Little White Marketing Lies

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2. Marketing Automation will save you boatloads of time

Little White Marketing Lie 1: Because of exactly that: Because by definition, in order to be extraordinary requires something to be unusual, remarkable or surprising and outside of the established order. The real question is, what about your customer service is surprising or remarkable — so extraordinary — if you will — that clients walk out the door and are compelled to tell other people about it?

I would argue that most of what occurs in the vast majority of businesses merely falls within customer expectations. They expect to be treated like guests. They expect to receive a great service or buy a product that does what was promised. They expect for you and your employees to be cheerful and helpful. They expect you to be knowledgeable about your work, your products, new techniques and trends.

There is nothing exceptional about simply meeting expectations. Why is there a disconnect between what business owners believe to be true about their businesses and what their customers are saying? C-suite execs and MAP Vendors are equally guilty of perpetuating this lie. Marketing Automation platforms are multi-channel, involve different segments, engage sales and marketing, and activate prospects at different points in the funnel.

Marketing automation should touch every part of your organization — customer support, sales, lead generation, lead cultivation, marketing, recruiting, after-sales, etc.

It requires dedicated focus and special skills. Looking for a rockstar with years of MAP experience may not be your best bet. Platforms have changed, technologies have changed, and there are dozens of new channels to engage prospects. Do they know how to correctly configure what attributes need to be sent to the marketing automation platform — and how to map that information?

Delusions About Advertising Don't Serve Us Well

How is personalization added to your marketing messages — merge vars, liquid logic, etc? Progressive profiling requires a technical understanding of how data is gathered and how to best segment this information. Beyond the technical skills, an understanding and experience in email deliverability, email list best practices, and reengaging old leads are valuable assets to keep your emails out of the spam folder. When was the last time you asked a MAP Vendor for their email deliverability rate and statistics while researching platforms?

After all, the hefty price tag should guarantee email deliverability, right?

Why Those Little White Lies the Ad Industry Tells Itself Aren't Going to Help Fix Anything

One of the most overlooked considerations for a MAP Vendor is email deliverability rate and email list policies. Talk to your vendor about this up-front to avoid serious deliverability issues that can wreak havoc on your lead gen program.

MAP Vendors are not one-size fits all, and it is not a decision to be made lightly. Your systems and technology must match your business needs. Still, a lot of advertising out there ranges from bad to annoying.

It's also true that not all advertising is created equally. Some companies have to market things with ads in which puppies, penguins, little kids or hot models wouldn't make any sense. One of the favorite examples of the "consumers actually love advertising" crowd is fashion advertising.

People buy fashion magazines just to look at the ads. But last I checked, fashion makes up a very small slice of the marketing and content pies. It's not something that's exactly transferable. Readers opening a magazine to look at pretty people and the latest in fashion will no doubt be drawn by the pretty people and latest in fashion in the ads.

No one gets overly worked up about the editorial-sales wall in these magazines because you never could tell the difference between content and advertising. Well, maybe someone is, but I assume it's a very small percentage of the reading population. And when you start trying to slide "native advertising" into news and science magazines, people will, rightly, get very angry.

1. Implementing a Marketing Automation Platform is “set it and forget it”

Another argument I've heard is that ads are useful. Marketing delivers messaging to people about products they may want or even need. This is also true! Colonoscopies and oil changes are useful. It doesn't mean people like them. And it certainly doesn't mean that sometimes -- often -- they won't go out of their way to avoid them. In a way, the ad-blocking debate has made us forget a lot of things, like the long history of consumers trying to avoid what you're slinging at them.

Before the ad blocker, there was the DVR.

And the remote control -- the original ad skipper. Even without a remote, as a child I'd walk over to the Zenith -- the one that had a inch screen but took up about eight feet and weighed pounds -- to change channels when ads interrupted "The Transformers" or "G.

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