12 Common Marketing Automation Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Let’s face it, marketing automation has gained significant popularity over the course of a few years. Prominent Industries around the globe have realized the true potential of marketing automation and are now doing great endeavors to utilize the maximum potential of this latest technology.

Marketing automation, as the name suggests, revolves around a concept that includes numerous software platforms. These are professionally designed applications or technologies that mainly cater to the marketing departments. Marketing automation is one of the latest technological developments that facilitate organizations to effectively automate their repetitive targets. This technology is extremely beneficial as it helps a company strategically market and gain leverage on multiple online channels. To sum it up, marketing automation allows industries to easily automate their repetitive tasks with the help of technologically advanced software.

However, just like any other useful trend, many brands have faced tremendous downfall when it comes to marketing automation.

Today, we’re going to take a look at the 12 most common mistakes that people tend to commit when working in the field of marketing automation. We will also discuss some of the ways that can help you avoid making these mistakes. So, without any further delay, let’s dive straight into it!

12 Common Marketing Automation Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

1. Formulating a poor strategy

Marketing automation requires strategic planning to target all your required segments. One of the most common mistakes that organizations around the globe make is not having a stable and structured plan. In simple words, marketing automation is a technique that is only efficient when you know what your target is. Thus, you must be very clear about what you want to achieve and where to start from. Automating unnecessary tasks will create more burden than reducing them. Thus, you must set clear goals, keep a track of your progress and understand your key progress areas. This will help you gain more insights into your area of interest.

2. Complicating with numerous tools

In today’s market, there is an automation tool for everything. You can schedule your posts, automate a chatting app, analyze your Matrix and do a lot more. But, it is important to understand that piling up a lot of automation tools results in chaos. Therefore, to avoid over burning and complications we suggest you opt for a simple application. This will allow you to analyze all your targets like promoting any brand like escape rooms and information in a single place and cut room for all the mayhem.

3. Not focusing on the right aspects

Initially, automation can seem quite tempting. Therefore, organizations are often lured into automating the wrong tasks. Before you start with the entire automation process, we would recommend you carefully analyze what your target areas are. For instance, if you want to focus on your email and audience reach, you might want to automate other aspects. On other hand, if you have a hold of your social media posts, scheduling them would be a lot more beneficial.

4. Improperly analyzing your audience

If you want to achieve success by using automation technology, you must actually understand your target audience. It is extremely important to understand what age groups you have in mind as this will make it easier for you to target them with the help of marketing automation. If you fail to do so, you will be losing a majority of your audience chunk and as an organization, you cannot afford to do that. Therefore, take ample amounts to analyze your target audience and only then focus on your automation strategies.

5. Not emphasizing on sales with marketing

As an organization, it is crucially important to confirm that your sales and marketing aspects are on the same page. If you fail to do this, your business will be suffering from a huge loss and this would, in turn, lead to a reduced return on investment. To avoid this unfavorable situation, you must strategically analyze with your sales and marketing team. You should focus on analyzing the lead target and figuring out the automation channels to enhance this process.

6. Failing to categorize your audience

There is no denying the fact that audiences play a major role when it comes to marketing automation. When you decide to opt for marketing automation, you must understand your target audience and segregate them into different sections. This way you will be able to curate a personalized and specifically targeted automated message that stands out to your target audience. If you fail to do so, you will just simply come off as a mainstream organization with poor marketing strategies.

7. Not optimizing your website content

Any organization’s website must be meticulously thought through. You must create a user-friendly website that has got everything in its desired place to create a visually pleasing as well as value-driven website. Failing to do so can reduce the efficiency of any marketing strategies. Thus, you must take extra efforts when it comes to optimizing your website content.

8. Coming up with vague emails

When talking about marketing automation, organizations automate their emails. However, this strategy can easily backfire if you are not writing your emails appropriately. To make your e-mail stand out, you must carefully amalgamate all the various aspects that contribute to the formulation of an interesting email. This means you will have to focus on the visual aspect, the valuable aspect as well as the target audience. Not only that, other crucial aspects would make your emails click-worthy from the audience’s point of view.

9. Not reaching out to more people

Automated emails are one of the most common bases to reach out to your target audience. However, organizations around the globe make one of the most common mistakes are failing to establish a welcome email sequence. This negatively affects their marketing strategy and overall image. You must send frequent and regular emails that inform all your audience about the latest changes, deals, happenings, and a lot more. This will help in carrying out the momentum with the utmost ease.

10. Bamboozling them with questions

People tend to ask numerous unnecessary questions that irritate the audience. When setting automated messages, you must take care of this thing. We would suggest you keep the question to a minimum and only ask the basic and required questions. This way, the user will not lose their interest and continue to stay on your website for a longer duration.

11. Poor CTAs

As we all know, a call to action is a crucial part of any message as this instigates the individuals to take an action by subtly suggesting the idea of making a reservation, confirming the booking, purchasing the said product, and so forth. Thus, you must focus on your CTAS. Very vague and not specific calls to action only amount to weak calls to actions that probably do not have any result. While on the other hand, strong and personalized CTAs that also include time-sensitive elements create more impact on the audiences.

12. Not promoting value-driven content

As a brand, it is extremely important to have good quality content. Before opting for any marketing strategies or automation processes, you must first analyze yourself that you have top-notch quality content that is ready to be promoted to your audience. You must run regular quality checks on your content and cross-check them to be fact-proof and impactful. This has a lasting impact on your audience.

Final Thoughts

There is no denying the fact that marketing automation has become one of the most useful assets in the marketing industry. However, you can not ignore the fact that this latest technology comes with its pros as well as cons. Any ignorance can result in major problems for an organization. Therefore, you must take every single aspect into consider before listing your things out for automation. This will help you to efficiently use the automation process and gain some leverage from it.