Automation exist wherever there are repetitive manual tasks that can be formally codified and this naturally leads to automation pitfalls for when it is implemented incorrectly. Development and learning in artificial intelligence has brought automation resulting in increased productivity, more saved time and reduced costs, which are basic essentials that are critical for business success.
Many businesses are interested in investigating the ways automation can help them stand out in today’s competitive market.
As promising as automation may appear, to avoid disastrous results from its application and achieve its benefits for your business, it needs to applied from a deep point of understanding through your marketing process.
There are still many mistakes being made that limit the success businesses are having with it. Here are 3 mistakes that are commonly made by businesses, that should be avoided when using an automation system.
Top 3 Automation Pitfalls That You Should Avoid
1. You focus on selling not relationship building
First automation pitfall is focusing too much on selling. Yes, automation is a great sales tool that can be used for bringing in more paying customers for your business. However, its basic function is first, to build and nurture leads into paying customers and beyond. That is only when it works effectively.
So over time, you learn about your audience needs, desires and pains. That’s invaluable intelligence for any business.
The problem is that many businesses make the mistake of trying to close the sale too fast and that could spell disaster for your marketing automation strategy. it could turn the customer off from your business. it could also close the sale too quickly, but overtime it could result in poor retention of customers and less revenue.
It is first important to focus on nurturing the relationship with your leads by providing for them constant information that would educate them and help solve their problem through a great automated content, before punching the sales button. A good knowledge of the sales funnel stages will help you better understand how to implement this process. Some good CRM software are Intercom and Simplycast.
2. Offering the wrong content 
Second, automation pitfall is wrong content offering. The quality of your content and where it is used in the buying cycle matters a lot in your automation process
You want to create great content that solves the problems, pains, challenges of your audience and drives demand. If your content doesn’t do that, then you’re making the wrong investment.
Good content that will help drive demand and can be automated, is content that is relevant to your buyer at each stage of your sales funnel. Most marketers do not have a deep understanding of audience problems, buying triggers, market conditions and buying process and as a result, are not generating the right kind of content.
Before you begin using automation, you need to get a better understanding of the kind of content you need to produce.
Not only that, you also need to make sure that you have the personas of those who signed up for your list even though you have the right content, and segment your email list accordingly so that you don’t get to send a right message to the wrong group of people.
It is essential you have this data if you want to create relevant content that speaks to your audience otherwise your marketing automation efforts will be futile.
3. Incomplete grasp of the Manual Process to be Automated
Before investing valuable time and money, applying automation on a particular process, it is important to understand the current manual process that you want to automate and find out if an automation would be right for it. This helps you know whether such a process requires the application of an automation or not.
This is essential because applying automation for a process that does not require it, might end up resulting in more harm than good for the business.
A proper breakdown of the process will help you understand and identify where automation can affect it in a positive way. Sometimes not all areas of a particular process needs an automation. For some portions. an automation might easily work, while it just would not make sense on others. Making the right choices at this point can have major implications in the success or failure of your project.
Understanding this, depending on the process being considered, may be a bit complicated and time-consuming and may have you bring together the teams and subject matter experts, but in the end the outcome is always rewarding when done right.
No matter how tedious the learning process might be, having a full grasp of the manual process and identifying the right areas where it should be applied will help you avoid the mistake of having an automation process work at a disadvantage for your business. Learn the best email automation tools in my previous article.
Ensuring those automation pitfalls don’t affect you
Surely, automation comes with lots of benefits for your business prominent among which is to save time, cost and increased productivity. However it cannot achieve all marketing benefits for the organization as a whole. By avoiding the automation pitfalls, you can maximize the benefits for your organization. An intelligent application of it in your business can give your company that extra push and edge it needs to thrive well in the face of competition while a wrong application of it could also spell doom and disaster for your business.
