Marketing automation has the potential to take your business to the next level. Used correctly, automation can streamline processes and help productivity skyrocket. It’s undeniable that marketing has officially entered the era of automation.
But as with most tools that have the potential to be invaluable, there are ineffective and improper ways to use and think about marketing automation. Automation is a nuanced practice, but if you stay aware of how it can be misused, you’ll avoid the most common marketing automation mistakes, allowing you to make the most of this game-changing tool.
What are three 3 most common marketing automation mistakes?
1. Making automation about the technology and features, not about the solution and humans
It’s true that the technology of marketing automation is quite impressive. Time-consuming tasks, from emails to segmentation, are essentially done for you. But it’s easy to get lost in the tech features and forget WHY automation is implemented in the first place.
Marketing automation is a solution with the main goal of giving back time and energy to an entire team. When employees don’t have to send tedious emails or manually enact a workflow, they can accomplish high-priority tasks that contribute to the profitability, productivity, and scalability of their business.
When dealing with automation, it’s important to remember who it’s for: the people who benefit from it.
2. Wanting everything out of automation
Automation is crucial nowadays, but it’s not AI that will run a business for you. Sometimes, leaders mistakenly believe that the implementation of automation means every project can massively scale because everything is done for them.
This danger is called scope creep. Oftentimes, as a project progresses, its scope grows, sometimes to a point that’s impossible to achieve. If misused, automation can contribute to scope creep.
When implementing automation, it’s crucial to remember that it, like all technologies, has its limits and should not encourage impossible goals. Automation will help your team; it won’t replace them.
3. Thinking of automation as a cost
In this age of marketing, automation is not simply a cost. It’s a necessity. If you want to scale your business and keep up with competitors, then manually executing processes, both small and large, won’t work. Automation, like marketing itself, is an investment.
With automation taking care of time-consuming marketing tasks, your team can focus their efforts on more significant opportunities. Marketing can spend the time nurturing genuine leads, and sales can work those leads and close more deals. Effectively, the time and money saved by automation for your entire business are well worth the investment.
Conclusion
The speed at which marketing moves means that a marketing team can’t do it all, or rather, they shouldn’t. Automation systematizes and automates important marketing and demand generation processes for a business so you can say goodbye to manual tedious tasks.
But it’s easy to think of or use automation in the wrong way. By seeing it as a technological cost that can do absolutely everything, you might miss what automation can actually do for your business: help scale and drive revenue.
A marketing automation agency can help avoid those common mistakes by implementing and managing automation so that it’s doing everything it’s supposed to do, and nothing it isn’t.
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