by Erik Michal, ddm marketing+communications
You’re a successful marketing agency. Your methods work. You’ve read a lot about AI-driven marketing automation, but are wary of investing in something unproven when your own people and processes have a long track record of success. Why make the investment now?
Following a trend for its own sake isn’t a sound long-term strategy for any business. In this case, there are plenty of concrete reasons why a relatively small upfront investment in a suite of marketing automation tools can yield a large long-term payoff.
It doesn’t have to be complicated
Marketing automation tools don’t ask users to take on new and unfamiliar processes, but rather speed up processes they’ve been doing manually (read: slowly) for years. The technical bar to clear is low. The data generated from a single email address, for example, can yield useful information (What products do consumers in certain regions prefer? Certain age groups?) that would historically take more than a minute to compile.
After breaking down leads into specific personas, marketers can use their automatically surfaced data to personalize ads with as much specificity as the data allows. Some marketers will want more specific insights than others, and that’s the point: it doesn’t have to be complicated.
The end result is both short- and long-term gain: data-driven insights can help a brand make more targeted sales pitches upfront, and craft more appealing advertisements over time. The same tools that bring actionable data to the surface can automatically design different content based on a user’s personal interests, tailored to the kind of products specific customers are interested in. Marketers who know what a potential customer wants next, and can scale that insight to reach hundreds or thousands of people, can see enormous returns on a small upfront investment.
Clients are expecting more sophisticated ROI measurements
Across multiple industries, leaders are cracking down on expenses, trying to measure what success means. As a result, clients need to be able to prove definitively with numbers that marketing objectives are hitting predefined benchmarks.
The ultimate goal of any campaign is to meet and exceed those benchmarks. Over time, marketers must offer more precise vision into a client’s blind spots ― trends in the market, a record of direct customer interactions — and deliver that information with convenience, to speak to a potential customer’s needs more easily. Automated marketing tools have made this easier across a variety of digital media over time. More and more, clients will expect these sophisticated data points to inform any marketing campaign.
Automated tools help a marketer show their work with more than just aggregate reporting (identifying trends within and among audience groups). They also help with lead scoring by delivering insights on individual actions with your ads.
Those data-driven insights include:
- Which leads you can ignore
- Which leads should you spend more time on
- Which leads aren’t quite ready to make a purchase, but are worth reaching out to, educating, nurturing, before ultimately saying to sales ‘now is the time to step in, they’re ready.’
Remember that lead scoring involves researching which leads are highly engaged with your content and which content is yielding the highest lead scores. Marketing automation tools are great at harvesting this data — marketers who are familiar with these concepts will grasp it intuitively.
Where to begin
Say you’re interested in marketing automation for an email campaign. Start with a few emails and study them. Bring those performance reports back in-house and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Think critically about what the data tells you, and be curious about what it doesn’t.
Before scaling up any campaign, consider the major pain points for your sales team. Marketing automation will likely be able to reduce the burden on your human marketers, so take time to learn where they need help. Wherever data on a customer is missing, test the limits of how much of that data might come to the surface using automated marketing tools. You might be surprised by what you learn.
When taking the leap into understanding data-driven insights, it’s common to not understand what that’s going to look like in the end. Your CRM and marketing automation platforms can help aggregate your data into surprising bigger-picture trends — but only if you take the first step of putting data into the funnel to begin with. Dive into the uncertainty, explore, play with the data, and learn as you go!
Erik Michal provides email and marketing automation leadership for ddm marketing and communications. Since 2020, Erik has delivered innovative solutions and industry expertise to ddm’s clients. His passion for problem solving, creating structure, and understanding data systems continues to open the door for success in industries like medical, finance and insurance for ddm.