Most Overlooked Aspects of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation platforms are incredibly powerful tools that have the power to create incredible, effective, revenue-producing marketing programs. And they’re only getting stronger. New capabilities like personalization, AI-generated recommendations, and data integrations are allowing marketing and IT teams to do some truly incredible things. But the allure of those tantalizing features can lead teams to push for them before they’re ready.
These are four foundational aspects of a marketing automation program that are too-often overlooked.
Alignment to Your Business Goals and Marketing Strategy
This may seem obvious, but most technology fails because it doesn’t actually support broader business goals and strategy. So let me take this opportunity to hammer drive this point home.
It is imperative that before you even begin the process of choosing a marketing automation vendor or send your first automated campaign, that all parties involved understand the purpose and value of the tool, and more importantly how that helps your business achieve its objectives.
Not having this alignment will lead to a disjointed system that simply does not meet the needs of your organization. That often leads to patchwork fixes and workarounds that are time-consuming and open risk of non-compliance or customer-losing mistakes.
This is where communication is critical. Make sure your leadership on both the technology and marketing/sales sides are aware of the program and have a chance to guide your technology choices in the right direction.
Architecture and Organization of Your Platform
Many programs are plagued by adoption issues that often boil down to, not the capabilities of the technology, but the usability. And when people hear marketers say “it’s just too complicated and difficult to use” they often blame it on the UI of their specific tool and begin pining for a similar product that looks cleaner and simpler in the demo.
But so often these issues aren’t about the design of the tool, they’re about the infrastructure and organization of the incumbent tool.
Once you have chosen a platform, architecture, and organization — folder structure, naming conventions, labels & descriptions, etc. — are critical to usability, adoption, and performance, but are often an afterthought in the planning stages. And all too quickly a brand new platform becomes unmanageable, leading to mistakes.
Run pilots and solicit feedback from users. Connect with stakeholders about what is causing their dislike of your platform. Little ideas here and there can make all the difference.
Understanding Available Data
Data is often one of the most difficult things to solve for in marketing automation, but while some of the solutions are incredibly inspired and creative, they aren’t always the easiest to understand, especially for marketing users.
Most marketers don’t know or don’t want to know what their data model is, but understanding what data is available, what isn’t, and how that data is collected helps marketers actually make good use of it.
Being ‘Data-driven’ is something that many marketing departments aspire to, but actually strikes fear into the hearts of marketers. Things like ‘data architecture’ and ‘data models’ can sound incredibly complex and many marketers will look at them as something that should only be worried about in IT.
But while becoming a true data scientist takes dedication and an aptitude for the topic, having a basic understanding of what data is available to your marketers does not have to be difficult.
Thorough documentation on the fields available within a marketing automation program, how that data is collected, and what it actually correlates to, will empower marketers to actually leverage the data they have to improve marketing campaigns, as well as reduce segmentation and automation mistakes.
The End User Experience
Marketing technologists often get bogged down in optimizing our own systems and processes that we don’t realize we’re creating a poor customer experience. Automation can be a powerful tool to save marketers time and generate data, but there is a delicate balance between automation and human. No matter how smart and sophisticated our tools get, there is sometimes no substitute for human intervention.
Think about when you call customer service and get routed through a phone tree that asks you to choose a hundred options before you can actually talk to a person. Or when you try to use a live chat on a website and it’s a robot spitting out articles to documentation you’ve already seen. Those might help increase efficiencies for an organization but can be incredibly frustrating for users.
So don’t just test the back end, test the front end. How long does it take someone to get a response to a contact form? Are there fail-safes to make sure no one slips through the cracks? Is all of the messaging consistent and setting the proper expectations? Is the experience so frustrating that you’re driving potential customers straight into the arms of your competitors?
Test often! And from various sources, not just your internal team. Get fresh eyes. Have people from different departments test various campaigns. Find a user testing service, they have much cheaper online options these days. Ask your great aunt if she can figure out how to work it — if she can, anyone can! Because at the end of the day, your brilliant backend workflows and automation will be useless if no one enters them.
In Summary (TL/DR)
· Align your marketing automation strategy and priorities to your business goals. Make sure all stakeholders are on board with those goals.
· Let your users know how to use the data that is available to them. The clearer you make it, the more they’ll use it, and the better your results will be.
· Keep the experience of your customers front and center when automating. When in doubt, place the burden of inefficiencies on your internal team, not your customers.
A few of my other favorite tips:
· Create fail-safes to notify you of any errors in your automation.
· Test often. Take a half-hour every morning and choose something to test. Take notes on when and what you test so you can refer back to when something was working.
· Don’t be overly reliant on lead scoring. Lead scoring is a great tool for prioritizing leads, but should not be the mechanism on which you base your automation.
· Work your way towards multi-touch attribution. Start by tracking first touch and last touch, and then expand as you can from there.
· Closed-loop reporting, where you are able to attach ROI to marketing efforts, is the holy grail and worth the effort to set up.
