Integrating Your Marketing Automation with Sales Growth

Marketing automation is all about convenience and simplicity. It’s about streamlining marketing across multiple channels. It’s about taking repetitive tasks and automating them with software. It’s about measuring and tracking marketing metrics in your organisation so that you can improve your marketing efforts over time. Ultimately, it’s about taking time-consuming, tedious tasks and transferring them from your employees to your tech systems.

What marketing automation isn’t necessarily about, though, is sales growth. One idea behind marketing automation is that it will free up your employees’ busy schedules, leaving them with time to focus on other things. Ideally, you will be able to reallocate your human resources to functions that will drive growth, innovation, and revenue for your business. What’s crucial to remember, though, is that there is no direct link between marketing automation and sales growth. If you want to see growth, there are a few other steps you will need to take to get there.

The Danger of Marketing Automation

For the most part, marketing automation is an excellent tool. The benefits it can provide regarding productivity, efficiency, and overall employee morale and engagement cannot be overstated. However, the reason that there isn’t a direct link between automated marketing efforts and increased sales revenues is that marketing automation has a dark side.

The danger with any automation is the removal of the human touch. Martech application can feel robotic and artificial. They can overlook or miss crucial, essential aspects that a human would always catch.

In the world of marketing automation, what you are often automating is communications with customers. Think about an automated marketing campaign for a retailer. The company might have mechanisms set up to send customers recommendations or offers based on items they’ve purchased before. They might use remarketing, to remind customers about items they placed in their shopping carts but never bought. They might localise their communications, to suit the climate/weather in the areas where customers live.

When done correctly, these types of communications feel smart and helpful. When done incorrectly, they seem like spam—or even worse, tone-deaf invasions of privacy. As a result, businesses always need to be aware of the danger of marketing automation. Automate too much, with minimal human touch, and your campaign runs the risk of backfiring.

 Accountability and How It Plays into Marketing Automation

So how can you execute a marketing automation strategy that does foster sales growth? The answer is simple: accountability.

What does “accountability” mean in relation to marketing automation? A few different things. First, it means paying attention to metrics and measurements. How are your customers responding to your automated marketing campaigns? What numbers do you see for engagement, conversion, or overall response? If the metrics aren’t flattering, then you need to accept accountability for that. Marketing automation might be making life easier for your sales team, but it isn’t delivering results. You need to go back to the drawing board and figure out why.

If the first part of “accountability” is holding your enterprise accountable to the numbers, the second part is holding yourself accountable to your customers. Marketing automation is a failure if it doesn’t represent a thorough understanding of the buyer journey. How quickly are customers moving through the sales funnel? When are communications or touchpoints necessary? How should those communications look? Figuring out the answers is not easy. Things may be different from one demographic or buyer persona to the next, and the cross-channel nature of modern marketing only complicates things further.

In most cases, businesses struggle to manage the accountability side of marketing automation on their own. Luckily, Cloud10 can help. Learn how we can help your company reap the benefits of marketing automation while also remaining accountable to the metrics and the customer journey.