Overcoming the 3 Common Barriers to Successful Marketing Automation

1. LACK OF EFFECTIVE MARKETING AUTOMATION STRATEGY

Without an effective strategy, automating your marketing is almost impossible. 58% of the survey respondents from the Marketing Automation Trends for Success report, find this as their toughest barrier.

Whether you are already using marketing automation or not, rethinking your strategies is never a bad idea. Pardot created a Marketing Automation Success Plan Template that you can download and personalize to help map out your plan for success. If you need help setting this up, please visit our Salesforce Marketing Cloud page to learn more.

2. POOR SALES-MARKETING ALIGNMENT

Poor communication is usually the #1 killer of sales-marketing alignment. Open up the fields of communication between the teams so that sales understands marketing better, and marketing understands sales better. (Check out Pardot’s 6 Steps to a Better Sales-Marketing Strategy blog for implementation tips!)

3. INADEQUATE CONTACT DATA QUALITY

“54% of B2B companies estimated that at least quarter of their marketing database was comprised of old, inaccurate, unusable, or duplicate leads.”- Spear Marketing Group

Using cleaning tools (such as Data.com Clean) will automatically match, attach, and enrich your prospect records in your CRM, which can then be synched to your marketing automation platform. This will help keep your data, complete, up-to-date, and accurate.

After cleaning all your past data, be sure to keep your future data organized and accurate as well. You can achieve this through progressive profiling because it allows you to gradually collect data on a lead over time. This gives the website viewers shorter forms to fill out each time they visit the site. Check out the progressive profiling overview from Pardot. For more information on Pardot, please visit our Salesforce services page.