In an upcoming webinar with RingLead, I’ll be sharing five marketing automation myths and debunk them live. By understand what NOT to do, you’ll get a better idea of what TO do. Here’s a look a three of them.
1. Marketing automation is a massive investment – FALSE!
There are many types of marketing automation. Commonly, when people refer to marketing automation, they are referring to a marketing automation platform, such as Pardot, Eloqua, or Marketo.
The reality is there are two types of marketing automation. I like to call it marketing automation with a capital “A” and a lowercase “a.”
Marketing Automation with a capital “A” is the big solution which will encompass all aspects of complete marketing automation. Though it can do everything a business would need, not all businesses are ready for this, or have a need for it. Some businesses simply need one or two things to be automated at their current stage.
Marketing automation with a lowercase “a” is a single tool which can be strung together to accomplish specific tasks. For example, with the combination of tools such as Unbounce for landing pages, and Mail Chimp for email, you can accomplish many marketing automation goals without a full enterprise Marketing Automation solution.
Look at what you really need, and you might find that marketing automation with a lowercase “a” will work for you. Starting with single point solutions will help you understand the full value of a true marketing automation platform, should you move in that direction.
2. Ease of Use = easy to see results – FALSE!
No marketing automation tool is directly plug and play. This has nothing to do with the technology, yet it has everything to do with your understanding of how to use it. Marketing automation is such a different way of looking at, and executing, modern marketing campaigns. It takes a solid foundation, and rework of your existing marketing programs, to be truly effective. Most modern software tools are built on an “ease of use” platform, yet no matter now easy a tool is to use, if you don’t really understand how to build, execute, and scale modern marketing programs, you’ll likely not see the gains you were expecting from your solution. To see results, you’ll need to invest in educating yourself on modern marketing practices, and understand the full capabilities, and best practices, for your tool.
3. Email to Email is Nurturing – FALSE!
Oftentimes when I’ve seen a company buy marketing automation, they set up their first nurturing campaign by taking their existing email templates, put them in a timed sequence, and call it a nurturing campaign. This is not a nurturing campaign, but a spam campaign. Email sent though a marketing automation tool is vastly different than your old emails because of the nature of them. Emails you used to send were a one-to-many format. Each time you hit send you sent an email to many people. With your marketing automation tool, you’ll be sending one email to one person. So the emails need to be written with a personal interaction, rather than optimizing for mass appeal.
Join me for our upcoming webinar on 1/28 at 2 p.m. to go deeper into these myths (plus two more). Register here.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 3 Marketing Automation Myths – DEBUNKED
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