I’m a massive fan and advocate of marketing automation. The benefits are huge and in today’s consumer world it’s a “must have” for all marketers. Nurturing unqualified leads until they become sales-ready, personalised relevant emails at scale, right messages at right time, or accelerating sales velocity and using rich lead analytics to demonstrate precisely how marketing spend leads to incremental revenues…What’s not to like, Right!!!
So why are so many businesses unhappy with the return on investment and why do so many marketing automation integrations fail right of the bat?
Well, I’ve seen multiple failed marketing software implementations because the customer believed that the software enabled a set-it-and-forget-it operation. They totally missed the fact that content, reporting, fine tuning and people are required on a continuous basis to make this stuff work. The marketing technology is the easy part.
In other words, the software didn’t fail. The buyer failed to realize they were buying a tool, not a solution. You can buy the most expensive hammer you want…you’re still going to need a lot of planning, expertise, hard work, money, and materials to build a house.
So here are my picks as to why this happens:
No clear plan for automation
Putting technology in front of or in place of a clearly thought through plan is nothing new in the enterprise software market. It’s been happening with CRM for over two decades, marketing software adopters often lead with technology and then find themselves wondering why their marketing software investment fails to deliver payback. Simply put, marketing automation software is an enabler for delivering on your marketing plan, and if there is no plan it has nothing to enable.
Similarly, most marketing team’s activities are very tactically focussed. They work on campaigns both above the line and direct, social media, writing content organising events etc and the team can be structured around these responsibilities. Whilst it may follow an overall strategy, it can be adhoc and siloed in its day to day execution. Most of the time there really isn’t a documented specific process across the department. So, If you haven’t thought about all your marketing processes then what do you have to automate?
Have very clear objectives for how you want to use marketing automation. Understand your processes around what can be automated or scaled before you set things up. It’s important to take that step back and do some good old fashioned BA work before you jump inside the tool and fire anything off in anger. If you’re not prepared for the full feature-set then you end up with a very expensive email management tool. And that is my next reason
You are not thinking beyond email
Marketing automation fails because its capabilities are not fully used. Most marketing teams end up using their solution as nothing more than glorified email management tool. The marketing software is capable of much more and most customers use about a third of the software’s capability. For example, while marketing software can combine every marketing channel required to connect and engage with prospects which contributes to delivering relevant, contextual and personalised messaging, most customers simply automate manual “batch and blast” emails to every lead irrespective of buyer persona, product under consideration or where that buyer is in their purchase process. This reality clearly stems from my previous point of missing out the full planning stage but it also relates to the next issue, lack of content.
Content Marketing is Hard.
“We didn’t have the right content. Or rather, we had a huge amount of content, but it was in the form of web pages, not packaged up into e-Books and whitepapers and other things that people would swap their contact details for. So, we had a lot of web traffic, but we didn’t really have any way of getting people to give up their anonymity. At least at first”. This is a quote from marketer Joby Blume, who wrote about his marketing automation experience at a former company. It’s a great insight into lack of planning and content
Marketers understand that traditional outbound marketing will not produce the results on its own and can annoy prospects. They also see the value of inbound techniques, such as content marketing, which is about delivering remarkable content in order to educate buyers, and subsequently be considered in those buyers’ purchase processes.
Marketing automation software needs remarkable content to advance leads through a buy cycle funnel of awareness to consideration to purchase. It needs content to nurture customers to stay engaged and loyal. But feeding the content beast is a full time job, creating remarkable content takes a lot of effort and few marketers apply a solid content strategy to their marketing automation programs. To be done right, remarkable content should be created according to buyer personas, channels and life cycle stages at the minimum. Just publishing content is not enough. Content marketing strategy takes in the big picture of marketing — audience, revenue, profit, and brand. Deciding to have a blog and write articles is not a strategy. The unfortunate truth is that while many marketers espouse the virtues of content marketing, very few actually double down on it because it gets too time consuming.
This is the biggest obstacle to successful marketing automation. Most company’s end up over-communicating through email with mediocre or poor content and becoming a nuisance instead of a help.
Think human not software. Put yourself in the shoes of your target customer and work backwards to reverse engineer your campaigns and workflows.
Stop thinking like a marketer and remember what it means to be a consumer first.
This is where just having an implementation vendor can sometimes not be not enough. They will know the software inside out and will talk the talk around creating journeys and the 10x improvement in performance, but you need a marketing automation expert “in-house” when dealing with them to ask the right questions and to get your content strategy working for you. So my final point is this…
Hire an “in house” expert who knows the pitfalls
If any of these common complaints fits your current situation, it may be time to give me a call for an audit and course correction:
- We are utilizing a small fraction of our software’s overall capability.
- We haven’t seen the promised revenue growth after implementation.
- We are frustrated by the amount of time or energy required to make this work.
- We have a lot of data, but suspect we’re not making the best use of it.
- We are using multiple systems and data sets from different programs to measure our marketing success.
- Our email drip campaigns are not producing new leads or referrals.
- Most of our traffic is still coming from paid media.
- All “automated” leads are handed over to a sales rep… where they often amount to nothing.
