5 big challenges marketing automation helps your business overcome

The scope of marketing automation goes way beyond what people think when they come across the term. Many assume that it just reduces the workload of marketers by automating repetitive and tedious tasks. While that does account for much of it, the real value lies in how the software can increase business revenue. According to VentureBeat, 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase.

As marketing automation delivers results, it also addresses critical pain points faced by you and your team in your day-to-day activities. Let's take a look at five big challenges marketing automation can help your business solve.

Difficulty in measuring ROI 

Understanding the real impact of campaigns on your business growth and justifying each investment is something that every marketer anticipates. To achieve incredible benefits and decide where you should invest your money, you need to ask yourself a lot of questions like: 

• How well is my budget aligned with my goals?

• Which recent campaign fetched more returns?

• Which marketing channel converted more leads with less expense?

• Where should I invest further to evolve my marketing?

Should you derive all this data manually? No need. Just enter the input (budget, channel, time, target, etc.) and observe how marketing automation calculates every metric that measures your ROI. With exact numbers, you can strategize your decision-making to deliver higher results while also saving a lot of money!

Marketing and sales silos 

The goal of sales and marketing teams is the same—to make every lead a customer. However, the actions each team performs are different because they have access to different types of data about a lead.

What can happen in such a case? Here's an example:

Consider a lead who purchases the premium plan but still receives the free trial emails from the marketing team. Also, another customer who unsubscribed from the monthly newsletter mailing list still receives feedback emails from the sales rep. Here, a communication gap is created because of a lack of knowledge sharing between the sales and marketing teams, which will ultimately result in a bad user experience.

This gap is bridged when you connect your CRM and marketing automation solutions, thereby facilitating bi-directional communication between the teams. This ensures that the sales and marketing teams are synchronized, each team gets accurate data about their target audience, and they can appropriately run campaigns together.

Lack of real-time interaction 

Every campaign you send as a marketer demands to stand out among the large number of messages your audience receives every day.

Consider you're sending a generic email about your business and another personalized email where you're talking to your customer about the upcoming release in your product

Which one do you think your target audience is likely to open? A study shows that personalized emails get a 6 times higher transaction rate than generic emails.

With an in-depth website and mobile app analytics—tracking page views, monitoring survey responses, retrieving locations, and demography—marketing automation makes it possible to provide a seamless real-time interactive experience to your audience with tailored content that is actually automated.

Low-quality leads 

Lack of quality leads has become increasingly common, leading sales teams to often mark a lead as "junk". This can be because they're contacting individuals who haven't expressed any interest through the traditional lead generation strategies like:

• Cold calling
• Mass advertising
• Email blasts

Therefore, generating a quality lead and passing them onto the sales team for conversion has become one of a marketer's biggest challenges. But with marketing automation, you can ensure that you capture only those prospects interested in your business when they voluntarily sign up for your product/service through automated signup forms, popups, social media campaigns, event/webinar signups, etc.

When visitors subscribe to your brand's YouTube channel or sign up for your newsletter using a popup form while visiting your website, it indicates they have some level of interest in you and what you offer. From here, you can move the leads down the conversion funnel. Once you classify the leads as cold, warm, or hot by nurturing and scoring them, you can pass the qualified (hot) leads to the sales team.

Inconsistency in brand presence 

In today's marketing realms, it isn't enough to promote your brand in TV ads, radio ads, or magazines. You need to have a strong web presence across the internet for maximum gains. If you're wondering how to maximize this digital marketing strategy consistently and efficiently, marketing automation is the answer.

No matter what type of content you curate, whether it's Pay-Per-Click ads, running campaigns on your social media handles, blog content, posting vlogs on video sharing platforms, or SEO content, marketing automation serves as a single place for you to create the content using simple drag-and-drop builders, schedule them to post at the right time via automation, and analyze the reach with in-depth reports.

Conclusion

When leveraged the right way, marketing automation can effortlessly tackle the key challenges and reduce the workload of a B2B marketer. With easy-to-use Zoho Marketing Automation, you can design a seamless multichannel experience to nurture your leads and focus on customer needs while automating time-consuming manual tasks.