In a world with advancing technology, marketing automation has taken over most of our efforts. Automation evokes a wide variety of emotions in people, such as curiosity, confusion and even fear.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a software used by marketers for automating repetitive tasks and for integrating many marketing channels like email, social media, websites and more.
Marketing automation is an essential part of your marketing puzzle. You must constantly reshape and analyze your strategy for discovering what is working and what isn’t to be successful!
Today, we can see a lot of misinformation and myths regarding marketing held by business owners and marketers, which are misleading many regarding automation!
Marketing automation has many truths and lies, but how do we segregate the two when there are too many myths surrounding it? Although marketing automation is picking up the pace and becoming one of the most reliable tools in today’s marketing world, there are still some issues and problems associated with it.
Marketing automation can be used significantly for acquiring customers through your website, social channels and emails, all while converting existing ones! It can be applied for:
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Analytics and metrics
- Management activities
- Rewards programs
5 myths about marketing automation (and why they’re wrong)
Marketing automation can help you nurture your leads in an ongoing process by synching your strategy throughout your efforts. Many businesses know about marketing automation, yet refuse to get involved due to certain misconceptions spread!
1. Marketing automation is highly complex
Before we start anything, we usually tend to think of it to be very complicated or that it can be too difficult, but once we get along, it will become a cakewalk for you!
It might have been correct that marketing automation is too complicated at one point in time, but those days are gone! Now, marketing automation software is highly user-friendly, and it is explicitly designed to streamline and ease the process.
A perfectly automated marketing system should work seamlessly with a company’s existing CRM. Plus, there are many marketing tools, like Outgrow, that allow you to easily implement applets and widgets.
2. Marketing automation is too costly and time-consuming
If you want quality in anything, we got to pay a great deal of money! If you are looking for something cheap, you will get results which are also of low quality. So, whatever is too expensive or not is just a subjective matter!
The cost linked with automated marketing, whether it is in terms of time or money, changes depending on the companies requirements and by the size of its contact lists.
A business ought to determine the value of developing the frequency of meaningful interactions with potential or existent customers! Tools like Marketo or Hubspot may cost you about $1000 per month for enterprise-level marketing. The cost, as mentioned earlier, varies according to requirements!
3. Marketing automation is not essential for my marketing campaign
Every business has its own set of needs. However, if a company is looking to engage in email marketing or mass communication of any sort, then it is highly advisable to adopt marketing automation. Every industry speaks its own language, and so it can be challenging to reach a diversified clientele with a single set of emails.
Marketing automation aids businesses to combine their clients by industry, geolocation, and many more certain similarities! This way, marketing campaigns, and various communications can be adjusted towards the client’s unique needs!
An added element of personalization can significantly decrease the chances of clients discarding an email promptly as junk or spam. A lot of them are bombarded daily by spam in their daily business cycle. If you can increase the probability of a client opening your email and actually click on your links, how does it not become necessary?
4. Marketing automation is only for emails
Email marketing was a notable breakthrough marketing strategy at one point. It gave the companies a good chance of marketing themselves directly to customers instead of purchasing ads on television, magazines, or radio!
A lot of business owners started to think of marketing automation to be only relevant for email marketing. Now, that is a myth that can mislead many!
Marketing automation, of course, is a vital factor when it comes to email marketing, but there are many other channels connected with marketing automation. It can be utilized for website tracking, campaign optimization, behavior analytics, analysis of results through testing and google analytics set up on your site, and many more!
If you can understand the significance of marketing automation in other channels by recognizing how it can be used for making your processes quicker and more straightforward, and its ability to guide a large number of leads through the conversion process, you are well on your way to saving a lot of your business time and money!
5. Marketing automation is impersonal
You can develop personalized messages for each contact based on their behavior or data. It can get impersonal if you don’t plan, design, or execute properly. With automated tools, you will be able to tailor the content of your campaign based on your customers’ database.
A personalized campaign can engage customers more effectively, and this will lead to more open rates and click-through rates.
Conclusion
If done correctly, marketing automation can lead to an increase in revenue by delivering the right message at the right time to the right person and hence converting prospects into customers!
When you disarm the myths and misconceptions, it is pretty evident that marketing automation is great for your business! In simple words, Marketing automation works as a supplement to your sales strategy that allows you to strategize your path ahead!
Your main aim must be to manage and scale your business profitably and successfully! One of the hurdles associated with the technology is faulty assumptions and lack of understanding!
If you can leave all the misconceptions and myths behind, marketing automation is as approachable and simple as anything!
Faiz Varghese is a social media marketer at TechWyse, and is a knowledge-craving techy. He loves to write quality content on the internet and has a passion for his job.
