Is marketing automation the be all and end all of digital marketing? Is it a technology that basically once you implement it you've reached sort of the end state and you no longer need to continue with anything else? This certainly seems to be something that people almost ascribe as a quality to marketing automation when I talk to people about it. They go on about how it's really like a technology that's so completely game changing.
Look, I'm a huge fan of marketing automation. I help clients in all different types of industries implement it and grow their businesses through marketing automation but what I want to make clear is that it's not a silver bullet. It's a technology that's there to really support your lead generation and then your lead closing efforts. It's probably not going to replace them and I think that sometimes we have some disappointment can come in from business owners, especially B to B business owners.
They almost get sold this dream that marketing automation can do it all for them when really what you want to be thinking about it as is a technology that's supportive. You've got your marketing team, you've got your marketing activity, you've got your sales team. We want to link the two together in a unified process and marketing automation can help us do that. Yeah, if you're not using marketing automation and you're the kind of business that has leads and has customers, so you're a business to business or you've got a bit of a lead cycle even on the B to C side of things, definitely marketing automation can help.
Very, very valuable technology but you need to understand that it isn't a silver bullet. What it can do though is save your team a lot of time, it can help work with leads that normally you wouldn't actually get particularly good results out of them. Perhaps leads that in the past would have slipped between the cracks, now you can have a system in place with your marketing automation platform that nurtures those leads until they're more ready to convert or they fall out of the pipeline.
It's not going to change your business overnight but done properly marketing automation is a real time saver and can definitely help you generate more leads and close more deals.
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