How To Identify Marketing Automation Challenges for Your Business

Wondering why your growing organization is not getting enough new leads despite your best marketing efforts? You are not alone! As the competition grows steeply, most startups struggle to reach, attract, and retain customers. Don’t worry, though! A whopping 81% of successful businesses have solved this problem by using marketing automation! 

Marketing automation is the key to achieving high-quality leads at low costs and effectively boosting your business’s profits and growth. But there’s a catch! There are various marketing automation challenges that you must deal with before you can effectively use automation.

To help you start, we have put together this complete marketing automation guide. It will cover all common marketing automation challenges and offer key tricks to overcome them. Sounds good? Let’s get started!

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the process of streamlining, automating, and measuring your marketing tasks and workflows. It uses specialized automation software to increase your marketing efficiency and profits.

Marketing automation involves intelligently automating marketing activities to boost the operational efficiency of your marketing campaign. It works through a simple process of data collection, analysis, and resultant action.

Marketing automation tools can automate the routine parts of the following marketing practices:

• Market and demand analysis
• Lead generation
• Lead segmentation
• Lead nurturing
• Lead scoring
• Strategic cross-selling and upselling
• Account-based marketing
• Customer relation management
• Return on investment measurement
• Marketing decision support
• Campaign analytics and reporting
• Sales force automation
• Advertising and promotion automation

Why Should You go For Marketing Automation?

With its comprehensive scope and low costs, marketing automation is the perfect solution to streamline your marketing efforts and achieve high profits. It makes your marketing operations efficient and information-driven. Moreover, it frees up your employees for more productive work.

Still not convinced that automation is useful? 77% of marketing automation users have reported a rise in conversions after implementing automation! Let’s check out the key benefits of automation in more detail:

• Marketing automation makes your marketing quick and affordable. It does this by automating routine activities and reducing staffing requirements.
• Marketing automation software integrates your sales and marketing efforts using a central database and inter-connected systems.
• They also increase your conversion rate by managing, nurturing, and converting a large number of leads using their centralized automation.
• They generate automated reports of the market and your performance, helping you make well-informed marketing decisions quickly.
• They help you personalize your marketing using their advanced reporting, market segmentation, and customer profiling abilities.

How to Correctly Implement Marketing Automation?

Here are the steps involved in implementing marketing automation:

• Step 1: Plan your marketing campaign and select the right automation software that fits your needs and resources accordingly.
• Step 2: Implement the software by integrating it with your existing data systems, specifying responsibilities, and training your employees to use it correctly.
• Step 3: Measure the software and marketing campaign results to find opportunities for improvement or maintenance of the automation system.
• Step 4: Analyse the data to optimize your marketing automation system.

Marketing Automation Challenges and Their Solutions

Marketing automation boosts your marketing effectiveness manifold by eliminating routine and laborious tasks. But it may be challenging, as applying automation requires an organizational rejig. Here are some common marketing automation challenges and their solutions:

1. Failure to Utilise Automation

Marketing automation software must be plugged into your company’s existing system of data sources, data storage, and software systems. In some cases, you may have to replace old software with automation tools. So, you may have to go through the complex software onboarding process to integrate it into your company’s systems.

The solution-

Opt for a software solution that provides good customer support and free onboarding. Also, remember to consider all involved systems, employee needs, and expenses while choosing the software. Spending a bit extra here will save you a lot of money in the future!

2. Relying on Subpar Data

As we saw, marketing automation is driven by data. So, the quality of outputs from automation software depends greatly on the quality of input data. Therefore, linking data sources incorrectly or using irrelevant data is one of the most common marketing challenges. 

For example, a marketing automation system will send out emails to your list automatically. But you will not get good results if your list has invalid, irrelevant, or outdated emails.

The solution-

You must ensure proper onboarding of the automation tools to avoid such errors. Also, verify that your data collection systems are working correctly and that the data sources are reliable.

3. Automating the Wrong Tasks and Lack of Supervision

Marketing automation systems usually work on templates and pre-defined AI rules. But not every task should be fully automated! You must know where to step in to ensure more personalised and accurate messaging. 

For example, you can automate the posting of content on social media. However, you must respond manually if your follower comments on it, showing interest. After all, software is not always capable of understanding and convincing people in real time! 

The solution-

Remember that marketing automation greatly optimizes and automates your marketing campaigns over time. But it cannot take the role of a great salesperson! 

So, you should not use automation tools for personalized interactions. These interactions include content creation, customer calls, comment replies, and sales emails to leads. However, you can use automation tools to support these activities with their inbuilt features like reminders, schedulers, market research tools, and centralized record keepers.

4. Poor Timing

If your business is very new or limited in scope, you may not need marketing automation. Forcing automation into a simple system can make it more of a liability than an asset. Moreover, small businesses must focus on personalized messaging. This is because they have an impression to build and protect! 

The solution-

Consult all involved employees and analyze your business size, structure, scope, and budget before reaching for your wallet. Here are a few signs that you may not need an automation system yet:

• Your target market is limited to a few companies or a few hundred customers.
• You have very little content to share as of now.
• Your website has very few visits.
• You don’t have an extensive database of unsolicited leads.
• Your leads come from client referrals only.
• You currently don’t have the time or money to implement and maintain an automation system.

Ready to Level up Your Marketing With Automation?

Marketing automation is an effective tool to streamline, automate, and measure your marketing activities. However, we saw that there are various marketing automation challenges that you may face.

So, make sure to use the tips in this blog to understand, predict, and resolve them at the earliest. Most importantly, you must focus primarily on selecting the marketing automation platform that perfectly fits your needs and resources. This is critical because the wrong system will bring up several marketing automation challenges repeatedly.

Some options to check out are HubSpot Marketing Hub, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, and Omnisend. Now, go ahead and implement the most suitable automation software. And don’t forget to tell us how it works for you in the comments!