Marketing Automation vs. Customer Journey Orchestration
Dr. Luke Soon
AI Ethicist & Philosopher | Futurist | Human + AI Experience | Partner at PwC | Author of Genesis: Human Experience ?????? in the Age of AI ?? | Championing Humanity + AI for Long-Term Abundance ????
I thought it interesting to review the current adtech, servtech & martech landscapes - it's been awhile. I've gone through the iterations - as in implemented (oh, some were so painful), you name it, CRM, CI, CEM, CXM, NBO, NBA and more recently XM and now probably a sub-set: CJO. Let's start with the basics: there's sales, service and marketing - our traditional siloes in any/most org. Yes. still.
With sales, there's relentless focus on lead generation, funnel management - hence the Eloquas of the world, and now Salesforce.
With marketing, there's lead conversion and the management of program/campaigns - hence the likes of Teradata, Unica, SAS.and more cloud-recently, Adobe. I think a recent infographic by Scott Brinker @chiefmartec showed 9000+ icons/vendors on a crowded martech landscape!
Therefore I thought it wouldbe intereting to contrast the 'old' vs 'trending' : enter the ring Marketing Automation and Customer Journey Orchestation. But first, some definitions.
Marketing Automation (MA) or Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) — which is best? Discover the ins and outs of each, and which will offer your business the most benefits.
When it comes to CX approaches, marketers need to choose between two different strategies: marketing automation vs. customer journey orchestration (CJO). While marketing automation is often part of customer journey orchestration, the latter is more complex.
Sometimes, however, your needs may only require simpler marketing automation. Below is a look at the benefits of each.
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation focuses on using software, such as campaign management platforms, to automate repetitive tasks or interactions that may happen between customer and brand. These can include things like email marketing, social posting, digital advertising and even some web and mobile personalisation.
Important to tnote that MA is often campaign (not journey) focused, more singular in nature and leverages cross channel capabilities. Through marketing automation, a business gets to streamline and fasten the process of its interaction with its customers.
MA helps a business cut down repetitive tasks and enhance the output of its marketing teams.
With MA brands can automate marketing tasks such as:
MA is typically thought of as the vehicle firmly centered on solving the ‘how’ of facilitating scalable processes, data signal responsiveness and operational coordination to get ideas into delivered campaigns and is often a component element of customer journey orchestration.
Marketing automation can decrease cost and effort of execution, increase scalability and, if designed well, it can operate in real-time to act or react based on customer/prospect target actions and help carry through a journey or experience.
领英推荐
The Benefits of Customer Orchestration
By contrast, customer journey orchestration is much more holistic and advanced - focusing on setting up detailed customer journeys, which are often groups of campaigns (comprised of a series of steps and interactions) that a customer may take over a portion of time or even a lifetime with a brand.
Orchestrating a customer journey then adds a level of complexity whereby advanced data management, analytics and optimisation capabilities are necessary.
CJO involves the use of customer journey mapping technologies with the intent of guiding customers to end conversion events versus forcing them down predefined marketing paths.
According to Forrester, CJO allows companies to discover, optimize and?orchestrate journeys, with platforms helping companies?use real-time data?at the individual customer level to analyze current behavior and predict and adjust future behavior.
CJO is really about building authentic relationships with prospects and customers, whereas MA can be perceived as impersonal and checking boxes in the sales funnel to convert a lead.
Most marketing strategies today revolve around a customer journey - being able to focus on how a customer behaves and what route they take to transact adds predictability for a sales team. CJO brings granular personalization and relevant content on an individual basis and is the next level of CX — this is the pinnacle of marketing activity and what many consumers now expect in their advertising communications.
Automation can give a reliable flow of inquiries, orders and sales. However, due to the nature of the machine process, sometimes marketing automation will fail to create trust and loyalty from customers, Warner explained.
Without the injection of ‘real time’ and current messaging, the content may have a negative impact on brand image if the approach doesn’t relate to ‘live’ affairs (such as promoting socialising during the pandemic lockdowns.
Though analysts agree that marketing orchestration is more advanced, that doesn’t mean it’s right for every organisation.
What Questions Should Marketers Ask?
When deciding on an approach orgs should ask the following questions and be very honest with themselves:
Example if we had a bank that needs to track customers — CJO works better from performing research on a mobile device to making an online purchase to calling customer support, all over the span of weeks - however MA works better for batch-based single-channel campaigns. Orgs with less sophisticated needs, perhaps fewer channels, for example, might choose marketing automation over CJO. Campaigns from marketing orchestration help to form the basis for CJO.