Businesses are always seeking to streamline their processes wherever possible, and it’s no surprise that marketing automation software is a particularly popular way to achieve this. This technology allows brands to automate marketing activities and workflows to increase leads and revenue across websites, email, apps, and social media. Its value hasn’t gone unnoticed either, which explains why over half of companies are currently using marketing automation. Meanwhile, 58% of those that aren’t using this software are planning to adopt it in the future.
There are countless marketing automation tools to choose from, but simply having the software doesn’t automatically set you up for instant success. In fact, if you don’t know how to use it correctly, you’ll miss out on all the key benefits. Worse still, poor utilization could disrupt your business, ruin a campaign, or even damage your company’s reputation. To stop you from making some potentially costly mistakes, here are three common marketing automation missteps to bear in mind.
Not integrating it with existing technology
To really make the most of your marketing automation software, you need to know what makes your customers tick, so you can adapt your marketing strategy to suit their wants, needs, and habits. However, it will be very hard to do this without integrating your marketing automation tools with the other technology you rely on.
Though a primary use of marketing automation software is managing email marketing, it also has the potential to manage reviews, business analytics, referrals and more. Therefore, in order to plan the most effective strategy possible, the software requires access to all the data collected from other sources as well. Your customer relationship management (CRM) system, which stores information regarding how a company encourages conversion and customer retention, is one tool that could help you. This is particularly true if you use CRM software like SAP C/4HANA, which includes a dedicated cloud that allows you to integrate all marketing initiatives and track conversion rates through analytics. Implementing this unified approach to data provides a clear overview of your market so you can use targeted messaging to create a personalized customer experience.
Automating faulty processes
Marketing automation tools are great for speeding up already-efficient processes, but not so good if there are issues with the systems you currently have in place. Combining marketing automation with faulty processes could mean inadvertently spamming your customers, for instance. If you don’t have an optimized strategy for creating and scheduling your marketing campaigns, you could lose control and end up automatically sending too many emails in a short space of time. The lost productivity and technical expenses resulting from spam emails are estimated to cost global businesses $257 billion a year, while customers are also likely to unsubscribe if this starts to annoy them.
First, define your content marketing process, which can generally be split into five stages: plan, create, publish, distribute, and analyze. You’ll need to consider how the content will tie your brand and target audience together, how it relates to particular themes and topics, and how it is relevant to—and coordinates with—each potential client’s place in the buyer’s journey. Once you’ve settled on a series of steps that work for your business, look at each one carefully to see where automation can improve overall efficiency.
Focussing on the wrong data
Analyzing data is crucial in uncovering whether your marketing automation software is making a difference to results and having a wider impact. However, it’s easy to get carried away with the positive figures without focussing of the rest of the information available to you. For example, though it’s encouraging to see a high open rate for your emails, you can’t assume that this means readers will then take action. If you really want to know if your efforts are paying off, you need to examine all the data thoroughly to see the bigger picture.
Another potential mistake is prioritizing your marketing analytics over your sales data. Though both divisions are vital for mutual success, only 35% of salespeople believe their company’s marketing team knows what they need. This is why it’s recommended that you involve your sales team in important marketing automation decisions. Cooperation between the two departments means that your marketing automation tools are focused on collecting the data most likely to result in sales leads.
