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5 Critical Marketing Technology Mistakes to Avoid

Right Source | August 21, 2018

More leads. Higher conversion rates. More revenue. This battle cry is familiar to B2B organizations everywhere. Fortunately, the dedicated marketers and salespeople driving these ambitious goals today have sophisticated marketing technology to help them get the job done.

But just because you have marketing technology doesn’t mean you’re using it effectively. According to SiriusDecisions, 85 percent of B2B marketers using an MA platform believe they’re not using it to its full potential.

The only way you will be able to realize the explosive ROI marketing technology offers is by getting organized.  Here are a few of the most common organizational mistakes that keep marketers from getting the most out of their marketing technology — and how to fix them.

1. Messy Foldering Systems

Without a clean foldering system within your marketing automation platform, your team will end up wasting valuable time and effort looking for information. This could also lead to costly mistakes like incorrectly connected workflows and programs. However, a well-organized folder system will allow users to quickly and easily find lists, programs, campaigns, forms, landing pages, queries, and reports.


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If you poke around the internet, you’ll find lots of best practices for organizing your MA tool. These can be a wonderful starting point, but above all else, you need a select a structure that fits your organization.

So how do you avoid folder chaos? Start by asking yourself these questions:

  • Should marketing initiatives/activities (e.g., emails, webinars, website forms, etc.) be separate from operational tasks (e.g., data updates, lead scoring, etc.)?
  • Based on your volume of activities, should channel or date be the first level of folders under activities?
  • Based on your volume, should you begin with folders separated by years, followed by month sub-folders?

Below is an example of Marketo’s channel foldering example, which nests assets and campaigns under the corresponding marketing channel (e.g., events, digital ads, and PPC):

Need more detailed help with your foldering system? Learn more here.

2. Inconsistently named assets

In addition to having a clean organization system for your folders, you should use a standard naming convention for all assets within your CRM or marketing automation tool (often called taxonomy for you MarTech geeks). Without consistently named assets, your team will have a hard time finding and identifying those assets, which will lead to a whole lot of frustration, inefficiency, and reporting errors.

Here, you can see how a consistent naming convention can help your team easily locate the files they’re looking for:


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3. Overwhelming CRM page layouts

Your CRM can store and manage high volumes of information. But that can overwhelm your team and actually decrease efficiency if you aren’t using customization to set up your team to be successful.

Below, you can see a page layout with tons of information, but because there’s so much information, it’s not actually that helpful — it’s overwhelming.


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But with some strategic organization (like the example below), you can visually prioritize the information your team needs the most. Now, they can see the information they need at a glance, without having to sort through fields and fields of data that aren’t all that relevant to their roles.

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Plus, you can create customized layouts for the various functions within your organization, depending on the information they need at their fingertips.

4. Incomplete descriptions

Adding detailed descriptions to everything from programs to smart campaigns in your marketing automation gives all users the ability to quickly and easily identify what they are looking at and how it functions within the broader system. Without standardized descriptions, it can be difficult to seamlessly transfer information from user to user — which can lead to confusion and mistakes.

Good descriptions for programs and campaigns include the audience being addressed, the actions being taken, and where that information comes from and flows to.

These descriptions should be consistent across all the tools your team uses. Just think: While marketers will generally work in a marketing automation platform, your sales reps will probably work primarily within your CRM. By making sure you indicate identical fields between those systems, you can prevent confusion and keep your data clean.

5. Failing to map your field values

When you boil it down, every company’s ultimate goal is to convert leads. When you convert a lead, it needs to become a new type of record within your CRM, like an account and/or opportunity — and all the data you’ve collected about that lead should transfer to the new record.


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However, this can be a tricky process. If conversion mapping is done incorrectly, you risk losing all of the data that your marketing and sales teams worked hard to gather about your prospect.

When conversions are mapped correctly, all the data you’ve collected about the lead will transfer seamlessly to the new record. With that information, your sales team can have more informed conversations during the sales process, and your operations team can create a seamless experience for your eventual customer.

Final thoughts:

Marketing technology is an investment, no matter if you’re working with an enterprise-level CRM instance or just starting out with automated email marketing. And while it would be nice to simply press the ‘on’ button and let this new technology do the work for us, it takes a little more forethought to be successful.

By making sure your marketing technology is set up to work with the team and processes you have in place, these organizational mistakes can easily be avoided.

Need a partner in avoiding these critical mistakes? Drop us a line — we can help.

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About Right Source:

The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.