What To Do When Your Marketing Automation Strategy Fails

Marketing is an art form. There is a lot of room for creativity and outside-the-box thinking. The ways you can turn a lead into a sale are limited only by your own imagination. However, it is an unfortunate reality that marketing is not an exact science and sometimes things do not go according to plan. After a marketing misfire, the first thing you need to do is meet with the team and work out what exactly went awry. Grab a pot of coffee, book a conference room, and don’t leave until you can come to a consensus. This may seem like an easy task but there are so many moving parts to a marketing campaign that it can be difficult to pinpoint the faulty cog in the machine.

Here’s what you do if it turns out automation was the chink in your armor:

The first matter of business is to establish that it was the automation that turned things sour. There’s a host of standard marketing foibles you need to go through before you start pointing fingers at your solution. Are you targeting the right demographics? Is your messaging clear? Does your campaign resonate in the way you had hoped? All very important questions to consider while breaking down the situation. If you can establish that the automation strategy was the culprit, then you can start making adjustments.

While it is very easy to learn, automation is only as good as the person using it. Meaning that it is not infallible and is prone to human error. There is a laundry list of missteps and some are more common than others. Maybe your team is sending out automatic emails at a sub-optimal time of day. Or maybe you’re segmenting your leads with a faulty metric. It may even be something as simple as a typo on one of your landing pages. Any detail could be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The only responsible way to course-correct is to look at and rectify them all.

But what if you find that your technology solution is the problem? It could be that your software just isn’t up to snuff with the strategies your team is putting forth. You may need to reassess whether your current vendor is really a good fit for your organization. We’ve discussed the importance of selecting the right solution multiple times, but it bears repeating; different vendors are better fits for different organizations.

If your company has seen growth or downsizing, scalability is a very real problem and it may be time to look at a solution more fitting to your new speed. Taking a loss on your campaign can be disheartening. but stopping to assess possible human error, simple marketing 101 missteps, and the viability of your solution at your level of business can put your team back on the track to success.

For more information about marketing automation mishaps and how to avoid them click here for an article on the most common automation pitfalls.