So, if you’re going to launch your first marketing automation campaign or if you’re already implementing this in your business, there are a few common mistakes you should keep in mind and avoid.

Not Understanding Your Objectives

After working with quite a few clients and also seeing many businesses out there who want to get started with marketing automation, there are a few things that tend to happen which hinders success. As a business, you need to understand what are your main goals for marketing automation, and if you’re wanting to set this up for the right reasons (and not just having ‘shiny new tool’ syndrome). There are many tools and solutions out there, and in order to pick the right one to reach your specific goals, you need to first have those goals in mind.
Once you understand these goals and reasons to use marketing automation, you can figure out whether the costs involved are worth the potential returns for your business

Using Marketing Automation as a Magical Solution to Fix Bad Processes

If you already have poor marketing processes in place, all that marketing automation will do is help you implement those poor processes more quickly. Make sure to plan out the purpose of your campaigns, and ensure that you aren’t just repurposing bad habits with a different methodology. Targeting the wrong market or mass emailing to purchased lists that won’t actually bring you any qualified leads still won’t make this more effective.

Not Planning Out Your Content & Workflow

Just like every other type of campaign, you need to make sure that you’re planning out your content and what you would like to see happen. Who are you targeting? What type of content should you deliver along the way? When should you be reaching out to people during the process? Marketing automation helps nurture leads who are in the middle of your funnel, and you still need to make sure the pieces that make up your campaign will still drive leads into your pipeline to begin with. From there, you can target and nurture with automation that will be the most effective. 

Not Including Sales & Business Considerations as Part of the Process

One thing to keep in mind is that any of your marketing efforts will not be a success if sales cannot then use what you’ve done to gain more customers. Don’t work in a silo, with marketing vs sales. You need to be in alignment between these two parts of your business, and ensure that you are in agreement in terms of your full sales process. Marketing automation shouldn’t just be making the marketing team more efficient, but should help sales be more efficient too.

Using Marketing Automation Alone & Not Continually Updating the Strategy

Not all leads are going to move through your buying cycle in exactly the same way. You need to keep in mind that there are other ways that information will flow and potential customers will be absorbing your content and learning about your business. Make sure that you’re still using other digital marketing efforts as part of your overall system, and that you’re also adjusting your marketing automation strategy over time as you learn. 

Summary

To summarize, when Optimizing your WordPress site, common mistakes include:

1. Not Understanding Your Objectives
2. Using Marketing Automation as a Magical Solution to Fix Bad Processes
3. Not Planning Out Your Content and Workflow
4. Not Including Sales & Business Considerations as Part of the Process
5. Using Marketing Automation Alone & Not Continually Updating the Strategy

Now that you know more about what common mistakes to avoid, make sure to check out our recent blog posts covering more useful marketing automation tips. If you liked this video, subscribe to the Umami Marketing YouTube Channel and the monthly Digital Marketing Postcard. Victoria will be back again in November (hopefully from somewhere sunny and hot!) to answer more of your questions. See you next month!

To get the most out of your inbound marketing strategy, contact us for a free inbound assessment by one of our Inbound Specialists!