Marketing Automation (MA) is that piece of technology that allows marketers to reach customers faster and with more measurable results than ever before. Today’s marketing landscape is defined as the golden era for marketers by no mistake.
While MA has enabled marketers to automate the entire marketing process, it doesn’t mean that they can shut off their brains and go on autopilot. When used correctly, a lot can be accomplished with MA and this includes aligning the sales and marketing process. However, if marketers misuse their systems, they can make mistakes on a much broader scale.
Below is a list of things to avoid when it comes to marketing automation, as well as what marketers can do to avoid them.
- Working with the Wrong Segments
We all know what that perfect offer looks like. It is highly personalized, very industry specific, and offers the right solution to the right customer at the right time. But what about the reverse? Have you ever gotten an email that’s personalized and industry specific, but has nothing to do with what you are looking for? Or an email that’s targeting the construction industry and is sent to the physician’s office instead? This happens quite often, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that segmentation is poor, it just means that Marketing didn’t pay attention to the list of customers that the email was originally intended for.
This is a mistake that can be easily avoided. Ensure that you check the final content and intended audience before sending out that asset.
- Misunderstanding your Audience
One of the hardest jobs of Marketing is understanding what it is that customers want. Sending out batch-and-blast emails will never work to uncover their needs. Forgetting to capture their activities and preferences will result in incomplete profiles while misusing content will result in misunderstanding where the customer is in the lifecycle. The better marketers can understand customer needs, the more effective will be the result. By using MA, marketers can work with data and insight to zero in on customers and uncover their needs.
- Delivering Content at the Wrong Time
As marketers, one of our most important goals is to deliver sales-ready leads to the sales team. A big part of that is by working with the already existing leads in your database and executing the right marketing programs to make them more sales-ready. MA is that technology that enables marketers to target customers at the right time through the right channel. By assessing the preferences and activities of each customer, you are better able to achieve success with targeting your audiences when they are most ready to buy, and delivering the right content is a key part of achieving this.
- An incomplete offer
When running a campaign and sending out a series of offers, it becomes important for marketers to deliver on their promise. For instance, let’s say that a customer has downloaded a thought leadership publication from your website. The customer gets a notification in their inbox which follows a link to the asset. Once the customer opens the asset, they get a call-to-action at the bottom of the publication that requires them to click on it and be redirected to another content piece. The trick is to ensure that every customer touch point is delivered with the promise in mind. Every asset should follow a series of sequences as promised to the customer. Failing to deliver a white paper to the customer’s inbox after he or she has filled out the form results in an incomplete offer. Not only are you souring the business relationship, but you’re leaving money on the table as well.
Are you taking full advantage of Marketing Automation to drive customers through the sales cycle or are you making mistakes that can be easily avoided?
