The allure of marketing automation is simple enough: let software take care of all the repetitive marketing tasks that you’re too busy to take care of each day. Imagine super-intelligent bots following up with prospects via email and social media. Imagine these bots scanning your website for customer questions and effortlessly responding to their requests.
There’s just one little problem with this scenario: most, if not all, of these marketing automation tasks are focused on the middle of the sale funnel, and not at the very top of the sales funnel. In short, marketing automation may be great at delivering the right content to the right prospect at the right time, but not so great at getting that prospect in the first place.
You can think of this as the difference between lead nurturing and lead generation. The lead generation is the hard part – it’s the time and effort that’s spent in finding the right prospects for your sales funnel. You want high-quality leads going into that sales funnel, and the more, the better.
In contrast, lead nurturing is all about the follow-up process. It’s about sending out an email at the right time. It’s about deciding what type of content or message to send to a prospect to move him or her further along the sales cycle. But at some point, there’s a difference between a finely-honed message that a customer wants and… spam.
Yes, the dreaded “s***” word. (Spam!) Think of all the messages you receive from a typical B2C company once you agree to opt-in to their email marketing. You literally receive a barrage of messages, all of them from some hyper-intelligent bot trying to press the right buttons. You receive an offer to buy rainwear and umbrellas when it’s raining. You receive offers to buy special clothing for special holidays. You receive offers because it’s the second Tuesday of the month and they have a special promotion going that’s just perfect for the second Tuesday of the month.
You get the idea – at some point, it’s just going too far and it becomes spam. At that point, you’ve lost the customer. Most likely, at that point the customer is scrambling to find the “unsubscribe” button in your email newsletter.
The same thing happens in the world of B2B marketing as well. In the name of “nurturing the lead” or “pushing the customer along,” your marketing bots can go too far, push too hard. There’s a limit to how many times an eager marketing bot can send out an email message saying, “Just seeing if there’s any interest in a phone conversation with [XYZ]?” For the third time: NO.
Which is not to say that a B2B marketing automation strategy can’t help you to improve your efforts, at least incrementally. Most marketers are drowning in data and information, so automation gives them hope that they can actually leave the office on time for once. They may even begin to notice an uptick in the number of requests they are getting for face-to-face meetings.
But just remember – if you let the bots do all the heavy-lifting for you in the middle of the sales funnel, you may be forgetting about the two more important part of the sales funnel – the top and the bottom. The top is where the leads come in, and the bottom is where the sales come out.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.