When you hear the term “marketing automation,” don’t you think to yourself, “Wow, all I do is press a button, sit back, and watch the leads roll in.”

While automation may be truer in the manufacturing world where robots do the production, the reality is things don’t work that way with marketing automation.

In fact, you  put quite a bit of work into marketing automation before it really does anything for your company.

Fascinating insight: marketing automation has been around since the 1980s. Originally, marketers used software to insert people’s names and addresses from their databases into their marketing materials.

What Do You Have to Do?

Well, it all depends on how you have your system set up. But generally, regardless of your campaign and strategy, this is what you have to do:

1. Consistently Generate Content

Have you ever tried to sit down and update a blog for weeks and months on end? It’s hard, grueling work.

With marketing automation, you have to create content – and a lot of it! You’ll either need to hire a dedicated specialist for doing it, or have many of your employees working together to produce it.

2. You Have to Constantly Monitor Everything

Yes, you can use a tool to generate compelling blog post titles…but to your readers they’ll clearly sound manufactured. There’s some things software just can’t do well.

And you can check out the analytics on various pieces of content. But it’s up to you to understand what the information means, what to change about your content, and how to continue moving forward.

Remember, marketing automation doesn’t replace your marketing strategy entirely – it compliments and supports what you already do.

3. Add The Human Touch

Even though the digital world is just that – digital – it allows people to connect to companies in personal ways they never did before.

With marketing automation, it’s easy to let the software do the heavy lifting – but you shouldn’t do that. If you design an e-mail autoresponder series, don’t automate the person’s name.

You also have to test the e-mail frequency and relevancy of the content.

If prospects and customers feel like numbers, they’re going to go somewhere else with their business.

4. You Must Have a Strategy and Leads in the First Place 

Marketing automation does not work well to build your marketing campaign and get new leads for you. You must already have those.

It helps qualify and nurture leads along the sales cycle, but your marketing department needs to define a strategy for getting them.

The Truth about Marketing Automation: It Allows You to Focus on Other Tasks, but Doesn’t Free up Time

The whole idea behind it is that it eliminates much of the time you would spend on boring, repetitive, grunt-work tasks. Instead of doing those, you have more time to test and improve your marketing strategy.

And that’s a pretty cool thing because you can accomplish great things you couldn’t have before – when you figure out what works.