Marketing is changing and we, marketers, are evolving. In fact, we have come all the way from the production era to the product era, to the sales era, to the marketing era, to finally arrive at this new holistic concept of marketing, placing the customer at the center and offering seamless experiences, no matter the customer’s point of contact. Marketing has become more important, more challenging, more digital, and most of all, more intelligent.
So, how are we adapting to this new period? What kind of tools have we built? What tactics and strategies are we following? What roadblocks are we facing these days? These and so many others are very pertinent questions we, marketers, may ask ourselves before truly surfing this new digital marketing wave.
The Paradigm of Big Data
Today’s world is data-fueled. Big data has become marketers’ sun, and we ought to spin around it to survive and making a living in this ecosystem. There is no point in trying to fight against this reality, neither deny it. The numbers speak for themselves:
- 90% of all data has been created in the last two years;
- Today it would take a person approximately 181 million years to download all the data from the internet;
- In 2012, only 0.5% of all data was analyzed;
- Internet users generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day;
- By 2020, every person will generate 1.7 megabytes in just a second;
- 97.2% of organizations are investing in big data and AI.
Impressive, right?
The Invariability of Marketing Automation
As the old saying goes, if you can’t fight them, join them. That’s what we, marketers, have been doing. Facing this reality, every day, we bet on several tools that help us tracking, managing, and analyzing the tons of data we base our work on. In fact, we marketers go the extra mile when considering digital tools, as we lie immensely on diverse marketing automation platforms. These technologies help us make the best of the data we collect and act upon it, marketing more effectively on multiple channels and automating repetitive tasks.
Although it all sounds natural and we often fail to notice that we do actually use tons of marketing automation tools to help us daily, the numbers reveal and uncover our complex reality:
- 75% of marketers say they currently use at least one type of marketing automation tools;
- Nine out of ten marketers use more than one form of marketing automation software on a regular basis;
- Marketers are on average using more than 12 different tools, and some are using more than 31 tools to manage campaigns and data;
- The amount of times “marketing automation” has been searched per week has almost tripled over the past five years.
Still don’t believe we marketers are super-heroes?
An appreciation of Marketing Automation – Making it easier the hard way?
We may only conclude that marketing automation is more and more essential for our role, as marketers of the future. It simplifies our lives and automates tasks, thus freeing our time to be more creatively and intelligently spent. However, that is still a lot of confusion in our heads when it comes to which platforms to use, how to use them, for which purpose to use them, whether or not they are worth the investment, whether or not they are compatible with other software, among so many other doubts. And, unfortunately, at the end of the day, this misinformation and confusion only lead to misuse of the tools, which won’t be used at full potential. And once again, recent statistics only come to prove this theory:
- Automizy “Marketing Automation Challenges Report 2019” (2019) says that finding tools is the #1 marketing automation challenge for agencies with 20%;
- Kinetic Digital Marketing “Marketing Automation 2018 Report: Do You Really Know What It Is?” mentions that the biggest objection to using marketing automation (software) is cheaper alternatives in the market;
- Communigator and SmartInsights “Managing B2B Marketing Automation” (2019), points out that the #1 barriers to adoption of marketing automation is integrating data from sources and systems;
- According to Ascend2 “Marketing Technology Strategy” (August 2015), technology integration complexity is the most challenging obstacle to success;
- A majority of companies surveyed by SiriusDecisions (roughly 85%), thought that they were not using marketing automation to its fullest capabilities;
- Three in five companies believe the marketing automation implementation process was difficult.
Although not all the studies point to the same #1 roadblock of implementing marketing automation, many refer to the struggle it is to find the right tool among cheap alternatives, integration issues, and challenges with optimizing the usage of the software. Besides, independently of the main cause, these days, still 60% of companies find implementing marketing automation difficult.
Let’s look beyond these statistics and see why more in-depth!
Marketing Automation: Why so hard?
From the point of view of a marketer, I can prove that the lists of tools used to manage campaigns and accounts are endless. Oftentimes, because we do have tons of tasks and areas to which we dedicate our time, from social media, email marketing, CRM, analytics, marketing automation, website management, blog CMS, form tool, engagement and nurturing software, etc. And for each and every area of these, there is a considerable offering of sophisticated platform alternatives, all promising to be cost-effective, make our life easier, and justify the investment, right? So, the question is up: are they actually simplifying our lives?
I believe, that sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
In fact, many times we end up getting lost in this sea of tools (investing blindly on them), money, resources, and effort to learn, use, and monitor are usually the ones to pay. Our lives become more complex and our capabilities are put to the limit. Neither is it easy to deal with tons of different software daily, neither is it simple to integrate them all. We end up lacking a complete, 360-degree view of our leads, costumers, campaigns, and overall marketing initiatives, and data gets stuck in the middle of all of this. And this is one of the major challenges marketers face on a daily basis. And maybe even the key challenge.
A real case of a marketer daily (complex) life
As a marketer, I also struggle with having many diverse duties to handle and way too many tools to get the business done. For instance, let’s take a simple case of a marketing task you perform at least once a month and only prove the number of platforms you go to.
For instance, just to check how your website is performing…
You go to Google Analytics to check for bounce rates, page views, page visits, session duration, among so many others. Then you’ll go to Hotjar to check for the hottest and coldest areas of your site pages (“Why is no one going over our Contact Us section?”). At the same time, you are already checking your keyword ranking and authority in Moz: “That keyword is not working… Do people actually search for this? Let me check at AnswerThePublic…”. Oh! Remember the CTA no one was seeing? The Contact Us one? Let’s check in our marketing automation tool if we have had any leads entering our CRM from there. Just a few? Let me check the structure, content, and SEO of my website in WordPress to see what’s working and what’s not.
See the amount of data you have just collected, its complexity, and how the many platforms you are using? Challenging, isn’t it? That’s why picking a marketing automation tool that integrates them all, eases your life and on top of that meets all your needs and fulfills all your wants is absolutely essential!
So, in order to help you out and to ease your life a little, I have prepared an article to help you to pick the best automation tool for you and your business! Jump to the next article: “Top 5 Marketing Automation Tools: Pros and Cons” Start reading and find which marketing automation tool best fits you!
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