Why don’t marketers understand marketing automation?

Today, marketing automation is a key part of any advanced organization’s marketing, sales, and demand generation program. You are helping marketers (in particular, B2B) refine their customer relationships. In this age of digital marketers, marketers must put resources into online channels that allow them to have a direct conversation with the customer, but there is open room for improvement.

According to a survey, marketers are betting on websites, brands, search engine optimization and social media technologies; less in paid promotion or, more essentially, in marketing automation.

Studies show that only 13% of automation projects are productive. There are several reasons for this: unclear lead management methods, lack of customer and content lifecycle alignment, sales and advertising stakeholder friction, to name a few. At the same time, you have to ask yourself, 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 constant stream of expert indexable content all the time, then it won’t drive enough traffic to your site to build your database of leads. And if you’re not building your lead database, Marketing Automation can’t help you. Automation is useful for nurturing the leads you create and push into the system. If you simply have a stagnant list that is not growing, 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 will ever be; however, he 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 you are a B2B company and you are negotiating high dollar value contracts.

Expecting too much of your marketing staff:

Just because you will have the ability to “automate” things, don’t have the unrealistic expectation that marketing automation will help you overcome the absence of staffing problems. You have to spend 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 devour your content and prospects unless you have the internal resources to keep it running successfully on your behalf.

Lack of calls to action:

Even if you have a lot of great content on your site, you should also get 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 falling short and not giving automation software a chance to do its thing.

Remember, marketing automation software is a tool. For the best results, you need to set the right goals, select the platforms that are best for your business, focus on your buyer’s needs, and create content that is valuable to your audience.