Through the adoption of various technologies, marketing automation in organizations allows for implementing strategies aimed at increasing revenues, maximizing company revenues, and improving market efficiencies.
It allows organizations to respond quickly to competitive threats, expands access to consumers’ journeys, provides critical insights for tailoring future consumer experiences, and creates personalized experiences. Although marketing automation is still in its infancy, it is on its way to becoming the solution in a field that defines gross product sales and overall organizational performance.
Studies have equally disclosed the negative impacts of automating marketing practices, despite the positive influences of digitizing product or service promotion functions. The expansion and redesign of business blueprints driven by technological inventions have exponentially increased companies’ quality, quantity, and forms of business information. Therefore, making marketing decisions is no longer easy because of complex variables and big data, too much for human beings to handle.
Furthermore, marketing automation has increased the scrutiny of marketing accountability in various industries around the world. As a result, accountability is no longer an optional process in the marketing profession. Marketing managers are under a lot of pressure to show marketing results and legitimize their roles as important value creators in their organizations. Furthermore, marketers face difficulties identifying accurate metrics systems that accurately assess their companies’ financial performance in terms of marketing objectives.
Challenges in implementing marketing automation
While organizations attempt to increase value in their digital promotional mechanisms, inherent challenges impact their success.
1. Lack of a clear vision and leadership
The failure to undertake appropriate market research to implement the appropriate mix of marketing automation techniques makes it difficult for firms to experience success. Many institutions in developing marketing automation overlook the best practice approaches in undertaking the data-driven initiatives of customer problems. Many organizations fail to realize the dynamic consumer environment while posing a challenge towards effectively realizing their marketing automation initiatives. Moreover, poor lead management practices from the top organizational management negatively impact the marketing automation practices with a decline in the potential sales revenues within the company. Therefore, the lack of a clear vision and leadership prospects negatively impacts marketing automation practices and procedures.
2. Lack of training and human intelligence
While technology is important for a company’s success, top management and an appropriate mix of human resource training and perspectives are essential for marketing automation success. Despite this, companies fail to provide adequate training to their employees and human resource personnel to align their operations with marketing automation approaches and techniques. By implementing marketing automation procedures, many executive leaders fail to realize the potential of human intelligence. Failure to effectively integrate employees into marketing automation concepts and practices resulted in the organization’s failure to succeed.
3. Lack of personalization
Many companies look at marketing automation as cost-saving measures, thereby neglecting the input of employees for the organizational progress, which results in ineffective outcomes. When companies use marketing automation, there is a breakdown in communication and coordination among employees, which results in unintended costs. Furthermore, when it comes to marketing automation, one of the most common pitfalls is the lack of personalization of digital content for company-wide practices. While studies point to top management’s failure to synchronize operational perspectives, they also point to a failure to develop more content-specific information for narrower segments as a cause of poor outcomes.
4. Conflicting strategies
The challenge of organizational design involves determining the cross-functional coordination across departments. While a company’s operations are intertwined, marketing automation can suffer from a lack of clarity due to an inherent problem in developing critical performance indicators across departments. Leaders’ marketing uncertainties and differential perspectives towards embracing diverse aspects of the marketing automation processes in companies generate challenges for their efficacy of the underlying issues. While company leaders may endeavor to institute various approaches towards achieving success, the intrinsic aspects of reasoning shape their resolution towards incorporating different perspectives and ideologies relating to marketing automation strategies.
5. Lack of correct consumer data
Marketing automation necessitates collecting customer information and data for processing and consequently usage during the automation process. Nonetheless, data quality and efficacy in using it to promote best practices are operational challenges. Many studies have shown that failing to capture the correct consumer data effectively can be a major stumbling block when implementing the marketing mix and approaches across company-wide initiatives. The potential of big data for automation and effective communication presents a challenge for businesses to ensure proper access management and usage across institutions.
