Breaking It Down
In short, marketing automation is a tactic that allows organizations to engage people in a highly personalized, scalable fashion.
In long-form, it’s a majorly important tactic you should have in your tool bag that will help you attract prospects through a wide variety of channels, engage those prospects with valuable content to turn them into leads and convert those leads into customers.
Nurturing leads is a vital part of any funnel or sales cycle, so being able to execute at scale without losing a human touch opens a lot of doors for any organization. Not convinced? Take a few minutes to read through our list of common misconceptions that we come across.
1. Is marketing automation just email marketing?
We often run into the scenario where a client team is certain that marketing automation is just another term for email marketing. Granted, lots of email platforms do in fact send emails automatically based on basic triggers, so the confusion is warranted.
The point when marketing automation and email marketing begin to diverge is when we compare platform capabilities and data accessibility.
A solid marketing automation platform (we’re biased as a Hubspot Partner) will allow you to schedule posts for a variety of social channels, connect ad accounts, build landing pages, collect form data, and even engage your site visitors through tools like chatbots. All that and more, including sending emails.
2. Doesn’t the cost outweigh the benefits?
At first, glance, using any marketing automation platform can be overwhelming. So many buttons, so many new terms, so many screens. Plus, most platforms aren’t cheap.
That being said, fully utilizing an automation platform will grant you deep insight into how your organization runs and what tactics are most effective at driving revenue. It’s possible you don’t know or regularly update your key metrics like customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, or maybe even ROI by channel. You’re not alone, most people don’t. Think of the impact if you did know!
3. Do people even respond to automated messages?
We all see plenty of irrelevant content whether it’s in your inbox, on your way to work, or in your newsfeed. Generally speaking, that’s a lazy approach. Pushing out the same content to every person on a list isn’t worthwhile, but figuring out ways to help your prospects through valuable content is. It can have such a positive impact, in fact, that businesses who effectively nurture prospects generally experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.
While it’s crucial to strive for the highest quality of content, it’s just as critical to test content and adapt continuously to always stay on top of your audience’s problems, needs, and aspirations. Testing never stops and no sequence is ever fully optimized.
4. Won’t our messages sound generic? We’re not robots.
Of course you’re not! Any message you send out to people doesn’t have to sound like it, either. Personalization is king and there are tons of opportunities to make messages super relevant to the recipient. Did someone read a key piece of content on your site? It could make sense to follow up with them, highlight a key takeaway from what they read, and encourage them to continue learning.
If you really take the time to get to know your customers, their behaviors, and what level of personalization they respond to, you can provide a wonderful experience from the top all the way through to the bottom of your funnel.
Last Word
Ultimately, marketing automation can be a key way to improve the way you interact with your customers and scale your business profitably (or to profitability). Since not all strategies or executions are created equal, we’re always happy to chat and see if there’s any guidance we can provide.