New Uses for Marketing Automation
Perhaps the biggest advancement for marketing automation will come with artificial intelligence (AI). The key tenet of AI involves enabling technology to teach itself. As AI becomes more advanced, it can be combined with marketing automation to enable those solutions to accomplish more with the data provided them, Anderson predicts. Instead of simply accomplishing one task based on an established set of rules, the technology will begin to notice patterns and provide suggestions to marketers based on those patterns, she says.
“You could see a world where your marketing automation solution would look at all the content you have on your site and look at all the sales data that you have and say, ‘Hey, I noticed that 30 percent of the customers that end up closing view these three articles—would you like to turn those into an email series, or would you like to surface those better for certain audiences on the website?’ When you combine AI with marketing automation, I think those sorts of things are really possible,” she explains.
THE BOTTOM LINE: WHY MARKETING AUTOMATION MATTERS
Marketing automation technology is already able to lighten marketers’ workloads by taking charge of various processes, and it will only become more powerful in the future with additional data from the Internet of Things and the advent of artificial intelligence. Yet while improving workflows is certainly important, the true value of marketing automation solutions lies in their ability to improve relationships with customers—a quality that marketers should always put first and foremost.
“You want to make sure that you’re doing things that build a relationship and trust, that engage customers with the kind of content that is most important to them,” Hicks says. “Ads are tricky; ad blockers and ad blocking technology continue to get smarter and smarter, and it’s going to be hard to get your message through, unless what you’re offering up is something that is very relevant and engaging and important to the client that you’re dealing with.”
Automating timely and relevant communications with prospects and customers enables marketers to provide personal interactions at scale. “As your business grows—as you get more customers, as you get more buyers coming to your site and reading your emails—you’re able to keep that one-to-one relationship,” Anderson elaborates.
Perhaps the greatest mistake marketers can make when implementing a marketing automation solution is to “set it and forget it,” as Anderson says. For marketing automation to be a useful tool in driving customer engagement, it needs to be frequently adjusted to meet changing customer expectations. Rather than looking at marketing automation as a means of lessening their workload, marketers should view it as a powerful tool for building relationships with customers by providing them with relevant content at the right time.
“Poor marketing automation is lazy marketing automation. It’s just done to make the marketer’s life easier,” Anderson summarizes. “Marketing automation, when it’s done well, is done to make the consumer’s life better.”
Those who are just beginning to incorporate marketing automation into their overall marketing strategies should keep this in mind and ensure that the personnel responsible for marketing automation systems are properly trained. Furthermore, Anderson cautions against using the technology to accomplish a task just for the sake of it—she emphasizes that just because marketing automation can carry out a given function doesn’t mean it should. Rather, marketers need to determine the most useful tasks marketing automation can achieve for customers who are on the other end of web pages, emails, messages, and other communications. Furthermore, marketers should start small, automating just a few tasks, and expand their strategy as they acquire more data.
Assistant Editor Sam Del Rowe can be reached at sdelrowe@infotoday.com.