52% of B2B marketing organizations say lead generation is their #1 marketing challenge. The solution? Marketing automation.
Marketing automation is a very effective tool in providing companies with leads. By nurturing prospects with highly personalized, useful content, marketing automation helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers. Why then are companies failing to capitalize on marketing automation? Here are the most common missteps of companies who use marketing automation wrong:
- When companies buy email lists, it hurts more than their bank account. When they send emails to people who never requested the information, those emails get flagged for spam, bring down reading rates and hurt the company’s IP address reputation. All this will result in those emails going straight to spam folders for buying email lists.
- Companies think marketing automation will do the marketing and lead generation for them. This is not the case. Marketing automation will help that company become successful, but it will not do all the work. Companies need to create valuable content that speaks to their potential customers.
- Email marketing isn’t dead. You can read more about that in a recent blog of ours. It is an ineffective tool if it’s the only channel you are using to talk to your potential customers. The average person will receive more than 10,000 emails this year, according to The Radicati Group, Inc. If companies are only relying on emails, how confident can they be that they are separating themselves from the other email noise? Too many companies use marketing automation solely as an email engine.
- Nurture campaigns are often considered the most complicated feature of marketing automation. But B2B marketing is very similar to building a relationship with someone. When you nurture a lead, your message should always be relevant and timely based on customer actions. It takes time to figure out what customers want before you can start to sell to them. These types of campaigns have two times the open rates and three times the click-through rate compared to a one-off email. In a nutshell, you have to treat a nurture campaign exactly as you would any other sales relationship.
- Leads get handed off from the Marketing Department to Sales too early, resulting in raw leads. According to Sirius Decisions, only 2-5% of raw inquiries actually convert to sales. That is a very small percentage to be wasting efforts on.
63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use integrated marketing automation. Avoiding a few common mistakes when integrating this tool will keep you and your business in that percentile. Have you already incorporated a marketing automation tool with your business? Has it freed up your time and energy to focus on other tasks? Comment below with your insights!
