Marketing automation is a way for your business to have a ton of advantages and disadvantages for your business. It can free up time, expenses and help you scale your business to new heights while consuming less resources. It can also come with it’s set of disadvantages which can impact your business. In this article we will explore some of the advantages of marketing automation and the disadvantages it can carry on your business.
Advantages of Marketing Automation
More Profit From Underlying Customer Base
Further, from nurturing leads to selling more products to your existing customer base, automation helps you generate more profits from new customers as well. Thus, a proper marketing automation strategy ensures that your business grows exponentially by bringing in more customers into your fold.
Time Saving Component
The advantages of marketing automation are clear. For starters, it saves you time and effort. Marketing automation helps you identify the appropriate customers for your brand, at the correct time.
Lead Nurture and Generation Improvements
Additionally , it helps you save a lot of time by eliminating the tedious and time-consuming tasks of lead nurturing. Thus, automation of your customer relationship management (CRM) system ensures that your company gets better returns on investment by freeing up your marketing staff for better tasks.
Ability to Drive More Sales
There are many other advantages of automation platforms as well. This includes managing leads, contacts, information technology, scheduling tasks, and more. These tasks generally take up time that can be used on other aspects of the business.
Therefore, automation allows SMEs (small to medium enterprises) to focus on core business activities such as developing products and building relationships. Many marketers also claim that the benefits of automation are evident in the sales results that come out of using CRM systems. Indeed, sales have always been a major problem for marketers, which is one of the reasons why such systems are popular.
Recommended Reading: Aggressive Sales Tactics for Hungry Sales People
The biggest advantage of marketing automation allows your small business to concentrate on generating leads and earning profits instead of trying to handle too many tasks. With automation, you will be able to direct your attention on generating sales.
Ability to Combine Processes
However, if you want your small business to grow and reach new heights, you have to make sure that you get the right time management and manpower management skills in place. Marketing automation allows for all of these processes to be combined into one smoothly functioning system that is easy to access and effective to use.
Saving Money
Another advantage of using an SMM system is that it gives you the chance to save money. With this in mind, it may seem like marketing automation consultants are not really benefiting your business. However, this is not completely true as there are certain advantages that come with having a consultant in place.
Recommended Reading: Why Marketing Automation Could Be Your Next Big Move
The first advantage is that your company gets to enjoy a lot of benefits that would otherwise not be possible without one. For example, by delegating most of the marketing tasks to the consultant, you will be able to spend more time focusing on increasing sales and cutting costs.
Eliminate Cumbersome Tasks
As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest pros of marketing automation is its ability to eliminate certain tasks that do not have to be handled by your employees. This includes tasks such as handling the entire campaign through email, monitoring customer responses and managing the distribution list. Although this is very important, it is also important to note that it could lead to certain disadvantages as well.
For example, if you delegate the tasks to a marketing strategy service, you risk losing some of the overall control over your campaigns. If you are too relaxed about outsourcing, you may miss out on finding new ways to increase sales and reduce expenses. On the other hand, you might be missing out on the expertise that comes from hiring in-house staff or doing research yourself.
In addition to this, the automated campaigns will ensure that you always have fresh and high-quality content on your site. Not only does this provide better customer service, but it also increases sales since you will have content that your customers will find informative and helpful. Therefore, automation saves time and money for both your customers and your business.
Being Aware of the Advantages of Marketing Automation
However, not every SME (small to medium enterprises) owner is aware of the benefits of marketing automation. Many owners feel that implementing marketing automation would cost them a lot of money and is too complicated to implement on their own.
The reason why most SMEs don’t go for marketing automation is that they think it would be time-consuming or too confusing for their marketing people to manage. However, if the following points are kept in mind, it would make it easier for SMEs to incorporate automated solutions into their businesses:
Most SMEs fail to recognize the benefits of CRM automation because of their lack of a proper CRM infrastructure in place. SMEs overlook this because of the time and resource consumption involved in manually collecting data from leads. Again, automation of this process would help you focus on core activities and free your marketing team up for better marketing tools.
Disadvantages of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation may sound like the best thing since sliced bread. However, in this section, we will share with you the disadvantages of marketing automation. While automation can help your staff to focus on more creative tasks, it can also have some unforeseen disadvantages you should be aware of.
Automated Tasks Not In Line With Business Operations
The first disadvantage is the automation of tasks that are not relevant to the product or service you are providing. For example, automated pricing decision making will never work for a grocery store. However, it can work for an insurance company selling life insurance.
The grocery store will probably save money by eliminating the double entry of manually entering the prices. But, if those tasks were to be done again, the grocery store would be losing valuable time by having to do so and it would be more time consuming to process the customer’s quote once the automated pricing decision making process has been initiated.
Effectiveness of the Marketing Automation System
The second disadvantage is related to the overall effectiveness of the system. Marketing automation systems are designed to reduce the tedious tasks involved in the decision making process. But, as any engineer can tell you, the more tasks that are reducing the less likely you are to achieve high efficiency.
As such, when these systems are being used to replace human employees the efficiency that was achieved through manual work will be lost. This means that while the pricing machines may be efficient at the initial stage they will soon need to be updated.
Marketing Spam
Another disadvantage is related to spam. Spam is a real problem in today’s society. Email marketing automation systems can often lead to increased spam filter error, which greatly diminishes the effectiveness of the email marketing campaign.
The filters are programmed to delete spam emails from inboxes as they become available. In turn this results in lower efficiency when processing emails.
Pricing Tasks
And finally, one of the biggest disadvantages of marketing automation related to the pricing tasks involved. Advertising automation systems are primarily designed to free up marketing team members from the repetitive tasks associated with manually processing pricing tasks.
But, as any marketing professional can tell you, there is nothing automatic about this. Every action that is performed is subject to human discretion. And even more so the pricing tasks associated with these actions.
Conclusion
So there are some big disadvantages of using automated marketing tools. But, this does not mean that the technology is without its benefits. In particular, the use of complex algorithms can free up a marketing team from a great deal of repetitive tasks that take a lot of time out of their day.
And, as long as these tasks are performed by a qualified marketer, then the efficiency can be greatly increased. That, combined with the fact that new tools are being designed every day, will result in efficiency gains for both the company and the marketing automation software