Marketing Automation can bring incredible results for almost any business. The technologies and software platforms now available reveal an extraordinary level of detail about your target market, and automate many of the more repetitive marketing tasks. To get the most from Marketing Automation, many businesses turn to specialist companies to manage the process for them, freeing up time and resources to get on with the work at hand.
As a Marketing Automation company ourselves, we obviously want to encourage this! However, there are some pitfalls of working with the wrong kind of Marketing Automation Company. These are the three shortcomings that we feel would be most damaging to your marketing efforts:
1) Lack Of Up-To-Date Knowledge
Marketing Automation is an emerging field. Five years ago it wasn’t even a term, and it is only in the last 18 months to two years that proven techniques have emerged, backed up by solid and repeatable results. Unfortunately, many of the companies that profess to offer Marketing Automation do not have up-to-date digital marketing knowledge. Many are old SEO companies who offer the same tired and unsuccessful solutions under a different name. When approaching a potential marketing partner with questions, make sure you get a good understanding of the level of their expertise, and what platforms they use.
2) Generic, Impersonal Content
The very soul of marketing is the ability to communicate with a prospect on a personal level; to address their concerns and their goals. In other words, the more customised your content, the more successful it will be. Some Marketing Automation companies will throw themselves into a campaign without a full understanding of your business and your target market.
This is doomed to failure, as the content will come across as generic and impersonal. At best, you will see a reduced response rate, and at worst you could end up alienating potential customers. Avoid this happening by getting detailed information from a marketing partner about their on boarding process. It should involve detailed consultancy at the beginning, so that your partner company can really get under the skin of your business and address the needs of your customers.
3) Inadequate Data Management
Marketing Automation does not involve cold calling. It works to cultivate leads that come through naturally via your website and social media channels. It may be that you already have a contact database that can form the core of your Marketing Automation campaign, or you may just have a handful of contacts. Unfortunately, a prospect list does not appear overnight. It takes time to entice website visitors to give you their contact details through a carefully managed content campaign.
Some so-called Marketing Automation companies will try to shortcut this process by using your money to bulk purchase contact data and use this to send out emails. You need to be very, very careful with this, as consent requirements for email marketing have become extremely tight. The last thing you want when trying to get new customers is for your content to come across as spam. When talking to a Marketing Automation company, find out what strategies they plan to use to organically build up your contact database, and how they plan to contact them.
Working with a Marketing Automation company is a partnership. You entrust the business with speaking on your behalf to your target market. It is therefore important that you establish a creative two-way dialogue from the very beginning; that you know how they operate and they understand you. The way to avoid a bad relationship is to ask plenty of questions and do your research carefully.
