Marketers started to use automation in their marketing role these days. Whether automation is a new or standard practice in your organization, there are common traps that marketers often fall into. Thus in this post, we will discuss some of the common mistakes that marketers should avoid.
(1) Dirty data
Dirty data can cost brands, not only money but also time, as marketers will take action based on those inaccurate data. Dirty data includes duplicate records, naming inconsistencies, outdated contact information, incorrect distribution and so on. Dirty data will lead to low engagement numbers, damage to your IP reputation, high email marketing costs, and loss of leads. To ensure your automation works properly and worth your effort, it is important to ensure you work with clean data.
(2) Picked the wrong automation tool
Based on research, 45.9% of marketers who don’t rely on marketing automation say that the biggest obstacle they faced is that they couldn’t find a platform that is capable of what they need. In addition, 59% of B2B professionals say that they don’t feel themselves utilizing marketing automation tools to their fullest potential. So, picking up the right marketing automation tool is essential. Some top features to look for in marketing automation software include user-friendly interface, advanced analytics and reporting, knowledge base and customer support tools, and integrations.
(3) Marketing and sales team aren’t aligned
Marketing is a function designed to support sales, product and other business sectors. It is essential for your marketing team to bring in all necessary parties to build workflows that align with teams. This is particularly important with marketing and sales teams who work hand-in-hand to turn leads into customers. Marketing automation software can enable sales teams to focus on converting leads instead of boring tasks.
(4) Team is not trained for the automation
Automation tools are powerful but worthless if your team doesn’t know how to use it. Holding training sessions will ensure that key stakeholders know your tool’s capabilities, are aware of current workflows and understand the process to create a new task. To train your team effectively, you can curate your training to the team, invite service providers to participate with the training, or hold a multi-step training process.
(5) Only leverage one type of automation strategy
It is common to see that marketers start using marketing automation, get familiar with one set of tasks, and then only focus on that. This is how you miss out on opportunities to improve your brand. There are probably a lot of little tasks during your work that don’t seem time consuming individually. However, if you add up all the time you spent, you end up with a large chunk of your day spent on things that probably can be automated. Therefore, poke around marketing automation to see which processes you can make more efficient.
Conclusion
Although automation might not always be correct, it can help to save a large chunk of time and manpower for your organization. What you need is only having a minimum amount of manpower to take care of the automation software. Therefore utilize marketing automation in your marketing strategy. And remember to be aware of these mistakes to improve your efficiency of marketing automation strategy.
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