Boosting the value of marketing automation

For nearly 25 years, the core purpose of marketing automation has remained unchanged: to automate both simple, repetitive email tasks and complex communication flows, helping marketers work more efficiently. In today’s fast-paced environment, marketers face constant pressure to achieve more with fewer resources. Automation—and more recently, AI capabilities—has become an invaluable ally in meeting these demands.

The market is flooded with marketing automation tools, each catering to specific needs. These tools can be categorized based on various features and use cases. In this article, we’ll explore the common challenges marketers face when integrating and utilizing these tools. More importantly, we’ll discuss how choosing the right tools can help avoid these obstacles and unlock their full potential.

What is marketing automation? 

As marketing automation is well-established, there’s no need for an extensive introduction. By definition, it refers to “software platforms and techniques designed for marketing departments and organizations to automate repetitive tasks.” However, it often goes beyond simple automation, enabling processes that would be nearly impossible to manage manually.

The true power of marketing automation lies in its flexibility. With triggers and conditions, you can design workflows that respond to specific actions or criteria. Triggers set the events that start the automation process (e.g., a form submission or customer interaction), while conditions determine when an action should occur (e.g., a customer opening an email or visiting a particular page). This enables you to create workflows for a wide variety of scenarios, offering virtually endless possibilities to personalize and optimize customer journeys.

However, the successful implementation of marketing automation depends on the skills and resources of your marketing team. That’s why marketing teams should prioritize solutions that are easy to learn, implement, and maintain, instead of opting for feature-heavy systems that may be difficult to integrate and use. Technology should enhance productivity and efficiency—not add unnecessary complexity. Even smaller teams should be able to design and execute sophisticated workflows without friction.

To truly unlock the full potential of marketing automation, seamless integration with other marketing tools and features is essential. This can be achieved by either investing in complex integrations or choosing solutions that offer native interoperability with other capabilities.

Approaches to marketing automation

There are two primary approaches when implementing marketing automation:

Approach 1: Stand-alone marketing automation tools

The market offers a wide range of stand-alone best-of-breed marketing automation tools, each with different capabilities. However, before you can fully leverage these tools, you’ll need to integrate them with your existing ecosystem. This involves syncing with other systems such as your CMS (content management system), DXP (digital experience platform), CRM (customer relationship management system), CDP (customer data platform), email marketing tools, contact management systems, or website forms.

To unlock the full potential of these tools, seamless integration with personalization features, lead scoring tools, and other platforms is essential. However, these integrations are complex, and most mid-sized marketing teams often lack the expertise, resources, and IT support necessary to implement them successfully.

Approach 2: Built-in marketing automation tools

Another approach is to use marketing automation technology that is natively integrated into an all-in-one marketing platform, such as a CMS or CRM. These platforms often include a range of other digital marketing capabilities that are seamlessly connected.

Such platforms offer a fast time-to-value, enabling marketers to immediately start using various features without extensive setup. The synchronization and interconnection of features are ready out of the box. Some platforms even allow for the reuse of web and email content within marketing automation workflows, further enhancing efficiency.

However, adopting such a multi-capability solution requires alignment with a higher-level digital strategy. Businesses must recognize the value of a consolidated solution in order to fully leverage its benefits.

Top barriers to adopting marketing automation

MarketingCharts.com, in collaboration with Ascend2 and its research partners, published a report titled “Biggest Barriers to Full Use of Marketing Automation Tools” (see Figure below). The report highlights key obstacles preventing marketers from fully leveraging marketing automation. These include a lack of skills and knowledge, budget constraints (ROI), complicated setup processes, challenges with integrating other tools, and decentralized data.

Let’s delve deeper into these barriers, exploring their implications and potential solutions to help marketers overcome these challenges effectively.

Lack of skills, knowledge, and capacity: 

Many digitally immature teams lack experience not only with marketing automation tools but with marketing automation itself. Even for those who understand the concept, adopting new third-party tools often introduces unfamiliar interfaces that hinder productivity. Teams commonly face challenges in designing effective email workflows, setting clear goals, and measuring success. Additionally, creating essential content, such as compelling calls-to-action for workflow emails, remains a significant hurdle.

Complicated setup, decentralized data, and the inability to integrate:

Implementing marketing automation technology often requires support from internal IT teams or external consulting firms. The process involves setting up the tool and integrating it with various third-party products and services, such as:

• Email services

• CMS (content management system)

• CRM (customer relationship management)

• CDP (customer data platform)

• Contact management tools

• Tracking and analytics systems

• Personalization tools

• Lead scoring solutions

These integrations are crucial for tasks such as capturing proper contact data through web forms, and synchronizing and organizing it within your CRM, CDP, or contact management tool.

Only after completing these challenging tasks can marketers begin testing, debugging, fine-tuning, and managing their first automation workflows. Like any third-party integrations, marketing automation requires ongoing maintenance, regular updates, and bug fixes—activities that demand resources from multiple teams.

Consolidation: overcoming challenges in marketing automation

As we've explored, marketing automation presents unique challenges, from lack of skills and knowledge to complex setups and integration difficulties. However, these obstacles can be significantly reduced by choosing the right solution—one that is both easy to use and seamlessly integrates with your existing tools.

The all-in-one approach makes it easier to unlock the full potential of marketing automation by ensuring that all key components—such as content management, email marketing, personalization, segmentation, and automation workflows—are natively interconnected. Since these components are developed by the same vendor, they share a unified UI, UX, and codebase, making the platform easier to learn, use, and maintain for both marketers and developers. Marketers become more efficient as they no longer need to juggle different tools, switch between applications, or handle multiple vendor support teams.

Additionally, some modern platforms offer content repositories that streamline content reuse across digital channels. For instance, website or landing page content can be repurposed directly for marketing automation emails, eliminating the need for manual copy-pasting.

While implementing a larger, consolidated software platform may require more upfront effort, the long-term benefits are substantial, particularly for mid-sized and upper mid-sized businesses. This approach simplifies processes, reduces complexity, and delivers greater efficiency over time.

Key benefits of a consolidated marketing technology stack:

Maximize marketing automation efficiency with Xperience by Kentico

Xperience by Kentico’s new marketing automation tool leverages 13 years of expertise and has been designed for ease of use. It seamlessly integrates with key platform components like the content hub, personalization and segmentation, forms, tracking, consent, and contact management—allowing you to build more efficient workflows.

With quick access to customer tracking data you can easily create automation conditions based on individual actions. Setting up triggers, such as form submissions or specific customer interactions, is straightforward. Built-in consent management ensures compliance with regional privacy regulations, streamlining the process further. Unlike other solutions, Kentico offers a more intuitive, unified experience within a single platform, reducing the need to switch between multiple tools.

The workflow designer also provides a comprehensive set of tools for creating processes that support lead nurturing, retention, or upselling, helping your team achieve better results with fewer resources. This makes Kentico a powerful, efficient choice for marketers looking to unlock the full potential of marketing automation.