Marketing automations look like a brilliant solution to your marketing efforts.
They promise you:
- You’ll be able to cut down on the working hours spent on marketing.
- Get a higher return on investment for your marketing efforts.
It almost sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, in a lot of cases it IS too good to be true. Marketing automation may work for some, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need a marketing team still running your efforts to ensure that everything is going right and that you are actually converting leads into sales.
Here are the three main reasons that your marketing automation ISN’T actually working for your business.
1. The Maintenance
Automation makes it sound like once your system is set up you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Almost as if you could go hands-free. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth of the matter. Marketing automation programs still require a decent amount of daily maintenance to ensure the information is up-to-date and that all leads and efforts are being properly leveraged.
You still need to allocate at least 4 to 8 hours every day to maintain your automation, and the truth of the matter is, once businesses start using marketing automation they stop allocating as many resources to the marketing department.
This happens because they imagine that they automated platform will take care of everything for them now and they no longer need to invest resources into their marketing efforts. When the marketing budget gets slashed and resources dry up, marketing automation fails because it still requires a dedicated team to run it effectively.
2. Major Disconnect from Leads
Good marketing automation systems may find you good leads and even warm them up a bit with initial emails and promotional materials, but from the time initial contact is made by the automation to when the sales team actually gets in touch with potential customer too much time has elapsed.
Even if a lead was interested in what they were seeing, it can take so long for the sales team to actually get their hands on the customer information that by the time they do the lead is no longer warm and making a sale becomes that much harder. If you are going to find leads, you need to be able to strike while the iron is hot because this is when the most sales are going to be made.
You just do yourself a disservice if you let good leads go cold because you are overly reliant on marketing automation systems to keep your leads interested. Once again, marketing automation systems still require a dedicated team and focused marketing effort if they are going to be effective for your business.
3. Poor Messaging
Today’s consumer and potential customer is savvy. They don’t want to be sold necessarily, but they want their lives to be enriched especially by online content and marketing materials. Too often businesses and brands put all of their focus on promoting themselves or their products and they quickly lose the interest of their target audience because no one really likes to see advertisements.
Marketing automation systems simply do not have the marketing expertise to create engaging and thoughtful content that keeps leads, customers, and target audience members engaged and excited about learning more.
The Pitfalls of Automation
- Automation still requires a lot of time and resources to maintain.
- Most businesses do not allocate enough resources to marketing once they have an automated system.
- Marketing and sales efforts are disconnected and disjointed by marketing automation.
- Initial contact to follow up time is too long.
- Brand messaging suffers.
A dedicated marketing team is far more beneficial to your business than a marketing automation system. However, you can use both at the same time just be sure that you do not make the common mistake of cutting the marketing budget or allocating the marketing team fewer resources because you now use a marketing automation system.