The dirty little secret about marketing automation

Reality versus the hype

There is a lot talk among sales and marketing people about marketing automation, both the process and the tools needed to implement solutions. Many larger software companies like Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and Adobe have bought marketing-related vendors, banking on the fact that the market is on a hockey stick rise in sales. Analysts like Gartner still consider marketing automation as the next frontier in CRM lead management.

But here is the reality

We recently ran a tool against more than 1,420 business websites to understand which marketing automation tools were being used on them. 200 of those could not be scraped leaving about 1,200 websites for analysis. Of those only 140 or 11.6% had a marketing automation tool on the site. Factoring in a small percentage that are using tools like Google Tag Manager to hide this information, we would say that 11% is a far cry from 60% which are stats we have seen in industry press. And of this 11%, after a deeper dive, less than 50% had much more than a contact page versus an identifiable conversion strategy and buyer process on their website.

So what's the dirty little secret about marketing automation?

Adoption is still low and even when the tools are purchased, they are not getting implemented properly on a website. People are spending loads of cash on software but user adoption, which leads to actual results, is still really low.

So why is this happening?

We have been implementing inbound marketing programs for business-to-business companies for over 10 years now and here are the top three reasons we see marketing automation being poorly used:

1.  Sales and marketing are still not getting along.