Marketing automation systems need to be used with care and responsibility, as conflicts can occur when dealing with high volumes of landing pages, emails and programmes. Most marketeers will need to take a trial and error approach when getting to grips with marketing automation, but it also helps to learn from others’ mistakes, and you may well decide not to use them. Here are three reasons why you might want to think carefully about using marketing automation.

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The Danger of Outdated Assets

All websites have large volumes of content and digital assets associated with them, often reaching the thousands. With a marketing automation programme, although it can be easy to manage your assets, it can become very difficult to keep a handle on your content. HTML edits are time-consuming and difficult when you create assets separately. For example, if you had to change the date of copyright, you’d need to manually search through each landing page. Contact an agency that specialises in SEO and web design in Cheltenham for guidance.

Difficulties Aligning Sales and Marketing

The approaches used by your sales and marketing teams may not perfectly align, but most businesses will rely heavily on their sales. However, a lot of marketing departments don’t consider company sales teams adequately, particularly at the start of the process for marketing automation when designing marketing channels, or further along the line when they are creating forms and landing pages. An example is when marketing teams look to increase conversions by simplifying application forms.

However, sales teams want to see rich data in order to identify good leads – at the very least, full contact information, geographical detail etc – fields which marketing teams may strip out in order to grow lead volumes and simplify UX. For this reason, it’s well worth being very wary of marketing automation. An agency specialising in digital strategy, SEO and web design in Cheltenham like http://www.ma-design.biz among others may be able to help with aspects such as this.

Over-Complicating Things

It may not be immediately apparent, but automation systems can ultimately make it difficult to have marketing success, as your assets and programmes become too interdependent and complex. Program errors can creep in and functions don’t always appear as they should. As the system is updated and more people get involved, more errors can occur and create knock-on problems.