The essentials of marketing automation to unleash profitability

Everyone on the internet is talking about the importance of marketing automation to make processes more efficient and effective. As of today, more than 51% of companies are using marketing automation in one way or another. However, if everything was hunky-dory, you wouldn’t be here seeking marketing automation secrets, would you?

Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey highlights how 68% of CMOs expect their mar-tech budgets to increase year on year, indicating how marketing automation will become more prominently seen across all industries and at different scales.

All for good reason.

Marketing automation has proven to drive a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. The study by Nucleus Research shows how adopting automation can increase conversions and sales for a business while reducing the cost of achieving the numbers.

But implementing marketing automation is more than just knowing what it is and its benefits.

While everyone on the internet has a set of tips and tricks to share for choosing the right solution to implementing it into different processes in an organization, there are not enough people talking about the mistakes. Mistakes have led to thousands of dollars being lost trying to create an effective automation process.

Implementing marketing automation is more than just knowing what it is and its benefits.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the marketing automation secrets that you shouldn’t do when bringing in process automation. Secrets that the management gurus have been keeping away from you. Things you should not do when using marketing automation

  1. Not getting everyone on board with marketing automation

Marketing automation is not meant for one person or one department. You need to have all your stakeholders and key teams onboard.

Unlike what most articles suggest – identifying repetitive marketing tasks and automating them with software. Look at it from the perspective of adding another moving piece in your organization that may impact how you do things, and how that will affect the other departments. Consider it similar to building a culture.

If not everyone is on board with the idea of automation, there will be functions running in silos, manually, which may hamper your growth in the long run due to frequent disconnects.

  1. Assuming marketing automation is easy

Internet gurus will say marketing automation doesn’t just make it easy for you to run various functions but is also easy to implement. That’s far from the truth because, by its very nature, marketing automation is meant to be extremely detailed to solve complex workflows. It takes a lot of upfront knowledge to set things up correctly and be able to tap into the various data points available to you.

Take for instance your sales lead scoring strategy. If you do not have a well-defined target audience and an ideal customer persona, or if you are not collating the right kind of data, it will negatively impact your sales performance. The team might end up chasing leads that are less likely to convert and lose out on the opportunity to follow up with those who are closer to making a purchase decision.

A recommended approach to adopting marketing automation is to focus on learning the smallest of nuances that come with it. The idea is to understand the ins and outs of it, technical and non-technical, to be able to set up a workflow that scales with you and helps you achieve growth.

This is where you should ideally be looking for a marketing automation software that offers a powerful support and success team, and a well-made knowledge base that gets you up-to-speed.

  1. Using marketing automation to simply run things on autopilot

Too many management gurus out there are promoting marketing automation as a solution that helps organizations run their marketing campaigns on autopilot. Some of them even restrict the use case to CRM and email marketing.

If you want to see success with marketing automation, you need to know that it includes CRM, email marketing, SMS marketing, social media, lead management, content marketing, multi-channel campaigns, and much more, and how it makes them all work in tandem so that you can get results at scale with an omnichannel strategy.

  1. Using marketing automation to eliminate data silos ‘only’

Many organizations run multi-channel and touch campaigns to generate leads, nurture them and move them along the sales funnel. But to cater to the needs of each channel, they leverage individual solutions in the hope to keep their running costs at bay. They only bring in marketing automation to eliminate data silos and get a holistic view of their campaigns.

It’s important to know that a marketing automation tool can help you not just bring all the data onto one dashboard. Good software will also help you run those different processes and campaigns from one place. When you need a comprehensive view of your growth strategies across marketing and sales, you also have campaign visibility to make better business decisions.

So if you’ve been recommended marketing automation to consolidate your manual marketing efforts’ data, it’s time to rethink your approach.

  1. Not having a strategy for marketing automation

Marketing automation tools do not replace the importance of having marketing strategies. They are enablers that make it simple to execute the marketing strategies with more ease, coherency, and in tandem, across all the platforms to keep communication consistent with prospects and customers, at scale.

 

Authored by

Harminder Singh Ari, Vice President – India Sales, WebEngage

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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