What Are the Key Challenges in Marketing Automation?

There's no shortage of resources that wax poetic about the benefits of marketing automation. While there's no doubt that creating a more customized, personalized path for your audience is a game changer, there's little reference to another topic — the challenge of building your marketing automation strategy.

Setting your strategy in motion doesn't happen until there's a foundation and infrastructure in place to feed and support it. Your initial focus should be thinking through the key challenges inherent to any marketing automation plan and figuring out, upfront, how you're going to tackle them.

Getting Personal

One of the biggest reasons for adopting a marketing automation strategy is the ability to create a more personalized experience. A more empathetic approach shows prospects and existing customers that their needs are understood. If your messaging is executed correctly, it positions a business to deliver real value.

To marketers, this isn't new. But most businesses haven't taken the time to map out the pains, frustrations, and motivations of their target audiences. For brands looking to get the most out of marketing automation, there needs to be time and resources devoted to understanding who you're talking to — and there are usually multiple decision makers. We've worked with clients targeting as many as six different personas.

Skills and Know-How

Not-so-fun fact: one-third of organizations that have a marketing automation platform aren't using it.

Businesses tend to underestimate the skills, resources, and time required to build and maintain an effective marketing automation strategy. The platforms provide the tools and capabilities — but none of it happens without developing the strategic and technical know-how inside your business.

Does your organization have the patience to develop an in-house specialist who understands lead scoring, sales enablement, and setting up different types of automation? If not, you need to consider where that level of support will come from. Some platforms offer better support and education than others, but managed services can alleviate the heartache.

Creating Engaging Content

Every marketing automation campaign depends on engaging content. The challenge — especially when targeting multiple decision makers — is that a personalized, customer-inspired approach calls for a huge amount of content.

Take an email campaign designed to get a CFO to schedule a call with sales. A CFO has specific needs and isn't looking for the same things in a product as your target's CEO or CMO. That means a unique series of emails for the CFO, addressing all the pain points and needs you identified. And it won't be enough to send messages — you'll need blogs, case studies, videos, and other content to back yourself up as an expert. Multiply that by every stakeholder you're aiming to reach.

There are strategies to repurpose and minimize, but writing one blog post per month isn't going to get you where you need to be. Expect a lot of content upfront, and a steady cadence afterward as your strategy adapts.

How to Tackle the Challenges

Your marketing automation platform isn't going to manage itself. If your team will be running campaigns, start with an honest assessment of your team's skills, resources, and time. It can take six to nine months to build and begin executing your plan without the right support — make sure you have the specialists you need from the start, and if you don't, find a team that can fill those gaps.