle alignment with content, stakeholder friction in sales and advertising, to name a few. At the same time, it is worth asking, who is to blame when it fails? It’s not the software, it’s us. Marketers set ourselves up for failure by making the following mistakes.
Lack of content:
If your website isn’t creating a steady stream of expert, indexable content all the time, then you won’t be driving enough traffic to your site to build your database of potential customers. And if you’re not building your lead database, marketing automation can’t help you. Automation is useful for nurturing the leads you generate and getting them into the system. If you simply have a stagnant list that doesn’t grow, then your deployment process will probably fail.
Inability to close sales:
Marketing automation can take your leads and nurture them until they are as ready to buy as they ever will be; however, you cannot close the deal. Regardless, you still need a genuine person to have a real conversation, or, more likely, a few, to close the deal. Note that this assumes that you are a B2B business negotiating high-value contracts.
Expecting too much from your marketing staff:
Just because you’ll have the ability to “automate” things, don’t have an unrealistic expectation that marketing automation will help you overcome the problem of understaffing. You have to put in a lot of time to make it work and without committed people on the team, it will affect your delivery time with the system. Marketing Automation can be a voracious monster that will gobble up content and leads unless you have the internal resources to get it right on your behalf.
Lack of calls to action:
Even if you have a lot of great content on your site, you still need to encourage your website visitors to take action, such as downloading marketing materials, signing up for the newsletter, or filling out a “contact us” form. If you still can’t convert your visitors into leads, you’re again coming up short and not giving automation software a chance to do its thing.
Remember, marketing automation software is a tool. To get the best results, you need to set the right goals, select the platforms that are best for your business, stay focused on your buyer’s needs, and create content that is valuable to your audience.