Do you believe the hype on marketing automation?
As a connoisseur of old school rap, we wanted to view marketing automation tools through the prism of Public Enemy.
Why Should You Care?
What if you ain’t down with Public Enemy? What if Neil Sedaka is more your speed? What if you see the phrase marketing automation and your eyes instantly glaze over like when a work meeting extends into the Hour 2 mark …
You should read this post because we aim to make this topic interesting through the prism of pop culture. We show how you can use marketing automation to drum up substantial new business and, besides, we compare it to flatulence. Where else you gonna see that comparison? Keep reading!
Cue Up the Marketing Automation Example
We recently received a LinkedIn invite to connect with someone who most likely automated the organic LinkedIn outreach.
This message is impersonal, generic and sloppy. The person didn’t bother with a personalized first name placeholder and addressed me as “Hi there.”
The Connect Request seems generic in the icebreaker, building lukewarm intrigue by mentioning that the sender is “moving into” our geographic location defined generically as “the area.”
The Call to Action has a typo where there is a “form” instead of a “from.”
In processing this invite in seconds, I got a completely inauthentic feeling that I was being splattered by a massive automation gun and, consequently, blew the dude off.
If Chuck D got this message, he might compare it to smelling a fart from a passenger next to him on an airplane. The Public Enemy frontman isn’t pretending that he didn’t SMELL automation and is calling bullsh*t.
Is a Marketing Automation Strategy Hype?
P.E.’s 1988 song Don’t Believe the Hype enjoyed immense critical success. Frustrated, confounded and suppressed by the establishment, their message to the audience was don’t buy into media lies and propagandistic marketing. The group’s leader, Chuck D, espouses that we be critical thinkers in spite of what’s presented. Hype and reality do not go hand in hand. Hype is talk without the walk.
Is marketing automation innovation or just spam? Is a marketing automation platform like HubSpot kitty litter for media and business elites to gush over in their insatiable thirst to cash in on the latest trends?
Marketing Automation Is Hype!
If you were remotely familiar with Public Enemy and Chuck D, a hard-scrabbled King to his sidekick Flavor Flav’s Jester role, you would assume the seer armed with a mic feels marketing automation is a steaming pile of bull excrement:
An automated cold email addressed “Dear Friend” isn’t intimate. It’s robotic. You’ve got our stats, but you don’t know us.
We’re just a cell in a massive Excel file. We can sense your automated “intimacy” is just you calculating a spreadsheet formula. You don’t care about us.
You spit out words in an automated SMS but we can’t hear you. Nuttin’ but noise! You didn’t segment your list and mistargeded us. We reply STOP to the disinterested bot hawking cheap carburetors.
As technology rushes, we lose touches. We believed initially in social media too. Now we understand why the people who build this stuff don’t let their kids use it.
Automated Marketing Campaigns: As Inauthentic As the Guy Who Sold You a Used Buick Sending You a Holidays Card Where He Misspells Your Name
Is Chuck D still living in the ‘80’s or does he have a valid point about the inability of marketing automation to effectively and meaningfully interact with humans?
Given the pro’s and con’s of marketing automation software, today’s digerati might chalk up P.E. as old school with critiques of marketing techniques and marketing automation tools as outdated as the group’s standard definition videos.
Marketing Automation Origin
Back in the day, prudent marketers utilized Print, Radio, TV and Billboards to hawk widgets. Today, traditional media has been supplanted by internet marketing, of which marketing automation plays a central role.
Today, marketers use software like HubSpot to create automated marketing workflows and marketing activities from launching campaigns to creating and scheduling posts, email campaigns, SMS/MMS, social media management and other “touches.”
Marketing automation is more efficient, cost effective and requires less bandwidth to nurture incipient and long-standing customer relationships. In so doing, it has morphed automation into a CRM (Customer Relationship Management), allowing integration to automate repetitive tasks and carpet bomb your contacts with some level of finesse and at a lower price point while scoring invaluable customer data.
Is There a Correlation Between Marketing Automation and Robots?
Marketing automation naysayers cite similarities. Times Magazine estimated that 2 million jobs will be replaced by robots by 2025. Robots are cleaning floors at Wendy’s, checking in guests at hotels, taking blood pressure readings at CVS, harvesting vegetables, erecting buildings and keeping malls secure as guards. Marketing automation is replacing sales people. Touch point marketing teams promoting face-to-face customer relations, flyers, street teams, personal trend influence marketing and site sampling are facing extinction. Call centers are leasing their space.
It’s All About the Benjamins!!!
Says Marketo.com:
Companies that implement this kind of lead scoring enjoy 28% better sales productivity and 33% higher revenue growth than companies without lead scoring. Marketing automation saves money and time. Done well, nurturing can result in 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead.
2 Types of HubSpot Marketing Automation Features
Content with Teeth (CWT) is an official HubSpot partner. We will discuss automation in one of the most dynamic marketing automation platforms.
A Sequence is email based. A Workflow is more dynamic because it sets enrollment triggers to automatically enroll prospects or contacts with an assortment of data points from clicking on a button in an email to past purchases.
Is Marketing Software That Automates Across Multiple Channels Just Another Dumb Trend?
We have jumped on the marketing hype train. A few years ago, chatbots were the rage. They allow automated messaging in Facebook’s Messenger and other platforms. We saw an ad on Facebook promising hundreds of leads for a bargain, $0.99 a warm body or something similarly ridiculous. As connoisseurs of clickbait, we signed up for the webinar and bought the course north of a grand.
The entrepreneur promised a 30-day money back guarantee. He answered questions diligently on a Facebook Group as we students got into the course. After 30 days, the dude ghosted, leaving students in the dust. Chatbots were a thing … yes, a scammy thing.
Marketing Automation Ain’t Hype!
Marketing automation helps and can be particularly effective when used with a content strategy. According to a ReportLinker press release:
The marketing automation software market was estimated at USD 3.60 billion in 2020 and is expected to be USD 11.46 billion in 2027, registering at a CAGR [Compound Annual Growth Rate] of 17.76% through the forecast period (2021-2027).
Businesses big and small are investing in marketing automation software like never before. Sorry Chuck D.
Need a Reliable Worker in 2021? Get a Bot …
In 2021, people talk about the “Great Resignation” where employees would rather work on their own instead of toiling for companies both big and small. In a tough labor market, employers from enterprise companies to start-ups can replace marketing efforts with automation.
A “bot” is available 24/7. If a prospect lands on your website on Friday night at 3am, marketing automation tools like chat workflows in HubSpot can respond and nurture a conversation that is sent to a human Sales Dedicated Representative the following Monday morning to follow up. Furthermore, a platform like HubSpot can conduct lead scoring to prioritize the most promising leads for that SDR.
Marketing automation is always working, requires no expensive benefits and is reliable once you have mastered the basics.
Combining Inbound Content with Outbound Marketing Automation
Content marketing, inbound or whatever you want to call it, typically snails, taking 3-6 months to create engagements.
Says Neil Patel on the long-term outbound strategy:
Do you know that it takes at least 3 months to get rewarding traffic from search engines?
To see a considerable uplift in numbers from the search engines, you’ll really need 6 months. HubSpot shared that their organic traffic grew by 538% in a year, solely by relying on their personas to dictate their keyword usage.
Marketing automation is a short-term fix. Prospects get your emails, texts or social media messages and can respond immediately.
When you combine inbound with outbound, you shorten the cycle to gain traction from your content. For example, a dynamic inbound blog post (more content), coupled with the outbound method (marketing automation), is a recipe for immediate engagements and effective lead generation.
Hey Chuck D, the “Hype” Worked For Us
Recently, we ran a HubSpot workflow triggered by contacts in our mass list opening an email blast promoting a blog post on how to use LinkedIn to develop buyer personas. We enrolled 255 people in the Workflow, landed three meetings and enjoyed interest from one business owner who ultimately signed a long-term contract with Content with Teeth.
With the addition of this previous client into a long-term retainer, we were able to pay off the cost of developing the blog and automation mere weeks into the new contract.
Best Practices for Automation
Here are some suggestions for marketing automation in general.
Omnichannel
Hit ‘em on air, sea and land with email, SMS, social media and multiple channels. People learn differently. Some from reading, others from video. Some prospects might rely on email while others engage more with a message on their phone or a LinkedIn message.
Personalize
Use placeholders beyond your name. “Dear Friend” isn’t cutting it. Consider adding name, company into your messaging to disguise your automation to prospects who are growing more savvy to impersonal messaging.
Segment
Break your lists into parts. CWT had a list of 2,500. We whittled it down to 1,000, then segmented it by business owners, marketing people and local Florida-based businesses. If we send a humorous “Florida Man” satirical post to the owner of a small business in Omaha, she is going to ignore it or unsubscribe because the content doesn’t align with her interests.
Hubspot Marketing Automation Best Practices
Here are some marketing automation tips for the HubSpot sales and marketing platform.
Don’t Spam
Don’t overload your contacts with messages. Build in delays, so you give people a breather. We recommend at least three days between messages.
In picking a particular delay, we recommend using “Delay for a set amount of time”.
Be careful with “Delay until event happens”. That means if the contact gets an email and opens it, they immediately get the next email or message. This could be useful if the prospect is eager and you want to convert them. From our experience, however, the contact gets bombarded with emails and unsubscribes. You now have lost a lead.
Go Omnichannel
Marketing automation is more than email! You can use the SMS platform Message IQ that integrates with HubSpot. You can also integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with HubSpot to gather more data on your contacts.
Use If/Then Branches in Workflows
If/Then branches follow conditional logic. IF the prospect opens your email, THEN they receive an additional action like another email or text message.
You can create different “branches” as shown by the Interest and No Interest ones above. BE VERY CAREFUL deleting an If/Then branch.
You don’t want to lose HOURS of work from a complex workflow by mistakenly selecting “This action and all after it”, removing all branches below this particular action.
Open Letter to Public Enemy’s Chuck D
You run into Chuck D at Publix. He is shopping for Henny and you forget his name, just remembering him blankly as one of the faces on that CNN ‘90’s special.
You ask him to take a selfie and he flees. He just got off a flight in Florida where some dude next to him beefed automation. He isn’t having it!
Chuck, hire us to write creative content for the Public Enemy blog. We will combine it with marketing automation that disguises the stench with personalization, omnichannel outreach and other effective marketing automation strategies.
We will prove you wrong that marketing automation is hype! It Will Take a Nation of Millions to Hold P.E. Down circa 2021.
Content with Teeth is a HubSpot marketing automation provider. If you have questions on how to wring results from marketing automation and generate leads, please get in touch.
