Make sure your customers are at the heart of your Marketing Automation Strategy

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing Automation

Are you failing the customer?

The single most significant thing that has affected marketing strategy today has been the shift of control to the customer. The proliferation of social media tools and online tools help leads decide on their own schedule and using their own combination resources.

The primary need that leads and customers have in their research is for useful and timely information. Our role as marketers should be to help customers get all of the information they need and ease their decision process.

Marketing automation doesn’t reflect the complete customer experience

Over the course of a lead’s interactions with your company, you learn a lot about their interests, challenges and timing. You should be gathering social, website, blog, purchase history and behavioural information on your leads and prospects - so make sure you put it to good use.Marketing automation programs should reflect that data. If you take the time up front to understand what your audience wants, then they’ll be more receptive to you.

Marketing automation often ignores your best customers

Too many marketers stop targeting communications after the lead has converted into a customer, missing opportunities to deepen the customer relationship and drive repeat purchases and upgrades. A comprehensive inbound marketing strategy should continue to personalize communications based on customer experiences.

Losing focus on content

When run well, B2B content marketing should provide leads and customers with exactly what they need and nothing more. It should be interesting, relevant, and useful. One of the biggest errors with marketing automation tools has to do with the content strategy, not the tool itself. Without smart, tailored, useful content – marketing automation is just an intelligent spamming tool. Too many marketing automation programs today have neglected this central tenet.

Marketing automation can result in multiple emails with the same content

In an automated email campaign, each email should offer value. Lead nurturing campaigns should not be an excuse for you to deliver the same content again and again. Make sure every email has distinct content, value and goals. It's fine to have your email campaign build and refer to past emails, but don't reuse.

Marketing automation sends irrelevant content

Make sure that the information provided in your marketing automation campaigns matches the expressed interests of the recipients. If they have converted into a lead because of a particular product or topic area, your content should reflect that. Don’t rush your leads or move into another topic area before they’ve demonstrated interest in it.