4 Marketing Automation Myths Explained
Marketers used to spend an incredible amount of time on tactical activities that are incredibly time-consuming and often quite ineffective. These activities were generally done in different systems and then combined manually to execute a campaign. The results varied and were difficult to measure accurately.
To impact the quality and quantity of the leads marketing is delivering to sales, a marketer needs a complete marketing automation platform, which offers concrete solutions to the most common problems marketers face today. The benefit of marketing automation is that it pulls all your required tools together in one place so that you can have access to reports of the entire campaign and make smart decisions about how to deliver revenue.
You’ll have numerous challenges on your way, and you’ll have to learn your lessons about what marketing automation is and what it’s not. Here are 4 marketing automation myths debunked:
1. Marketing Automation Is Only for Big Companies with High Marketing Budget
Don’t get scared about the enterprise platforms, designed for big companies with expensive feature sets which you might not even need. You don’t have to settle for a commodity point solution either. This is just not enough if you plan to contend with larger competitors and grow as a company.
How can you be sure that marketing automation is for you? Start with determining your business requirements and key project drivers, then see what workflows you can automate to conduct an efficient and responsive lead to revenue process.
Marketing automation can be a perfect solution, especially if your marketing team is small. Train your people on how to leverage it to your maximum advantage.
2. Marketing Automation Is Just for Emails
Marketing automation is NOT just for sending emails, even if setting up an automated follow-up email sequence is a good start when implementing the new technology.
Email campaigns demand prospects’ personalization, and marketing automation offers increased flexibility with data segmentation based on your customer’s interactions with your company (email, website, content downloading). It also has the best tools for A/B testing email campaigns, which is the best way to measure what works best for your audience.
With each contact point, you get to know more about your prospects while the image of each customer becomes clearer. Communicating with a particular recipient becomes more relevant, timely fashioned, and well-targeted.
Automation is about engagement through the complete buyer’s journey, not only about if and when they’ve opened your email.
3. Marketing Automation Only Benefits Your Marketing Team
When you integrate CRM and marketing automation, your company achieves better productivity and ultimately more revenue. When correctly mapped, marketing automation offers sales visibility into their lead’s engagement process, eliminating the manual research needed for understanding each customer. Now, they can easily pick up the conversation from the same point where marketing left off.
If your company has a long and complex sales cycle, you probably struggle to keep your leads warm over an extended time. Marketing automation allows you to set nurture campaigns that combine an automated digital touch with a human touch from sales keeping your prospects connected until they are ready to buy (again).
Marketing automation can also be extended to customer service, i.e., you can address customers that haven’t logged in for a while with automated messages to prevent them from leaving.
4. Marketing Automation Means “Set It and Forget It”
Marketing automation can indeed save time by enabling you to schedule multiple campaigns and release each one according to your settings. But don’t assume it’s easy because you can auto-schedule your content for the future.
After all, marketing automation is a tool, not a person. It’s a piece of a much larger strategy. Combining the possibilities of technology with marketing know-how is the ultimate recipe for success. So, each campaign needs periodic reviews and updates to align with your global business strategy and avoid the risk of becoming moldy and outdated.
Keep your campaigns relevant so your content won’t be marked as SPAM. Get to know your customers more intimately and make sure they are interested in your offerings before sending them content and hope they will resonate.
Closing Thoughts
Marketing automation surely makes your online marketing campaigns more straightforward and more efficient. But what marketing automation is not going to do, is to replace you. It’s not here to thoroughly do your job, yet it helps you work smarter by doing your routine tasks and giving you time for planning and designing.
If you want to learn more about how marketing automation can help you grow your business, download our eBook. We provide a common list of challenging situations marketers face today and how marketing automation can make you work easier.
