The Top 10 Reasons Why Internal Marketing Automation Projects Fail

While the power and ROI of the various marketing automation platforms out there is, quite frankly, incontestable - many companies who try to adopt and manage marketing automation by themselves to transform their businesses at best struggle or at worst fail completely. 

That of course is one of the reasons Superfluity exist - our team has all the hard-fought best practice and front-line experience gained from more marketing automation implementations than any other provider we're aware of. We've built our agency from the ground up to mitigate all the mistakes, failures and shortcomings of other agencies whilst incorporating all the fundamentals and value adds into our offering, Even still, we know full well how difficult and challenging it can be to deliver a successful marketing automation project.

There are many good (and often full appreciable) reasons why marketing automation implementation projects fail and we're keen to give you a comprehensive heads-up on precisely what those reasons are. In our experience, the Top 10 Reasons Why Internal Marketing Automation Projects Fail are as follows:

(1) Inability To Use All The Functionality

It generally holds true that you don’t have to be an IT genius to use many of the leading marketing automation (MA) platforms. Aside from nightmarish, inflated platforms like Marketo, most of them are relatively user friendly – at least to those already experienced in using digital marketing technology. 

However; there is a huge difference between being a casual user of a platform and a power user and the former will often ignore (or not even notice) many areas of the available functionality offered by any given platform. Someone familiar with classic email marketing tasked with implementing an automation solution may not also be, for example, familiar with persona driven content marketing, social media, SEM, SEO, website forensics, RPM and inbound marketing as a discipline. 

Consequently, many companies - and even agencies - using MA find themselves using it as a glorified email broadcast tool [tweet this]. Equally, we speak with many companies who think they're using the full capabilities of a platform only to find from discussion with us that they could be doing so much more - and better. Only 25% of businesses who have adopted MA think that they are using anywhere near the full capabilities of their platform (Forrester Research) [tweet this].

(2) Inability To Craft The Right Type Of Content

Content is very much king - not just for marketing automation but also for virtually everything these days, including SEO. The ability to craft the right type and complexion of contemporary content and balance that with all the other important things like aesthetics, context, watering hole marketing, device used etc. is a lot easier said than done. 

Using a platform is one thing. Knowing how to craft and distribute compelling and engaging content that delivers results is another thing altogether.  It can also be very time consuming and prohibitively expensive for many businesses to do right.

Common sense dictates that the subset of people who are fully able to (a) use a platform to its true potential, (b) create the right content and (c) then strategically distribute that content effectively (and not just via email but also via watering holes, syndication, curation etc.) is fractional. Having the requisite commercial acumen, real world experience and sales expertise on top of that - to tie everything into actual results - is even more uncommon. We know a lot of people in this space who - while great at using the actual platform - just can't help but sugar-coat marketing content as content marketing and/or create fluffy pseudo content. Why? Because they know no better and they do not understand the big social and digital picture, especially in the context of marketing automation and marketing orchestration. 

Genuine all-rounder's are not only hard to come by but they are very expensive. The recent jobs and salaries listed below are just for entry-level, account executive style staff so imagine what you would need to pay for experts! Even on the agency side - it's no surprise that many of the more stack-it-high, sell-it-low providers of outsourced marketing automation sacrifice quality for cost in this area by watering down their offering and by using interns and apprentices to manage their client campaigns. We've seen ratios as high as 30 clients per member of staff at other agencies (with barely hours a week spent on individual campaigns). As a leading boutique provider, we cap our own client to staff ratios at no more than 3 and we just don't employ fresh faced kids - the stakes are just too high for our clients.

There’s an awful lot more under the marketing automation bonnet than just sending emails and tracking results and there is a fine art to crafting and distributing compelling content that not only delivers world class results but which harmonises all your investments across your social and digital landscape.

With automation, you have to keep ‘feeding the machine’ with original content and that takes time - even with the incredible efficiencies and tools these platforms offer. While most businesses have at least some quantity of existing content that can be used content marketing; most just don't have anywhere enough of it.  Even if you think you have a good bank of content already then it will still need to be adapted, framed and packaged up into contemporary content and then distributed innovatively – not just by email but also across social media, online watering holes etc. If the content isn’t good enough - or in the right context and format - you won't get results and you won't extract maximum ROI from your platform [tweet this]

(3) Inability To Find - And Retain - The Internal Resource
One of the key challenges for businesses is finding the internal resource to adopt, implement and manage the platform in the first place - and capitalise on the significant investment in marketing automation. 

Many companies struggle for 6 months or more to implement a platform only to find that they’re only really using it as an expensive email broadcast or website visitor tracking tool. Others struggle to retain the staff they have just paid thousands to get trained since there is an extraordinary brain drain (with many companies prepared to offer a great deal of money to acquire those very few people who genuinely have high impact MA experience in content marketing using these platforms). 

On the other hand - many agencies try and keep their clients at arm's length to maintain the mystique of their work (or just hide it) and desperately try to avoid letting their clients build skills on the platform that they're paying the agency to manage (out of a fear of the client taking things in-house). Personally, we're big believers in knowledge transfer and taking the client on the marketing automation journey [tweet this] that they're actually paying for so from day one we build a roadmap for all our clients to transition some or all of their managed service in-house and we then work with them over the course of the relationship - at no additional cost - to make this happen. Client relationships should be collaborative, not competitive.

It's very important to note that while you may think your automation platform partner will train you on everything you need to know the fact is that they won't - they'll provide basic support. Some/most will charge for training and set-up for starters and if they don't, the support you get will be retrospective and not on-demand. If you need to know anything then all of them will either first refer you to a video or a digital guide or they will, at best, book a quick 20 minute online call with you and that will usually be several days later at their convenience. You may have a sexy sounding "customer success manager" assigned to you but picture it like this. You've bought a car. They expect you to know how to drive so they of course won't teach you any of that. They're not management consultants nor will they know - or be expected to know - how to help you with marketing strategy. At their discretion, they'll merely show you round the cockpit of the car, explain how to turn the windscreen wipers on, point out where the cupholders are and show you how to use the radio. What they won't show you is how to really get under the bonnet to supercharge your car (or fix it). They won't show you how to hook your car up to the 3rd party caravan or trailer which you need to bolt on. They won't show you how to use advanced techniques like toe and heel driving because they only expect you to use the car for the basics (like lead nurturing) and not for advanced track racing (like content curation, true demand generation etc.). They certainly won't tell you about the raft of workarounds you have to find, learn and implement to mitigate the many naunces and flaws they have in their product (and trust us - they all have them!).

(4) Inability To Join The Dots

Although generally user friendly; most of the good systems are still relatively complex for the uninitiated and will ultimately require trained, talented and dedicated professionals able to operate them - if they’re going to be used to their full potential. Best case scenario is someone new to any given platform will usually require 3 to 6 months of dedicated usage to become what we would describe as a semi-competent, casual user. 

Furthermore, those operators must be able to build the right processes and frameworks to tether all their social, digital and even offline channels together so that they work in complete unison - all using best practice. It’s hard to know what best practice is though if you have never it done it before - and done so multiple times. The technology and the overall approach is so new to the UK that there just aren’t many power users out there and those who do exist command six figure packages.

This is an equally large problem for some agencies who think that just having a couple of kids fresh out of university creating content and using a platform mostly for email marketing (with maybe the odd tweet or LinkedIn post thrown in for lip service) is good enough. It isn’t. Neither is spinning content between competing clients, sharing data or having such a high staff to client ratio that clients only really get a few hours a week. It's like an oligarch hiring a full-time bodyguard who turns out to be a kid who juggles the protection of 20 other oligarch's with the limitations of only having a pea-shooter! 33% of companies that outsource their content marketing claim their agencies do not fully understand the content needs of their audience.

Writing content that is attractive, relevant to the prospects place in the buying cycle and correctly geared commercially usually requires years of practical business experience if it’s not going to end up being labelled as fluffy pseudo marketing. Bad content marketing is just as ineffective as interruption marketing [tweet this]. 

(5) Inability To Fully Benefit From Best Practice

Being able to use marketing automation as part of a complete ‘Mission Control’ marketing orchestration solution is often a huge challenge to businesses. While there is plenty of best practice material available on the internet, until you have physically been involved in a number of wide-scope implementations then you will, understandably, make mistakes. Mistakes cost you time, money and even reputation in extreme cases and they certainly delay ROI. We made countless mistakes over the years and it is this hard fought-for experience which now allows us to dramatically improve every other project we will ever implement and manage which saves our clients time and money by providing them with an agile solution that works first time, on time. 

Businesses who fail with their automation programme rarely blame the platform. Instead they just wished they had done things better/differently with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight [tweet this].

(6) Limited Access To Training & Support 

Access to ongoing training, support and knowledge transfer is a critical element of adopting marketing automation. As alluded to earlier, most of the marketing automation providers do not provide on demand support and certainly not to their non-enterprise customers (or at least not after a short honeymoon period). Those who do offer support usually charge for any additional training and/or helpdesk style assistance (with Marketo being one of the worst and most expensive culprits). 

Charging people through the nose to become certified on their product is like Mercedes charging everyone who buys one of their cars a big additional fee just to be called a Mercedes driver! Even Act-On (the most complete and competitive platform on the market who, to their enduring credit, assign Customer Success Managers to every client for free) are now charging new clients between $399 and $2,499 for basic set-up, implementation and training but as stated, with or without that the training is very limited and is more basic support.  Marketo charge £4,800 per year just to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 so imagine how much they charge for training and support (and then double that figure) [tweet this]! 

Superfluity, by the way, allow clients to entirely avoid all these costs. All the time.

(7) Not Starting With The End In Mind

Marketing automation is essentially a process enabler that underpins a larger strategy and is generally not a strategy in itself. It is essential to build clear objectives where the outcomes that you require are fully defined from the get-go.  Although short term gains are fully achievable with MA, it is ultimately a medium to long term, sustainable business strategy (and often a complete paradigm shift) that needs to start with the end in mind.  It’s no good, for example, automating processes and/or your buying cycle if you don’t first audit and understand what your processes and buying cycles are to begin with - and establish how they should be best flexed.

Many businesses whose automation projects failed found that, on reflection, their objectives just weren’t clear or coherent from the get go and that they weren’t ready - or even able - to expose themselves to the full suite of features. The net result was that they found their chosen platform was expensive overkill compared to their available skillset and/or resource.

(8) Not Enough Sales & Marketing Alignment

It takes time to build processes and to really get underneath both the existing and the optimum relationship between sales and marketing, especially in terms of how they each impact on the buying cycle in their own unique way. As a result, marketing teams using MA can get confused by what stage they should be taking opportunities to and, diametrically, sales teams can find themselves harvesting leads too early in their lifecycle.  

We've seen salespeople attempt to prevent the marketing team accessing their customers and prospects and resist passing leads back to marketing for them to be recycled (leaving them to fallow instead) and they frequently avoid sharing information. As a consequence, the lead nurturing, cross-sell, upsell and CRM capabilities of marketing automation can often not be used to their full potential. Equally, we've seen marketing teams become overly precious about leads that they're creating. Factor in an overpriced agency trying to fit square pegs into round holes with a formulaic, by-the-book approach to marketing automation implementation (instead of a bespoke, boutique solution that's designed to work for the client - not the agency) and clients sales and marketing teams often end up remaining in their respective bunkers. 

(9) Not Bringing All Stakeholders Into The Process & On The Journey

Numerous companies who failed with marketing automation implementations had asked their marketing team to implement the solution and had not brought other stakeholders in the business - sales and commercial for example - into the process from the start. A true understanding of important things like sales processes and the buying cycle were thus absent and had to be re-engineered into the project late in the day as a bolt-

It's important to be sensitive and transparent with the people involved in your project. Your marketing team may feel that marketing automation will ultimately replace them and see them out of a job. In reality, marketing automation should actually bring them closer to the centre of the business, make what they do more appreciated and visible and allow them to become a lot more strategic and front-foot. Equally, sales people may think that it's such a paragon of virtue that they'll never have to pick up the phone again. That may well happen but it will not happen overnight - and perhaps never happen if you're implementation fails - so expectations have to be tempered and realistic.

All the stakeholders in a business have to work together as a team when it comes to adopting marketing automation. If you're looking to outsource the process to an agency (and we strongly recommend you do - even if it's not us!) then look for one who can demonstrate an ability to think outside the box and offer you a bespoke solution. Too many agencies have built a box within a box and are refusing to come out [tweet this]!

(10) No Economies Of Scale

By default, companies purchasing marketing automation themselves will generally not have access to economies of scale when it comes to the price. The pricing model used by most marketing automation platforms means that the greater the number of overall ‘contacts under management’ within a platform then the lower the overall unit cost per contact. 

Clients doing it themselves will never receive the financial benefit of leveraging rates from all the other clients who have contacts under management through a leading agency like Superfluity. As the UK's fastest growing and most cost-effective provider of outsourced marketing automation services and multi-touch, omni-channel content marketing and inbound marketing solutions with literally millions of contacts under management - we're proud to guarantee that our clients will always enjoy a dramatically lower rate purchasing marketing automation through us then they could ever hope to receive themselves by purchasing it directly. They'll get better contract terms too (no 12 month contracts from the get-go for starters). They avoid all training and support costs and they get knowledge transfer from our experts (who even the automation platforms themselves ask advice from).