The problem with marketing automation

Why marketing automation has diminishing returns in B2B lead generation.

Marketing automation is one of the hottest trends of the recent years. The idea is to automate repetitive tasks of writing emails, posting ads, creating social media and blog posts, and creating content on the website, with the intent of scaling lead generation.

Email automation

The idea is straightforward. Software tool automatically sends emails to a large number of prospective customers with their name and maybe a couple of other attributes pulled from a contact database for personalization.

These emails are sent over a period of time by an email robot in drip campaigns of up to 7 emails per recipient, after which it will stop trying for a few months. Sounds simple enough?—?you sit back and relax, and wait for the leads to land on your desk. Or that’s what the tool makers want you to believe.

See the picture above. It is a screenshot of my current unread email count. I receive tens, if not hundreds of cold email messages from robots every day. I’m so sick and tired of the robotic spam that I only open such email occasionally, out of curiosity, to learn about the new tricks the robots are trying on me. Wow, this message generator actually picked up and included one of my tweets!

Needless to say, I never respond. One day, I got this genius idea of writing a canned message to respond to the spam I receive. In it, I offer our solution back to the sales people on the other end. I posted it below for your pleasure.

Hi,

I understand that you are trying to maximize your reach with automated email prospecting. The problem is that everyone else is doing the same, making us all jaded. Robotic spamming is simply not a good way to build trust.

Harvard Business Review says that 84% of all B2B business starts with a referral.

This is what my company Inbot does. We help you get introduced to relevant decision makers globally, removing the need for spamming and cold calling. If you are interested in learning more, read my blog post about the importance of emotional intelligence in business.

Thank you, and have a great day.

Mikko Alasaarela | Founder, Inbot

Ok, by now you have realized cold emails are not working. You call the marketing automation tool vendor to complain, and they say that you are doing it wrong. You have to gather your mailing lists via social media and blog posts so that the recipients have already engaged with you and know your name when they receive the message.

Social media automation: Twitter

You decide to double down on automation, and purchase a social media automation tool. The app comes with a nice, pre-populated stream of popular articles that relate to your business. Simple enough, you connect your Twitter account and start a drip campaign of timed Tweets, and put the system on autopilot. You grab a cup of coffee and start waiting for the followers.

After a while, you discover a few peculiar things. Your account gains temporary followers that unfollow you within a week. When you have a hashtag in your tweet, many people add you to a list. When you follow people, they immediately send you a private thank-you message.

A horrifying realization hits you. These are all bots who are doing it automatically. You test your thesis and respond to a private thank-you message, only to realize nobody is responding. It was only a bot.

Social media automation: Facebook

Realizing that you are not reaching any real people on Twitter, you try your luck with Facebook. At least it has real people looking at your robotic posts! You open a Facebook page for your business, and let your social media automation tool to cross-post your automated stream also to the Facebook page. You lean back and wait.

After a few days, you realize there is no engagement on the page. You ask your friends, and they say that Facebook is throttling your page’s organic reach. You need to promote your posts to gain more followers.

You triple down, and purchase a Facebook advertising automation tool. You dedicate a budget, create a campaign and let the automation handle the distribution. A day later you see that your post has a lot of likes! Yippee!

Then you look at the people who liked your post. You find out that even though you strictly focused the campaign on your target customer profile, the persons liking your post seem to be random and not from your intended audience. Many of the accounts even seem to be relatively young, and have very little engagement on their wall posts. A terrible realization dawns?—?what if they are also bots?

Bots are taking over

When everyone automates their prospecting with bots, messaging and media becomes a cacophony of automated messages no human reads. With the new response automation systems, we will soon see marketing bots messaging with customer service bots in an ever-escalating robotic shouting contest.

The reason why bots are proliferating is that technology scales much better than human labor. Software is eating the world, as they say. 3784 marketing automation software vendors can’t be wrong!

With all this desire for automation and scaling, an important truth remains.

Humans still prefer to talk with other humans.

You can’t fake the human connection. If you strip it out, you lose the trust.

How to scale human connection

In business, trust is everything. I discuss this in another post, which is about emotional intelligence in business. When you run a B2B company, you need to build trusted human relationships to succeed. To scale your business fast, you have to rely on technology. The question is, can you have both?

The problem with scaling relationships is that you can only maintain a limited circle of trusted friends. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could discover all the people, who can open the doors to your customers, and make acquaintance with them? Wouldn’t it be even nicer, if you could strip out all the busywork with prospecting, bots, spamming, cold calling, and social media posting? What if you could spend all your time meeting customers and building trust instead?

This is what my startup Inbot does.

If you are interested in learning more, email me. I would be happy to be at your service.

Berlin, 1.12.2016

Mikko Alasaarela

—

We founded Inbot to make business a more emotionally intelligent activity. Our technology finds trusted connections to relevant customers. It strips out the hustling, spamming and cold calling, and leave entrepreneurs with what matters?—?warm introductions to customers.

In addition to technology that finds trusted connections to decision makers, we have built a community of ambassadors. The Inbot Ambassadorcommunity consists of trusted entrepreneurs, executives, investors and community builders. They deeply care about helping others, and have joined to build more caring business relationships. We are currently operational in 39 countries.

If you have a B2B product or service that has great existing references, trusted executive team and ability to ship internationally, we would love to discuss how we can help you grow your business globally.

Also, if you are a trusted executive, entrepreneur or investor willing to expand your network, I am happy to discuss including you in our community.

PS. A few hours after posting this, I received this (most likely) automated message. The sender definitely didn't read my post. Kind of drives my point home.