Marketing Automation, is it hurting your business?
Article
As someone who has built a career in marketing automation, I sometimes like to stop and ask a deep question about its impact on business. I find asking these sorts of questions a great way to reinvigorate my love for what I do, whilst also letting me push my knowledge forward.
Before I take you down into the rabbit hole, I will say, if you’re looking for an answer to the title of this article. You won’t find a cut and dry answer here as every business is different with different needs. By reading this article I want you to think for yourself as to whether your business really needs marketing automation or not.
What is marketing automation?
The most textbook definition of marketing automation is, it’s the process of automating your marketing activities with software.
In a more practical sense, marketing automation is designed to help marketers to automate their communications with prospects through the middle of the prospecting funnel.
You can use marketing automation to handle your repetitive and time-consuming tasks like email marketing, social media and even ad campaign management. Freeing your marketing team to focus on delivering top-notch campaigns, content, frictionless customer on-boarding journeys and strategies. All of which will help your business to nurture your pipeline and start to generate business growth.
The boom in popularity when it comes to marketing automation has led to a massive misconception about what it’s actually good for. A lot of business owners and even some marketers are viewing automation as a solution for slowdowns in marketing outputs – for instance, generating new leads.
This misunderstanding is leaving businesses and marketers with powerful tools to automate middle of the funnel marketing activities, but no real solution for actually filling the funnel in the first place. And when your goal as a marketer is to generate new leads, the most crucial part of the funnel is the top.
This has ultimately led to marketers buying lists of contacts to nurture instead of generating inbound leads or qualifying their outbound ones. Whilst it’s a quick fix, it certainly isn’t a long-term solution to the problem. In fact, I’d argue it creates more issues because it ends up flooding your pipeline with unhealthy contacts, unusable data and ultimately, it inflates your pipeline with contacts who are never going to buy from you. None of which are going to help any business to grow. All of this is why it’s all so important to make sure any contacts who do enter your main pipeline, have been qualified.
This brings me on to the next point:
What causes marketing automation to fail?
I’ve already alluded to one of the biggest causes. And that’s the lack of a proper strategy that creates a solid top of the funnel foundation that will support what marketing automation is good for – the middle of the funnel.
You’ll have an abysmal ROI from marketing automation if you don’t have a steady stream of leads entering your funnel. The ROI gets even worse if your marketers keep chasing after the same people in your data for your market over and over. The more time spent chasing the same, arguably un-interested contacts, the more time your competition has free reign to target new companies in your market and mop-up their sales.
Something else to think about is the volume of leads you’ll need to hit your revenue goals. Does your database already have enough leads in there? You can do a simple reverse calculation of your conversation rates to figure this one out. According to Hubspot, email marketing databases decay by about 22.5% a year. If you’re not filling your database with high-quality leads, how are you going to keep achieving your revenue goals?
The last thing to think about here is, marketing automation is only going to help you to do one of two things:
It’ll help you to manage a large database or/and reduce your time doing repetitive tasks.
If your database and pipelines right now are small, you really need to think about whether or not it makes sense to invest the time and money into automating your marketing.
So let us bring it back to the initial question.
Is marketing automation hurting your business?
As I mentioned at the start of this article, there is no cut and dry answer. However, if a lot of what has been spoken about in this article feels familiar, then maybe it’s time you take a step back and reset your marketing strategy. Focus on how you can generate or engage with new contacts who have a legitimate interest in your product or service.
Before your next call, make sure your target list is actually worth calling
Before investing in a full campaign, it’s worth asking how many prospects in your data are genuinely commercially promising, and how many could easily be culled.
Why outsourcing telemarketing makes sense in tough times
Outsourcing to a specialist agency gets you consistent, quality conversations with the right people, handled by professionals who know how to deliver .
How B2B telemarketing can complement digital campaigns
B2B telemarketing can complement and enhance your digital campaigns, providing real-time feedback and the human touch which is sometimes missing from digital channels.
While traditional B2B marketing campaigns aim to cast their net as wide as possible, account-based marketing aligns sales and marketing efforts to create personalised and targeted campaigns.
Effective and thorough planning is the cornerstone to success in B2B telemarketing – your campaigns must be based on a solid strategic foundation if they’re to deliver real results.
Targeted B2B Telemarketing: Proven Strategies to Create Hot Leads
Your potential clients are busy people – so if you’re going to cold call them, you need to know how to make the most efficient use of the time you have while you’ve got them on the line.
Best practices for briefing B2B appointment setting companies
When planning an appointment setting campaign, a clear brief gives your team the information they need to work successfully and ensures appointments are booked with only the right people.
How does B2B appointment setting increase your close rate?
Taking a closer look at some of the key reasons why so many companies are choosing to outsource their appointment setting campaigns to specialist third-party agencies.
How B2B appointment setting agencies keep your data secure
With concerns around data security on the rise, clients are increasingly seeking reassurances that data will be kept secure and used responsibly. Here’s what you need to know, and why quality data is so important.
When you’re preparing to launch a B2B appointment setting campaign, you need to plan it carefully to ensure success. Here are the main things to consider ahead of your next campaign.
Crucial B2B Appointment Setting Metrics to Measure Now
Appointment Setting is great for boosting sales and revenue, but during a campaign it can be hard to tell if you’re reaching the right people. Here are the key metrics you can to use to determine campaign success.
SYSPRO needed to own and promote its brand directly in the UK, whilst partners would generate leads independently, it was important for SYSPRO to be proactive.
Why automation can’t replace appointment setting in a sales strategy
Although automation has the potential to raise the bar for sales strategy, the human element remains vitally important – here’s why you ignore it at your peril.
Techniques to Guarantee that Calls Never Feel Cold
Making cold calls feel warm, open and mutually beneficial is no easy feat. It calls for specialist knowledge and plenty of experience – something that we happen to know a lot about.
Infographic: 5 Powerful ways to use Post-Event Data
If you’ve invested money to attend an event, you need to do everything to maximise your return, and one of the main ways is to ensure you make the most of your post-event data.
In recent years, telemarketing’s reputation has been tarnished by poor quality techniques. But effective and ethical telemarketing is a great tool for lead generation, inside sales, customer profiling and more.
The Lost Value of Sales Leads – Does a Sales Lead Ever Die?
It’s not uncommon for leads to be discarded for one reason or another. But what if that last discarded lead was a golden opportunity to build a fruitful, longstanding commercial relationship?
Why Telemarketing is More Than ‘Just Making Phone Calls’!
When it comes to the art of sales and marketing, there is an almost gravitational level pull towards the theory that more equals better. Is that really the case?
Getting started with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM works superbly in the B2B space and compared to the scattergun approach of other strategies, ABM’s targeted approach often leads to much higher returns over time.
