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Inbound Marketing Blog

5 Myths About Marketing Automation and Why They’re False

Posted by Stacie Chalmers on 22-Jun-2017 07:02:00

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According to emailmonday, 49% of companies currently use marketing automation. Yet despite its growth in popularity, there are a few myths floating around out there giving marketing automation a bad name that it definitely doesn’t deserve. Maybe you’ve heard that marketing automation is just another form of spam, or perhaps you’ve heard it’s just way too difficult to manage. While there are of course cons to every kind of new technology, fundamentally, marketing automation is an incredibly useful tool for your business. In this blog, we’re going to dispel 5 myths about marketing automation and why they are false.

1. It’s only for marketers

Marketing automation, despite having the word ‘marketing’ right there in its name, it’s not just for marketers. Marketing automation is for anyone and everyone whose role relates to the buyer’s journey – from a customer’s first interaction to the close of a sale (and even beyond that). Basically, it’s for both marketers and salespeople. How can salespeople use marketing automation? Well, marketing automation allows salespeople to see what potential buyers are clicking, downloading, watching and reading. This in turns allows salespeople to personalise the sales conversations. Furthermore, salespeople can use marketing automation to report on sales campaigns, receive real-time alerts when hot leads are engaging with an email or website, as well as return cold leads to the marketing team for more nurturing. Marketing automation is most effective when the sales and marketing teams work together.

2. It’s just a new and improved name for traditional email marketing

While email marketing is a large part of marketing automation, it’s not the only feature. While email service providers allow marketers to send out personalised emails to their contacts and receive insight into the success of the campaign, marketing automation takes this feature and goes above and beyond. How? Here’s an example. John is looking for a new travel backpack, so turns to Google to find the best one for his needs. He comes across your travel gear website and a pop-up comes up asking if he’d like to download your free e-book about 2017’s essential travel gear. He’s interested, so he fills in his details and you now have his contact details. John stays on your website browsing different gear for a while before clicking off. If we’re thinking about traditional email marketing, you’d have no idea what John is doing on your website. However, with marketing automation, you now have the ability to see exactly what John is reading and what pages on your website he’s visiting. Based on this information, you can automatically add John to a targeted email list based on the products he’s been searching. And really, this is just the basics of what marketing automation is capable of. Next time someone tells you it’s only a fancy name for email marketing, you can tell them what’s what!

3. You need a big marketing team to make it worthwhile 

The short answer? No, you don’t. No matter what the size of your marketing team is, marketing automation can benefit you. Of course, bigger and more complex campaigns are easier done with a bigger team, but the same is true even if you’re not using marketing automation. Marketing automation is great at streamlining the small yet time-consuming tasks like lead generation, so really you’re opening up more free time in your marketing team’s schedule to take on bigger and bolder campaigns. 

4. Only lazy marketers use it 

Some people have this crazy idea that marketing automation is just a lazy team’s way of creating content and email campaigns. While yes, marketing automation makes content publishing and campaigns easier to create and manage, what it doesn’t do is create good content. Furthermore, it is possible to have bad quality marketing automation. You need a strong marketing team who works hard to make sure your marketing automation beneficial and helpful to your buyers.

Many people who have never used marketing automation think you just auto-schedule your content and then sit back and watch the sales come in. This is false because in reality, while marketing automation is an amazing tool, it’s only a small part of the overall strategy. Marketers and sales people still need to be monitoring the content that’s pushed across their channels. If you think about it like this: marketing automation is step one, but step two, three, four and so on still needs to be completed by the marketing team.

5. It’s just another form of spam

Spam by definition is called spam because of its irrelevancy to a person, not because it popped into your inbox without warning. Marketing automation is useful because you can send out information and content to potential buyers based on who they are, their likes and dislikes, their needs and how they found out about your business. Marketing automation is a great way for you to truly engage with potential buyers, while at the same time guiding them through the sales funnel.

Learn about matching content with your buyer's journey.

 

There you have it: 5 myths about marketing automation – demystified! You’ve probably heard a few more myths doing the rounds but we think these are some of the most common, and perhaps some of the biggest deterrents for people considering marketing automation.

 

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Topics: Marketing Automation

 

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