How to Solve the Most Common Obstacles Marketing Automation Success

Marketers often have the task of attracting, developing, and transforming leads into sales opportunities. This task can be quite arduous for marketing departments without adequate team members. Also, this process requires a lot of resources and time. 

Thankfully, marketing automation(MA) has been able to help maximize efficiency in the marketing department. It can be said that marketing automation developed as a result of the world transforming to one that has an overabundance of digital channels, communication styles, and audiences, which makes it difficult for marketers to cope with manually.  

While there are numerous advantages to MA, there are also some obstacles along the way. This article aims to help you identify the most common problems associated with marketing automation and how to solve them to ensure that your marketing efforts are successful. Below are a few of them.

#1 The System Can Be Complicated

Most marketers and SEO learners tend to rely on marketing automation to solve issues like email automation. But what they fail to realize is that this magnificent tool is capable of solving an innumerable number of tasks as well. This becomes a problem for the average marketer when they realize that there are so many tools to make use of, as it becomes much harder to find the right tool for their needs. 

When this is the case, it is best first to ascertain if you require a full-scale marketing automation platform. To answer this question, you will have to take into account your company’s revenue each year. If your company makes $70 million a year, then you place yourself at a disadvantage if you do not make use of the platform. If your revenue is lower than that, you can make use of only the tools that pertain to your current marketing situation.

#2 No Relevant Content

The majority of content schedules created by organizations have been less creative and more industrial in their makeup. While it is great to have content that can be termed to be high quality, it does fail in its brief if it is unable to resonate with the target audience. An excellent way to produce creative content is by employing the service of professionals. This can be done through searching for quality content writers through review websites like The Writing Judge and Pick The Writer.

The typical behavior for most people is to move from one source to another, gaining more information so that they are better placed at making their decision. One thing to remember with early prospects is that they are typically not ready to get a product as they have not discovered a need for it. It should be your aim to not only offer them a product but also offer them a necessity.

#3 Poor Quality of Contact Data

When it comes to marketing, data is a vital aspect that cannot be overemphasized. Think of data as the fertilizer that feeds the flower of marketing automation. If you add low-quality fertilizers, not enough or no fertilizer at all, it is unlikely that the system put in place will yield expected results. 

Incorrect data can ruin any campaign before it even starts. The way to solve this is to create a data strategy. This strategy should include a process to capture, aggregate, and maintain information. Most companies tend to handle event lists, landing pages, and e-commerce forms differently. What this means is that you will have to standardize your data before you can implement marketing automation.

#4 Lack of Employee Skills

There are some technical skill sets required to be able to implement marketing automation correctly. Those individuals that implement and ensure that these platforms are maintained typically have educational or career backgrounds in data architecture, development, and information technology. For the moment, it is quite rare to find individuals that have these technical skills in conjunction with marketing skills, causing a shortage of employees with the required skills.

The way to resolve this would be to either hire marketing technologists that can bridge the gap between marketing and information technology. The second way to solve this might be to hire integrators or agencies that cannot only implement but optimize marketing automation platforms.

#5 A Lack of Lead Conversion

A perfect world would have customers paying for the product just as quickly as they develop an interest. However, this is rarely the case, as most customers that small business owners encounter are those customers that are interested in becoming educated about the product. They want to know more before they buy it. 

When you use MA to deliver, you can nurture this interest in information using numerous channels until these individuals on a quest for information become paying customers. You also have to pay attention to potential leads in other languages. In this case, online translation sources like The Word Point can come in very handy in passing the right content and message across.

#6 No Effective Strategy

It is very easy for marketers to wrongfully presume that marketing automation can be the digital “elixir” for building email campaigns and lead generation. It is believed that marketing automation simply does not require any forethought or strategy. 

This is wrong. It is important to have clear objectives and a strategy that ideally matches your brand and your chosen industry. The first thing you should do is first to understand the pipeline development standards, lead scoring, and, of course, how marketing qualified lead conversions work in your chosen niche. Doing this helps you to develop a strategy that has to have clearly defined customer segments, customer personas, and persona specific content strategies.

#7 Creating More Revenue

Most businesses that adopt marketing automation usually graduate to this platform after using platforms designed for email marketing. With email marketing platforms, these businesses were able to gain a lot of rudimentary insight into things like click rates, open rates, and the effectiveness of a campaign. 

There was no way to find out in-depth information like, how healthy the business’s marketing initiatives are and how they relate to the company’s balance sheet. Marketing automation provides an avenue for businesses to track their prospects from the initial contact to the final purchasing stage, ensuring that they get an accurate overall picture of the effectiveness of their campaign. This helps to determine the rate of effectiveness against the balance sheet, particularly in regards to revenue.

#8 Marketing and Sales Misalignment

The marketing and sales department are two of the most important departments in a business. However, there are times when there is no cohesion because both departments make use of different datasets and projections. 

Technology brought by marketing automation can help to ensure that the goals of both departments are aligned in a manner that benefits the company by ensuring each department can have access to the same tools and datasets, thereby fostering effective collaboration on campaigns.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the common obstacles that could hinder success in marketing automation. Every one of these obstacles has a general theme; it is essential to first take the time to understand your challenges before investing in a solution. 

Other concerns may be that software or process does not effectively get the job done. But the fact remains that some input is needed from you to get a perfect delivery..

While marketing automation can be an excellent solution to numerous problems, it is still a tool. It is still up to you to translate the needs of your brand so that you can be useful.