In the movie “The Truman Show”, Jim Carrey plays a character where he unknowingly lives his life in an artificially created reality. When the character becomes suspicious that his interactions with the world are not genuine, he begins a quest to discover the reality, and starts to behave in unpredictable ways. It is a great satire that brings attention to the fact that behavior changes when we start to treat something as a device-under-test.
When marketers hear the words “marketing automation”, there is an inherent lure to a utopian state where we can setup our computers to automatically coax and nurture visitors to the point where our sales efforts are completely concentrated in the right place. We certainly want to be convinced that it is possible. Unfortunately, humans do not have a history of reacting all that well to these marketing mechanization effects. I don’t see anyone raving about their great experience on receiving robo-calls; or their great experience in navigating the telephone keypad (“Touch “1” for…); or their delight in receiving what appears to be a robo-tweet; or about their great experience in talking to call center reps with ID#s and no direct call-back numbers.
There is an important tenet that cannot be forgotten. Our prospective customers are human. And given the complexity of human nature, we must recognize that some things can be mechanized and some cannot. There is no doubt that marketing automation can increase the productivity of our marketing efforts if done correctly. And if done incorrectly, it can spurn away potential customers that could otherwise be a great fit for the products and services that we have to offer.
Before we can start automating anything, it is a key pre-requisite to develop both our messaging and an appropriate level of marketing content, which will be effective in showing up on search results. Not any old search results, but search results that are presenting answers to the type of problems which customers are seeking information about. This is the key starting point from which it is possible to start to apply analytic tools to understand the digital behavior of our visitors. It is all about characterizing behavior. What brought them to us? How long did they stay? What areas were most interesting? Did they make repeat visits? With an aggregated set of behavioral data, it provides strong feedback on what messaging is effective or ineffective; and where our marketing communication emphasis needs to be applied. If we get in our visitor’s way by asking for an email, with no justification, we are just encouraging them to bounce. And that just deprives us from the opportunity to learn more about them.
If we can get to this key milestone of understanding what prospective buyers are interested in, it is then possible to use marketing automation to up the ante, in terms of what marketing content can be provided to them. But marketing automation becomes somewhat of a misnomer for what is happening. It is really “permission marketing” that we are transitioning to. And it only works if the information is perceived as useful by the visitor. If it is, it then becomes permissible to up the ante again, with new offers.
We can only expect marketing automation to get us so far. There is a reason that it is not called sales automation. Regardless of what point system we develop to score the visitors, the best that our marketing automation system can achieve is arrive at a “marketing qualified lead”. To convert it to a real lead requires that human touch from our sales people. Don’t let your marketing automation efforts be “The Truman Show” where prospective customers are spurned to run, or duped with false promises. Find ways to better understand their behavior and invest in creating information that will help them. They will be more likely to stick around and take your call when they step forward in the buying process.