What is Automation?

In the simplest form, marketing automation regards to using software and tools to automate marketing activities rather than using manual systems. This acts as a powerful tool to simplify the role and responsibilities of a marketer by helping it boost efficiency and providing a personal experience for its customers. 

Before we dive into its importance, let’s look at what marketing automation can be used for –

• Social media marketing.
• Website traffic tracking.
• Customer emails, email -marketing.
• Payroll, paying bills.
• Online form, event reminders.
• Data management.

Why is it Important for Digital Marketing?

Automating your marketing strategies saves you the time and money which our overworked marketers would have otherwise spent trying to churn out campaigns or manually sorting through contacts. 

Automation helps marketers to meet the demand for brand relevance through innovation as it helps their businesses to stay relevant in the competitive market. Therefore, embracing and innovating technology is a must for today’s digital landscape. 

However, adapting to the new changes is not an easy quest and does come along with its challenges. 

What are the main challenges that businesses face adapting automation and their solutions?

1) Wrong Adoption of Software

In the sheer excitement of new software, an employee can make unnecessary complications in misunderstanding the process. It in place of easing up its work would turn into a battleground, eventually resulting in distrust for software.

To avoid this mishap, you should develop an effective training plan for the employees to ease up the working and enhance the value generated through this change. Acquiring the required knowledge about the features and its implementation in marketing will help them achieve their goals with ease. Another tip would be to get in contact with the vendor of the software and allowing him to engage with the team to solve their queries and doubts. 

Remember, It is of utmost importance to educate your employees about their individual tasks at each level and how it is of value to the whole organization for them to render the best of their services. 

2) Unable to Captivate Due to Shortage of Appealing Content

All the training in the world won’t benefit if your content can’t breakthrough. One of the main challenges here is producing quality content that surpasses the content online. 

Here are a few helpful solutions –

• My first piece of advice to overcome this challenge is to offer efforts to research. Readers online crave quality and in-depth posts.
• Secondly, learn about the audience you want to target, then limit yourself to your targeted niche. Start working on producing informative and relevant articles for them, this will help you be visible to your target audience that values your content provided. 
• In the initial phase, keep a target goal of one or two posts per week which have good readability. 

3) Unable to Measure Effectiveness 

Setting outcomes and measuring them effectively is of utmost importance to the organization. In many cases, marketers are unable to extract the sale responses report with the use of the software provided. This technology eventually is of no use if you can’t measure your goal with its use.

To overcome this, you have to first opt for a relevant software tool that allows you to measure your outcome effectively. Secondly, either hire an expert to guide you through the process or ask your software vendor to help you understand the process of generating data with the help of the chosen tool. Take this time to analyze your processes.

4) Keeping up with CRM to Manage Leads 

As marketing technology has evolved drastically, a lot of revised tool options have emerged in the market. As integrating automation with the CRM is one of the greatest benefits available, it can sometimes get difficult to utilize it to its fullest. For example, poor lead identification, scoring, or follow-up. 

To help with this, you have to make sure your system is connected to your website so you can track your website traffic and personalize it accordingly. Secondly, make sure you have people with the right knowledge and skills to enhance accurate lead scoring and get right back at a potential opportunity. 

5) Relevant Customer Data

The Customer data that we work with is the base for a successful campaign. People usually consider having a large number of customers a great thing for business, which is true but only if they are your target audience. Having an irrelevant audience is nothing but a waste of time and resources where you might just end up doing the wrong campaign.

To overcome this, keep cleansing your database quarterly. Make sure you get rid of all the unsubscribes and bounced ID in your customer data. Keep providing your customers with forms, to generate new data. This way you can maintain data that would work in your favour and derive success. 

No challenge is too hard if you’re ready to face it. Remember, If you’re not keeping up, you’ll fall behind, and in today’s world that is not a potential option. Make sure to take advantage of this ever-growing technology to motivate and empower your employees towards the path of automation success. 

Author Bio
Javier is an investment advisor for Alcor, a global investment bank. He’s best known for writing on business growth, startup, and finance and helping startups grow. Apart from writing Javier has a good network in the finance industry especially in the Investors community.