4 Obstacles to Maximising Marketing Automation Software and Zymplify’s Solutions
Is your business using their Marketing Automation tools to their full potential? Did you purchase the dream and then have to deal with the reality of training yourself and the team on the software, while trying to achieve your usual targets at the same time? Maybe it doesn’t integrate with your other software the way you thought or was so tricky to set up, you just gave up?
These are big issues in the marketing automation sector as a whole and at Zymplify we have experienced firsthand how these barriers can stop customers maximising marketing automation.
Obstacle 1: Lack of training resources in-platform
If this sounds familiar, then you are not alone, 39% of surveyed brands (Mediapost, Sept 2021) have reported that lack of training and knowledge base resources were the biggest obstacle to maximising the usage of their marketing automation tools. Although your marketing team may be committed to maximising their new platform, they will need customer success and training support from the outset.
How can we as Automation providers address this?
At Zymplify, the Customer Success team has recently undertaken a huge project to improve the knowledge base within the platform itself. As our primary market research source, our customers were telling us exactly this, we needed more resources in-platform to help them, outside of the onboarding process and customer support meetings. Hence the team has developed short helpful videos and useful pop-ups on the platform which cover every aspect of Zymplify.
Obstacle 2: Lack of resources to manage the new system
32% of those surveyed by Ascend2 said this was their main barrier.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a marketing and sales team feels they have bitten off more than they can chew with Marketing Automation platforms, especially when it’s the first time they introduce it to their business. The good news is, your team can learn to use the platforms if they really “own” it and plan ahead for it.
Solution: Prepare the team and Plan ahead
Prepare your team for the “new” arrival. Think of marketing automation like a new employee that has all the skills, but needs to learn how to work for your business. Any new marketing platform will require you to work closely with it for the first few months after it arrives. There will be a “settling in” period for any new software system your team uses including marketing automation. Figure out some goals first (what you want out of it) and work towards achieving those for the first 3 months, then the next 3 months, and so on. This will help you quickly identify any bottlenecks that are happening. Like any task, the platforms will only be as good as the work you put in! So prepare your team members from the outset and your company will reap the rewards later on. Read more here from Demand Spring.
Obstacle 3: We need to develop an email & content strategy, fast!
This is a common obstacle that can quickly rear its head, especially if you are embracing email automation to power up the number of emails you send, is a lack of up-to-date content to send out. All of a sudden, the marketing team can find themselves looking for fresh content to appeal to their audience. Content planning and production take time and patience and a fair amount of planning as well. In essence, your email strategy needs a content strategy! Here is some advice in a blog on email strategy from superoffice (2021).
Solution: Plan a content and email strategy for your marketing automation system
Whether your team is going to produce the content or not, it would be advisable to budget for some content/staff time to create content for your new automated emails. This could be email content, guide or brochure content, and so on. You will want to measure engagement on your content through your new email marketing automation software, knowing that it is the very best content for your target market. A content strategy is a crucial part of a new emailing campaign and your marketing team will relish the challenge to produce new engaging content to underline the business’s new strategies. Here is some advice from ryrob.com on how you can plan a great content strategy in 2021.
Obstacle 4: Implementing Marketing Automation in a Post-Covid, Remote world
There has been a worldwide shift towards remote/hybrid working models post-covid as employers’ number one priority is to create safe working environments for their employees (Gartner, software-and-saas-global-outlook-ebook, 2021). With face-to-face working at a minimum worldwide, marketing automation software has to have strong collaborative options inbuilt to the platforms, so there is visibility across marketing and sales teams.
Solution: Agile, Collaborative Marketing Automation Software Options
Zymplify allows teams to work remotely in 2 ways:
1) Zymplify is an end-to-end platform for marketing and sales marketing automation tools. The teams will have visibility and measurements right throughout the funnel from top to bottom.
2) Zymplify has full Collaboration options available throughout the platform, allowing users to directly email other users to flag any checks or edits that need to be performed on their processes.
To Sum up, there are likely to be other obstacles that your team will encounter when implementing your marketing automation solution, this blog discusses the major barriers observed by the Zymplify team.
Remember, at Zymplify, Customer Success is always there to give your team guidance on maximising the platform.
If you want to find out more about Zymplify’s end-end marketing automation platform, Book A Demo here with one of our specialists.
