If your business is looking to take the next step with it’s digital marketing scale and capabilities, you’re probably considering a marketing automation platform. Marketing Automation platforms give you the ability to build out your customer journey, nurture prospects and leads until they’re ready to buy, and more seamlessly pass leads over to the sales teams.
Of course, they also have great features like drag and drop email builders, form builders, landing page builders, and often limitless combinations of automations and workflows to move prospects and leads along the journey.
On the surface, these features make it seem like Marketing Automation will make your marketers life easier than ever before. After all, with ‘automation’ in the name, you’d expect these platforms to do most of the work for you, right? Ehh…. automation is not quite artificial intelligence.
Marketing Automation is not Marketing Magic.
When mid to enterprise level Marketing Automation Platforms qualify their own leads, they will often ask you the size of your marketing team. Why? Because they know, especially in the onboarding phase, that to get the most out of their platform, you’re likely going to need a few marketers on the team to both execute the creation of content, and someone to actually run the marketing automation platform.
When you get started with marketing automation, you’ll have contact imports to do, custom fields to create, emails to build, integrations to set up, forms and landing pages to embed, segments to create, and automations to tie all of it together. You may also find yourself needing to map out the actual buyer journey, so that you can have a clear picture of what needs to be set up in marketing automation.
This stuff takes time, especially if you don’t have expertise with these tools. With automation and these new mediums for messaging at your disposal, you now have more copy to write, more designs to do, and more strategy to discuss. If you don’t have content, then you’ve got nothing to put in your marketing automation funnel, and if you don’t have the marketing automation platform configured, obviously, you’re spending money (and often lots of it) and not getting the value out of the platform.
Why More Work With Marketing Automation Is a Good Thing
Marketing Automation is not used to cut down a marketers workload, instead, its used to scale your marketing efforts as a whole. This means more work to do, not less. This generally means more creative to come up with, more strategies to implement, and more technical plumbing to put in.
However, when you take a look at the big picture breakdown of the percentage of time you spend doing the annoying tasks (email creation without a drag and drop builder, manual sending of campaigns, piecing together of multiple tools to try and connect the dots) versus the time you spend actually coming up with the strategies, engaging content, and unique value propositions before and after implementing Marketing Automation, you’ll see more of your teams time devoted to those things that separate you from the competition.
Many organizations struggle during their first, second, or even third attempts at marketing automation, often because they don’t understand that they’re about to add more to the plate of their marketing and sales teams, who become understaffed and end up trying to keep doing what they’ve always done while wading through a sea of menus and features in marketing automation.
Our position as marketing automation consultants allows us to step in and:
- Help select the right marketing automation platforms for your business
- Create a marketing automation strategy that is tailored to solving your biggest issues and goals first and foremost
- Configure and manage the marketing automation platform using our expertise and experience
- Monitor and audit the performance and strategies implemented
- All while saving your organization from having to hire another full time employee just to manage the platform
Working with us at MH Digital Group is a cost effective way to scale your marketing efforts, and we help tackle the increased technical workload that comes with marketing automation, while allowing you to focus on the bigger picture: your brand and your customers.