4 common digital marketing pitfalls to avoid

Digital marketing automation is a commonly used method of streamlining digital marketing efforts. It helps marketing teams prioritize strategic tasks instead of devoting all their time to tedious manual processes. Optimized efforts reduce opportunities for human error, helping teams better manage critical day-to-day tasks.

• Lead generation, nurturing, and scoring
• Segmenting audiences for more impactful targeting
• Monitoring upsell and cross-sell activities

Digital marketing automation is clearly valuable. In fact, Forrester predicts that investments in digital marketing automation will continue to increase, even as overall marketing spend falls. Still, that doesn't mean it’s a magic solution. Automation needs to be properly implemented to achieve maximum benefits. There are a few ways you can ensure you’re approaching automation thoughtfully to mitigate these common negative effects.

What are the negative effects of automation?

1. Improper integration diminishes benefits

Integrations allow your digital marketing automation technology to connect directly with other solutions. To realize the full benefit of automation, it needs to be properly integrated into your website, CRM, email marketing tool, social marketing tool, and digital ad tools. This will allow your team to share leads’ marketing activities and account data with sales in real time.

Before implementing automation technology, check if it’s compatible with your other programs. Choosing a solution that can integrate directly with your existing programs—without requiring assistance from IT—will make the integration process much easier.

2. Lack of quality content makes automated activities grow stale

Digital marketing automation requires a lot of content. Without fresh, relevant content to consume, users will lose interest and stop engaging with automation.

A content management platform (CMS) can help alleviate this problem by enabling teams to collaborate, communicate, and publish content in one centralized location. A CMS is also a great tool for cataloging existing content, giving your teams the ability to leverage each other's previous research and writing. When it comes to creating content or planning your future content, anything that can be done to help utilize resources more efficiently is worthwhile.

3. Automation can feel impersonal

Customers can see right through generic automated marketing touchpoints, and irrelevant communications just aren’t worth their time. Your audience knows you have access to a lot of their personal information—and they expect you to use it to improve their experiences. To keep them engaged with your automated efforts, it’s important to create dynamic content that can customize messaging based on audience data, delivering the right messages to the right people at the right time.

4. Inaccurate analytics can undermine automation

Analytics and dashboards can provide insight for account analysis, revenue attribution, and future automated campaigns. But it’s important to look at analytics holistically. Without properly integrated technology, your team may be forced to piece together dashboards, losing valuable information to human error along the way. Ensure that your analytics solution can pull in data from all your automated activities and house it in a central location.

Ready to learn more about digital marketing automation?

See how to create optimized, personalized cross-channel campaigns with our Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation product tour.