Marketing Automation 2.0

A recent Zapier study indicated that 60% of knowledge workers use automation tools to scale and anticipate a large rate of growth in automation in the near term. As employees are working more autonomously in a remote working world, feel the need to be more competitive and differentiated, it’s not a surprise that more are turning to trial and low subscription-based tools to automate routine tasks.

“Marketers (86%), IT professionals (88%), and customer service representatives (79%) are also the most likely to say that they’ll implement automation software in their next role.”

For Gig workers and marketing staffs that continue to get pressure to do more with less budget and/or time, automation will be a space to lean into right now but will become increasingly important over the next 3-5 years. The pace of change in automation will be startling and brands that aren’t pushing into this ahead of their industry will be at a disadvantage from a learning curve and a P&L perspective. To this end, the Zapier data indicates that 3 of the 5 top uses for automation in marketing are CRM and/or omni-channel related while others improve team efficiencies.

1. 42% Identify & target consumers
2. 39% Schedule email sends
3. 31% Send tailored messaging
4. 29% Manage subscriber base
5. 29% Notify team of events

Automation Doesn’t Stop with Process

More novel uses of automation in the areas of copy and creative are emerging to augment, streamline and in some use cases, replace what has been iterative and time-consuming process which has hindered time to market and driven up cost.

History has shown that digital adoption in the workplace often finds its roots in the consumer world. AI driven copywriting has been commonplace in consumer apps like GameChanger that helps manage baseball game schedules, batting line ups, scores and pitch counts in addition to game stats. GameChanger does all those things well and with a great value add – it provides a tidy game recap seconds after you’ve ended the last inning that dynamically incorporates player and team names that includes highlights for standout pitchers and batters. It’s smart enough to be gentle on the loss column but would be even better if it provided some nuance for Billy’s first hit in 5 games. Powered by Narrative Science NLG (natural language generation) processing platform to tell 8 million + stories a year. It brings the game to life for extended families and fans that can’t make it to the game, and, from personal experience, grandmas are amazed at how fast the coach types up the recap.

While not a new concept, AI driven copywriting can be a key area of automation. I’ve been following it since my days at Redbox…where a firm called Persado pitched me on their platform to optimize our email subject lines. Great subject line authoring that cuts through the inbox clutter and drives action is a human driven art, but, if you send out 15 million emails on a Tuesday with 700,000 variations of subject line, offer and movie recommendation based on past behavior, you better have a way to scale, test and learn. By breaking down the copy into six critical elements: narrative, emotion, descriptions, calls-to-action, formatting, and word positioning and running multiple real time experiments, Persado does that at scale in near real time. It’s machine learning’s ability to feed the results back into client owned models creates the continuous loop to improve each campaign. That’s automated optimization.

Any eCommerce and social media veteran can appreciate the overhead and pain of creating product descriptions and editorial content. The increasingly long tail assortments in digital storefronts combined with the benefits of intent based audience segmentation in the form of personalized landing pages are creating headaches for eCommerce operations teams. Solving real world problems like this is the domain of AI startup Hypotenuse.ai which is mastering product descriptions. To speed time to market and reduce overhead, day-to-day repeatable tasks such as blog posts and routine social media editorial content are simplified by AI driven copy from Jarvis.io. While it’s not a substitute for brilliant real time creative that capitalizes on in the moment opportunities, it processes the routine content like a champ.

While automating copy is evolutionary automation, the holy grail may be graphic assets and video. AI generated images in a space known as generative adversarial networks (GANs) has emerged with the help of NVIDIA (yes, the maker of the graphics cards you can’t get your hands on) that has produced a high level of production quality for animal, landscape and even facial image generation. This is a photoshoot at scale. While we’ve been able to use stock photography for years, GANs can create something unique for the brand while avoiding the hours of planning, pre-production/post-production overhead let alone waiting on location for the must have golden hour shot.

With the first-ever work original work of art created using artificial intelligence to come to auction at Christies went for $432,000,?the Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018) laid the groundwork for the legitimacy of AI driven media assets. This image was created by ingesting the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th. A step further would be to create an image from a text description alone. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence has done just that with a machine learning algorithm that can produce images using only text captions as its guide.?It’s a proof of concept that demonstrates that it’s not easy to anything meaningful out of text yet. So, no, don’t think you can write a brilliant creative brief and submit it to The Matrix and generate packaging, print ads or social media creative. Yet.

For marketers, the implications could be wide reaching. In lieu of using models as aspirational or representative personas, those can be created on the fly based on the profiles of actual consumers that buy your products and adjusting those images in advertising on the fly based on the performance of the ads across a number of dynamic backdrops or programmatic bid media environments.

Enter the Marketing Operations Automation Strategy

The Zapier poll indicated some but not broad adoption (< 50%) of automation across the top 5 tasks. This is a clear indication of early experimentation and nascent growth for automation writ large that hasn’t even touched upon the process heavy tasks of creative execution, product descriptions and social media editorial. ?Small and medium sized organizations that adopt, learn and evolve in this space will punch above their weight and compete against the larger 1,2 & 3 players in their category by getting to market sooner with fewer resources. Better still, it represents an opportunity to differentiate from competition.

To get there, enterprises need to ask themselves where they are now in their digital maturity and adoption of automation. Strategic evolution is the key to moving forward and follows the steps below:

1. Be Introspective - Assess the cost and time drivers in your go-to-market approach
2. Know Your 80 - Determine processes and tasks that drive 80% of the cost and time
3. Partner Right - Evaluate and select emerging automation technology for fit for your '80' tasks
4. Build Momentum - Experiment with 3-5 high impact, discrete tasks to gain experience and quick wins
5. Be Proactive - Create agile roadmap for enterprise adoption

Marketers seeking an edge on the bottom and top lines will seek out innovative uses of automation to level up their staff from managing repetition to focus on strategy. At the same time, automation will also support the rapid adoption of remote work forces while also improving brand efforts to become more relevant to consumers and get to market faster in an agile marketing world.