But it’s important to keep in mind that marketing automation is a tool, just like any other marcom tactic, and it has its limitations. You can’t expect it to completely replace the role the sales force or marketing team-it is intended to empower, not replace.

But don’t let this scare you away from marketing automation. It’s still extremely valuable and powerful and can make a huge difference in marketing and sales efforts.

You just need to find the right balance.

Automated marketing programs can help generate leads, increase conversions, improve loyalty, send targeted emails, take advantage of social media, grow relationships, increase your bottom line…the list goes on. All of these operations can be automated to varying degrees, but you’ll always need to fine-tune it, keeping an eye on what is working for different audience segments and which campaigns are better performing.

More than just an email

One common misconception is that marketing automation is just email marketing. While email is one aspect of marketing automation, it goes way beyond that, enabling you to better understand, manage and convert leads.

You can actually see where prospects are in the sales funnel and target specific marketing content to their needs at that time. Powerful stuff!

In essence, you customize the right nurture campaign for each contact to guide them through their decision making process until they are finally a customer.

The path is simple, really. It starts with engaging contacts by providing valuable information then establishing a baseline that prioritizes these contacts. Then, targeted content can be sent to each contact, based on their interest and activity, with the goal of turning some of those leads into customers.

Sustaining Interest

We can’t stress enough the importance of valuable content to keep contacts seeking more—we aren’t talking a datasheet download, here. Marketing automation needs to be driven by education, information that, at the end of the day, the recipient can say, “Wow. That was really helpful.”

That content, that value, comes from people. Marketing automation is merely the method to tell people about it and get them aggregated information.

Staying Proactive

This isn’t just a “set it and forget it” operation. As mentioned before, marketing automation can’t do all the work a human can do. To make adjustments, someone needs to be the oversight. These systems aren’t smart enough to adapt on the fly. Think of it this way—while the program tracks campaign effectiveness, you need to be making the improvements based on the data it provides.

So will marketing ever be completely automated? Not for a while. There are too many aspects of human nature that an automated system can’t account for. And although marketing automation can improve marketing efforts by leaps and bounds, it has yet to show the intuitiveness that a good marketer has to offer.