Visual Contenting March 2016 | Page 56

AUTOMATION The Marketing Automation 101 Podcast from Visual Contenting discusses about the inside out of marketing automation, visual communications and how they can help small to medium businesses succeed through proven methods, best practices and expert advice. Let’s grow and thrive! In this episode, we’re going to talk about the topic: marketing automation facts and myths. Every prospect gets through a different journey to become a buyer of your services or products. They may know your company via an educational blog post, get engaged with your message via a short social media update or already love your content upon receiving weekly newsletters. The conversion path for each one of them is unique, some is short, some may span to multiple touch points. And you can’t take control of these manually; you need an automated system in place. Just imagine chasing down hundreds if not thousands of them and you know what we mean. That’s why we need marketing automation. However, there’re still many myths about marketing automation that can get you frustrated at first. Visual Contenting Today, we discuss about 7 popular marketing automation myths that you should know to get better idea about how marketing automation can actually help grow your business. Myth #1 Marketing automation is for big companies This is not true as majority of companies that are using marketing automation is small to medium businesses and many marketing automation products are specifically designed to fit the SMB market. Myth #2 Marketing automation is another way of spamming people Marketing automation is not a different form of spam because you only send relevant content to your prospects based on their interest and with their permission. It’s a way of building one on one relationship with your prospects where you educate and help them with your awesome content all while guiding them through the sales funnel. Instead of pushing (and spamming) with mass advertising messages, you nurture your prospects with content that resonates with them in a personal way. And you can only do this with marketing automation. Myth #3 Marketing automation is only for robots Many people believe that marketing automation is inhuman and impersonal and that we marketers are only talking to a wall not real people. This is one of our huge mistakes as we can sound more personal by sending personalized emails or messages to our prospects. By collecting more data about your customers, their interests and goals you will make their experience with your brand more meaningful and worthwhile. They will love you for that. Aim for one on one conversation with your prospects (or customers) to make strong connection with them and you will see its power. Myth #4 Marketing automation is all about email marketing Email marketing is one of the strongest channels for your marketing automation besides other channels such as social media, landing pages, lead generation, nurturing and management activities, so to speak.