Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

Part VI. The Part of Tens

In this part …

· Discover the top ten blogs that you should read to keep you up to date on the latest marketing trends.

· Learn the top ten mistakes most people make when implementing marketing automation. Do NOT to do these things.

Chapter 16. The Top Ten Marketing Automation Mistakes

In This Chapter

Recognizing common mistakes

Avoiding common mistakes

Staying out of big messes

I’ve worked with hundreds of companies using marketing automation, and some have it down. Others find themselves in a giant mess. This chapter shows you the biggest mistakes companies make with marketing automation.

Biting Off Too Much

This book contains hundreds of pages about marketing automation, and this book is just a beginning. Remember this idea when you’re planning your marketing automation strategies. I suggest implementing marketing automation in steps, over a period of time. You’re more likely to know what you want when you do get around to building it if you space your efforts out.

Also, make sure that you don’t promise too much to too many people in your company. Keeping to exact promises can be tricky. You want to be able to show the maximum value that marketing automation can provide to help you make your case for getting the tool. But be careful: If you promise giant gains in every department, you have to deliver. Instead of making promises, set timelines and goals for the various departments, and let people know when you expect to get to their section so that you can manage expectations.

Skimping on Content Creation

Content is the lifeblood of online marketing. Marketing automation allows you to speed up how fast you can create and execute campaigns. The faster you can create and execute, the more content you need to create. Failing to understand this fact will limit the value you can derive from your tool. Here are a few tips to help keep you cranking out the content you need:

· Reinvest time. Simply look at the time you used to spend qualifying leads or importing and exporting CSV files before marketing automation. Take the time you save automating manual tasks and use it all for content creation.

· Never miss a chance for content. Creating content is something to keep in the back of your mind at all times. Keep a camera and notebook with you always. Take pictures to use in your blogs, and use your notebook to record quotes and interviews with people you meet. Consider anything as possible content as long as it can be made into something helpful to your audience.

· Budget for your content. Most companies don’t do a good job at budgeting for content. Consider having a slice of your budget set aside for creating content. You might include sending people to tradeshows to do interviews, or paying for coffee at your local coffee shop for interviews. Regardless, have a budget — and use it.

Having Only One Nurturing Campaign

Nurturing is a skill that requires full understanding of the technique to maximize its effectiveness. Like email, nurturing is something you need to work at over time, and you need to learn new things all the time. Techniques change frequently, with new tricks to try popping up all the time. However, the biggest way to fail with marketing is simply in not thinking small enough about nurturing. Think very small. A nurturing campaign should be focused on reaching only a single goal. The smaller you think about these goals, the better your nurturing campaigns will be.

The trick is something Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer wrote about in a 2011 article for the Harvard Business Review blog. Years of research helped them prove that constraint is good for creativity. The more constraint you give yourself, the better targeted your content will be, and the better your program will be. Creativity is the key that sets your campaign apart from others. Thinking that you can just automate the emails you already have is the fastest way to fail. Remember, it’s a one-to-one medium. If your nurturing campaigns are natural, you will increase the odds of engagement. Keep in mind that a consumer makes a judgment call on your email in 1/20th of a second. So try to put a constraint on your nurturing programs to have a very specific goal, and you’ll notice that your emails will be more specific and optimized for that goal and will generally help you reach your goal better than would a campaign with a less refined goal.

Underestimating the Impact of Social Media

Social media changed the way we engage with everything. If you’re mad because your cable box is broken, you can tweet and get your cable box fixed faster. When the tsunami hit in 2011, it was first reported on Twitter by citizens of the towns using their cell phones. This was amazing because real-time news was being provided by citizens. Typical news channels usually have a lag between an event like this and the report. Social media is now a huge part of our communications, which means that it’s a huge part of how people engage — and how they engage with you, too.

Failing to account for social media in your marketing automation mix leads to failure to correctly score your leads, and you’ll fail to use a great medium to generate more leads.

Remember, it’s all about the URL. The URL is what a person clicks to access your content, and any marketing automation can track link clicks to allow for scoring, nurturing, and other automations. The buyer’s journey isn’t just for email. Consider having special tweets sent out and tailored to specific stages in the buyer’s journey. Social media is one of your best places to distribute content. It also makes sharing your content very easy for your consumers.

Looking at the Wrong Numbers

Marketing automation tells you how your marketing impacts your organization, but only if you know what you’re looking at. Don’t think you can just look at ROI for everything. This doesn’t work. Consider looking at lots of different reports to determine different kinds of information. The following reports are the ones you should focus on most:

· Velocity: This tells you how fast leads are moving through your pipeline. Use the velocity of leads moving through your buyers’ stages to see whether your marketing is helping to prove your marketing value. If you can prove that your marketing is generating more leads in less time,you can show a tremendous value. For example, if you have a 45-day buyer’s journey, and through your marketing efforts you shorten that by five days, you are actually generating another full month-and-a-half’s worth of revenue each year. You can show this fact only if you are looking at the velocity of the leads.

· Efficiency: Look at how many leads are created compared to how many are created to closed deals. These numbers tell you whether you’re creating the right kind of leads. Improve your efficiency in this area and you’ll save money and generate better leads.

· ROI: Look at ROI on lead sources such as keywords or paid advertisements. It’s impossible to look at the ROI of a lead-nurturing campaign, so make sure that you’re not trying to figure that out.

Involving Sales Too Late

Because marketing automation impacts many other departments in an organization, involving those departments at the correct times is key to using marketing automation successfully. The sales team is easily the second most impacted department when implementing marketing automation. Most companies run into issues such as the following when they do not engage the sales team early enough:

· Missing key technology needs: If you fail to involve sales early enough, you find out very quickly that you bought the wrong tool. Many sales processes are highly customized, and your marketing automation tool must integrate correctly. If your tool doesn’t support the way your CRM system is used, it will not work.

· Not using the best copy: If you fail to ask the sales team which of the team’s emails are working with leads, you spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. Just ask them and save that time. Remember: The sales team members are the pros at one-to-one emails, so utilize them as such.

· Pushback on new tools: If you fail to get the sales team to buy in to the idea early, you face massive pushback on a “new tool.” Salespeople don’t like change, and for good reason. They are process based, and changing their process can wreak a lot of havoc for them. Mitigate this attitude by getting them to buy in to the ideas early on, and then to the tool later on.

Overbuying

Overbuying is an issue I see more than I like to admit. Many marketing automation vendors are out there these days. Some do a lot more than others, and some are ranked really well; others are not. A ranking should not matter to you as much as whether the tool actually works for you.

Many tools have awesome features. However, they may not be on your core list of features. A wonderful feature that’s not on your core list is okay if it helps you meet your goal, and maybe you just weren’t aware of that feature before. Be careful, though. Ask yourself whether you will have time to dig into using the feature over the next 12 months. If the answer is no, it’s likely that other tools will have that same feature in a short period of time, so a tool you buy today without that feature is likely to have it one day. Be careful of overbuying for the sake of a single feature; you probably won’t be able to use it for a while, especially if you are new to marketing automation.

Also think about how you will use any whizz-bang features. Be honest with yourself: Are you really at that level of complexity? If you’re new to marketing automation, you won’t be a pro for a few years, and many of those whizz-bang features are made for the pros.

Understand everything involved with a feature. Many features are awesome but take a lot of time to set up. If you’re strapped for time, you might not be able to use many of the features, so buying a tool for them is just a waste.

Forgetting to Audit

I used to have a boss who would say, “If it’s not measured, it can’t be improved.” I’m sure this is a saying from the great business writer Peter Druker, and it is 100 percent true. If you are not tracking your progress, you cannot know whether you are improving. I suggest auditing. If you don’t audit, you wind up with two main problems:

· Proving value: You’ll likely need to prove the value of a tool. Even if you’ve got great numbers now, think about two years down the road when you’ve used up all your massive gains. You’re likely to have to talk about small increases year over year. Auditing shows your progress and helps you prove your value.

· Knowing whether you’re improving: This is simple. Keep track so that you can get better. You can’t argue with that.

Underestimating the Power of a Website

Many companies look at marketing automation as a single way to solve all their problems. These problems may begin with not having a marketing department, not having a content strategy, or not having a good website. All these elements are must-haves to be successful with marketing. Marketing automation just makes marketing easier and opens new doors. If you’re looking at getting a new website, you should look at marketing automation at the same time.

If you don’t have a website, you’ll never get the value out of marketing automation. One of the main benefits of marketing automation is lead tracking. If you don’t have a place to track leads, the tool has no value for you.

Most marketing automation tools can build forms, landing pages, and other website features. If you build a new website without knowing how to use your marketing automation tool, you’ll probably have to pay someone to build forms and try to tie them into your CRM system for you. These tasks are all done out of the box with a marketing automation tool. So, save yourself the trouble and money and do them together. Have your website administrator sit in on a demo so that the administrator knows what you’re planning to do.

Undertraining Sales Teams

You need to train sales teams on the tool they will be using, just as you need to get them to buy in to its value early. If you give a salesperson a lead and show that salesperson the last web page the lead visited, the salesperson is likely to call the prospect and say, “I know you looked at my pricing page.” The prospect is likely to find this call creepy and hang up the phone.

Make sure that you train your sales team so that salespeople know how to use the tool they have, understand the data they are being passed, and know how to approach a lead they have intelligence on.