So you’ve purchased a shiny new marketing automation platform. Now it’s time to sit back and watch the leads roll in, right?
Not exactly.
B2B marketers often view marketing automation as the solution to all their lead generation problems. As a way to fill the gaps on their overstretched marketing team. Or as a set-it-and-forget-it type of fix.
Then they’re bewildered when they don’t see the results they expected after a few months.
What goes wrong?
When it comes marketing automation, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there. As an integrated marketing agency, we’ve heard most of them. But falling for them will cost you more than just the price of the tool.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest marketing automation mistakes B2B marketers make and explore the lessons that can be learned from them.
Lesson 1: Your marketing automation platform isn’t a glorified email marketing tool
Prior to working with us, many of our customers used their marketing automation platforms to send email. And only email.
But using your platform solely as an email tool won’t move your company forward.
To get the most out of your investment, pop the hood and explore all of the different features and functionality your tool offers.
For example, many marketing automation platforms can be used for:
Landing pages
Automation enables you to speed up landing page creation, save site visitor information, send personalized emails to contacts and more. You don’t have to worry about copying over information or hitting send on every email. And then you can put more focus into crafting landing pages that stand out to potential customers.
Lead scoring
There’s no need to spend time assessing and scoring leads when you can automate the process. When you develop a comprehensive lead scoring model and let your marketing automation platform execute it, you gain a better understanding of quality leads—without having to deal with giant spreadsheets or human error.
Keyword research
Keyword research is critical to getting more people to your site. But it can be a tedious and in-depth process. Whether it’s Google Search Console, Semrush or another tool, these marketing platforms can give you a complete rundown of relevant keywords you want to rank for.
Nurturing workflows
Personalization is the name of the game here. Identifying relevant content for every stage along the buyer journey and putting that structure into your marketing automation platform helps you communicate the right message at the right time.
On-page SEO
SEO involves monitoring site rankings, conducting technical fixes and optimizing content and linking, all things marketing automation can handle—while you analyze metrics and identify any changes that need to be made.
Lesson 2: You still need to know who to reach out to and how to reach them
If you’ve invested in a marketing automation platform, an important question to ask yourself is, “How am I creating awareness about my company or offering? Am I supporting top-of-funnel growth?”
Marketing automation is a fantastic tool to help you further qualify and nurture leads. But to do that, you must have leads to qualify and nurture.
It’s critical to identify who your buyer personas are, the types of content you need to create, how you will attract visitors to your website and what you need to convert those visitors into leads.
And that’s where inbound marketing strategy comes into play.
Lesson 3: Automating bad processes doesn’t make your marketing any more effective
Marketing automation isn’t a magic trick. Even the best marketing automation platform in the world won’t make up for a lack of internal marketing expertise.
If you skimp out on marketing planning and strategy, you won’t get the results you want – it’s that simple.
Establishing solid, repeatable processes with your sales and marketing teams will save you time and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Lesson 4: Successful marketing automation relies on sales and marketing alignment
Marketing automation doesn’t just make marketing’s job more efficient; it also makes the sales team more effective by improving the velocity at which potential buyers move down the sales funnel.
For this to happen, however, your sales and marketing teams can’t be siloed. They must have a shared understanding of their specific roles in the process, the buyer journey and the ideal customer profiles.
They also need to communicate about how customers are engaging. When sales provides marketing feedback on the language prospects are using and are interested in, marketing teams can use that to inform how they approach creating emails, landing pages and other relevant collateral.
Which, in turn, gives sales better resources to share with their prospects and bring them closer to a sale.
When sales and marketing make it a point to collaborate, they help each other achieve their common goal: driving more sales and revenue.
The key takeaways
While a marketing automation platform can help kickstart your company’s marketing into overdrive, it’s equally as important to have the right people and processes in place.
The end goal of your new platform shouldn’t be a successful implementation. Instead, it should be for your marketing team to use this technology to better enable your sales team.