In today’s marketplace, there is a significant move towards marketing automation software to help businesses manage their campaigns. These can offer great benefits such as combining many marketing tasks in one platform, more detailed reports, and minute-by-minute result analysis.
However, there are those who have become frustrated as well. It can make for an unhappy experience, where different departments blame each other, and at some point, they may switch off their software and go back to more traditional methods of running and monitoring their marketing. For some, this might seem like a good idea, but it does remove the excellent benefits that marketing automation offers.
What makes users frustrated with their marketing automation software? There are numerous reasons why and here are some of the major ones:
1. The Unknowns
One of the greatest challenges is in knowing the right information for the market. Informed decisions need to be made with the maximum amount of information at hand. The problem is that sometimes you won’t know there is information available. It can create a shroud over activities and slow down your response when you could take advantage of certain environmental conditions.
2. The Tools and the User
Marketing automation is not the key to success; it is a stepping stone to success. You can’t expect the software to generate sales suddenly; instead, you should rely upon your sales team. What marketing software does allow you to do is to refine your processes, so you know when a potential customer is ready to speak to a representative and what they are interested in. This information is vital for your pitch and allows you to increase your conversion rate.
3. Going Off Track
Marketing automation does not tell you when you’ve gone off track. It shows you the signs and symptoms that something is wrong, but it will not provide a flashing warning light. Instead, you should rely on a combination of your instincts and the data being provided to you from the marketing software in determining what has gone wrong and why.
4. Attracting the Audience
Marketing automation is not there to attract the audience. Instead, this has to be done via great content, and this has to be produced by you. Many elements make up great content, and your business needs to look at the best practices and implement them.
Marketing automation is more about the generation of data based on the people that visit and interact on your website.
5. Overlooking Important Data
You need to know what data is relevant when it comes to analyzing results on marketing software. Not seeing important data can affect your decision making and cause you to lose out on critical decisions.
What to Do
There are several actions to help you achieve a more positive experience from your marketing automation. This includes:
Refine Your Data – Ensure that you know what information you are using, monitoring, etc. and whether this information is relevant to your business. Consult with your sales team and check that they find the information useful.
Train – Don’t be stuck with software that you don’t know how to use. Take the time and thoroughly test and train yourself so that you know everything about the software. Then train your staff, so they also know everything about it too.
Switch Providers – Don’t be afraid of switching software vendors. Some systems might be more suitable for your business’ needs than others.
Hire Marketing Automation Experts – If there is one group that you need to be connecting with, it’s the marketing automation experts. Not only can they advise you on how to implement the best tactics on the actions above, but they can also speed up the time it takes for you to go from frustrated to happy.
Conclusion
Being frustrated with your marketing automation software is something you can escape. By taking the right actions and speaking to the right people, you can have the best experiences with your software, raise your business’ revenue and be more efficient in sales.
What marketing automation software do you use? Do you have any frustrations with it?
Let us know in the comments.