The 5 Most Common Challenges with Marketing Automation

The landscape for marketers is an ever evolving one, and necessarily so.

Behaviours are changing faster than they ever have before, not only in response to shifting social and economic conditions, but also in response to some of the significant technological advancements we’ve seen in the last few years. Staying ahead, no matter the market, requires continuous adaptation.

Marketing automation is the pivotal strategy to do just that.

A research paper revealed that marketing automation has surged by 91% in recent years, which bodes well for time and budget constrained marketing teams and the leaders that guide them, but rapid adoption brings with it a brand-new set of challenges.

Addressing the Challenges with Woolf Hodson Solutions

Despite the enthusiasm for marketing automation, 47% of marketers are currently unsure if their marketing automation platform has delivered any form of ROI whatsoever post-implementation.

And the reason for this, and indeed most automation pain points, can be summed up in one word: complexity.

Overall, the average marketing stack now contains 22% more apps than it did four years ago. This staggering increase in complexity can make it difficult for leaders and their teams to manage and optimise their automated processes effectively.

At WoolfHodson we offer a suite of solutions that simplify these complex challenges and enable marketing teams to unlock value and build better alignment.

1. Decentralised and Siloed Data

One of the more common issues faced by clients is a lack of integration or the siloing of data across activities, which can cause widespread automation issues and inconsistencies. Limited or fixed data structures, where new data types and sources aren’t easily integrated, lead to incomplete customer profiles and wholly disjointed marketing efforts. This kind of fragmentation can make it challenging to deliver the interactions that matter, which can in turn completely undercut the effectiveness of automated marketing activity.

Solution: Powered Up Reporting and Targeting

By creating the right data constructs and capturing and processing the right data across all of your relevant activities and interventions, our Reporting and Targeting tools create a unified view of your customer interactions. Improving both the effectiveness of your activity, and your ability to track that activity and inform future investment decisions, by surfacing actionable insights in the right place, at the right time for all of your teams to act on.

2. Limited Personalisation

Automated systems will often create a disconnect, where interactions feel robotic and lack the personal touch that customers expect. This limited or lack of personalisation will result from automation that fails to dynamically adapt to customer behaviours and preferences in real-time. A reliance on static segments or outdated customer profiles, both individually and at an account level, will often lead to irrelevant, misplaced or impersonal communications, negatively impacting engagement and overall satisfaction.

Solution: Qualified Interest Accelerator

Our Qualified Interest Accelerator continuously tracks and monitors engagement levels from multiple touchpoints, across key accounts, capturing and then qualifying that engagement based on identifiable buyer roles. By seamlessly integrating this data from multiple touchpoints and sharing it with account owners, your teams can not only act quickly, but deliver relevant, personalised engagement when it matters most.

3. Inadequate Training

Whilst the technology often takes centre stage, it’s the people in your organisation and their ability to optimise and leverage the tools available to them that make all the difference. Employee resistance to new technologies can be one of the biggest roadblocks to the success of an automation initiative. Underutilisation, operational inefficiency and insufficient understanding of capabilities and best practices, can all prevent teams from fully leveraging the technology and tools at their disposal. This change, however, requires a shift in behaviours as well as clarity on the processes and efforts that will enable real impact.

Solution: Team Enablement

As marketers who understand technology and technologists who understand marketing, we conduct topic-led clinics that address the specific challenges and opportunities many automation platforms present, whilst also managing and governing those platforms across different internal functions to ensure complete integration and alignment. With our combination of skills, we help teams adopt new processes and techniques ensuring that improved foundations are evolved, and built upon to ensure tangible returns from any investment.

4. Integration Failures

Many of the issues we encounter stem from the inadequate integration of automation tools with existing systems. A lack of coordination between marketing and sales teams, insufficient data-driven insights to guide decision making from the outset and an unclear view on ROI post-implementation compound the problem. The result includes fragmented campaigns, missed opportunities for engagement and conversion, and most crucially, the inefficient allocation of resources.

Solution: Campaign Impact Accelerator

Whether it’s better campaign design to increase personalisation, better connectivity between teams to ensure impact is tracked end-to-end, or complete and seamless systems integration, the Campaign Impact Accelerator provides you with a structured approach to campaign design and execution. Through a structured audit that highlights and prioritises your impact opportunities, we provide an actionable roadmap that delivers lasting value, fast.

5. Data Privacy and Compliance Concerns

The rapid pace of technological change often outstrips the ability of most organisations to keep their data governance practises up to date. Add to that the additional complexity of ensuring that automated systems are configured to comply with data protection regulations (GDPR, CCPA etc.), can lead to the inadvertent exposure of sensitive information or worse, a complete breach.

Solution: Comprehensive Data Management

We ensure robust data management practices that comply and remain wholly up to date with data privacy regulations. Our solutions integrate data across platforms, implementing advanced encryption and access controls to protect sensitive information and provide real-time monitoring to detect and address any and all vulnerabilities. Our goal is to mitigate the risks before they become problems, all while leveraging that data effectively and efficiently to enhance your automation efforts.

The Future is Automated

Marketing tools for automation have been around in one form or another, without much advancement for at least a decade and the rapid adoption and advancement of these technologies over the last 5 years is truly unprecedented. As martech solutions continue to advance, the scope and capability of automation expands, providing ever greater opportunities for enhancing efficiency, accuracy, engagement and returns on investment.

We’re proud to be at the forefront of this expansion, helping our clients leverage the most advanced automation solutions and strategies to maintain their competitive advantage and exceed their marketing goals.

Our obsessive focus on problem solving and making the complex simple means we’re able to create business-led marketing solutions that engineer real and lasting change.

To learn more about our Advanced Automation strategies, solutions, and how Woolf Hodson can help unlock the value of your marketing efforts, get in contact with our Sales Director Mike Brothers to discuss how.