Authored By : Pooja Jain, pooja@accentinfomedia.com
The Marketers, with the First Mover’s Advantage mantra embedded on their minds, are no farther in the technologically driven race than their counterparts from other departments. Marketing Automation is the key to expanding the business presence in the market, and the
Many corporations across the world are evolving to serve their customers in a better way and hence increase the market share of their services. This calls for lot more degree of customization of the marketing message, which is one of the key reason why most of the marketers are adopting marketing automation tools.”
Anoop Karumathil Melethil, Head Marketing, Maveric Systems
According to a research report titled, “Marketing Automation Market” by MarketsandMarkets, the Global Marketing Automation market size is expected to grow from USD 3.3 billion in 2019 to USD 6.4 billion by 2024.
What’s driving the growth of this market is the pervasion of new age technologies like AI, Big Data and Analytics into each and every segment of an organization. With the evolution of these technologies, new use cases are coming up every day. Each department within any given organization, provided it prioritizes Digital Transformation, is leveraging these and customizing them to achieve their agenda – to ultimately expand their market reach and share.
The emergence of new technologies help marketing teams to collect tons of data from various sources from within the organisation and outside too, processing this data and learning from it on regular basis can help build strategies with much higher accuracy.”
Puneet Bajaj, Partner, IFI Techsolutions.
The Marketers, with the First Mover’s Advantage mantra embedded on their minds, are no farther in the technologically driven race than their counterparts from other departments.
What’s New in the Marketing Landscape?
“The marketing landscape has shifted from being random to insight led as well as mass market to hyper personalised,” says Anoop Karumathil Melethil, Head Marketing, Maveric Systems.
In today’s multiplayer market, the competition is no longer about how excellent or how unique your product or a solution is. With high-end technologies out in the public domain for everybody to deploy, what gives your organization an edge, is not the fact that you are using it, but how well you are using it. The uniqueness that your organization brings to the market, lies less in the product or the solution itself, than in the process of how the product/solution reaches its intended customer.
The message that you are sending across to your customer will not hit home, if it isn’t specifically tailored for that particular customer. With Big Data providing all the information you could possibly want, Analytics allowing you to process that data, and AI helping you to predict the responses of the customers, if you still fail to leverage all this to make an impact when you are reaching out to the customers, it is likely that they will slip away to other marketers who have, in fact, automated their marketing processes.
Our ultimate target is to minimise the need for Marketing Course Corrections – by applying near real-time analytics while creating & approving budgets & plans”
Robin Das, Product Head, Brandintellé Services Pvt Ltd
Why Automate?
The question that needs to be addressed here is that why is there suddenly a shift in favour of Automation within the Marketing processes that have traditionally had a very high degree of personalization.
The answer lies in the question itself. With technology becoming a commonplace, customer consumption patterns and buying
Over the course of the next 2 years, we believe audience segmentation, customer journey refinement, and campaign planning—once manual tasks—will be considerably less time-consuming, increasing operational efficiency and allowing brands the time to focus on strategy and building key differentiators.”
Mani Gopalaratnam, CTO, Customer Success, Resulticks.
Becoming a Pioneering CMO
The Accenture report, ‘Way Beyond Marketing: The Rise of the Hyper-Relevant CMO’, talks about how the pioneering CMOs are not just exploring the new directions, rather they are actively rethinking their own roles. Pioneering CMOs are 27% more likely than their old-fashioned counterparts to say that their primary expertise is in being an innovator, looking to use emerging technologies to grow the business. While their peers are paying homage to the legacy systems, the pioneering CMOs have moved on to leveraging the new technologies.
(table Accenture report pg 10)
Referring to how it can be done, Robin Das, Product Head, Brandintellé Services Pvt Ltd. uses Data Analysis as an example. He says, “Data Analysis is one of the key elements needed to create impactful and creative campaign. Through the automation process, marketers can read, interpret, and visualize data in order to tweak campaigns and make informed decision.”
There is no dearth of examples that testify the advantages of Marketing Automation. With Digital Marketing, for instance, which happens to be one of the most crucial subset of Marketing today, Automation provides the foundation on which the Digital Marketing strategy of the organization is built.
With a consumer driven market, today the need to not only understand but to study the consumer is growing and evolving at an exponential rate. Using certain tools we are able to better understand consumers and their reactions towards trends and interactions with brands which form the core of any marketing idea.”
Ankit Talaulikar, Co-founder and Director, Dreamsketchers
“Marketing automation, powered by AI and ML, are enabling marketers to move past burdensome, manual segmentation towards segment-of-one targeting,” says Mani Gopalaratnam, CTO, Customer Success, Resulticks. The cumbersome groundwork that offered a stale, outdated, limited data at best, that had to be extensively worked upon manually to extract some actionable insights, has been replaced by a massive database that when worked upon with AI and ML, delivers to the marketers all the information that they need to know to target their prospective customers one-on-one. “It is about knowing what a customer or prospect is looking for and guiding them towards the right offer or experience through a holistic, individual journey that is paved with relevant communications and evolves across interactions and over time,” Gopalaratnam added.
We are living in a world where the customer is operating through multiple devices and touchpoints. For a company to succeed in a ‘device-agnostic’ world, it must leverage marketing automation tools and improve Customer Journeys and Content discovery.”
Neeraj Singhal, Country Manager, Zeotap India
Finally
At a time when Automation is the driving force in the industry, no department can survive in the evolving market dynamic, without coming on-board with Automation. Harnessing the immense potential that lies in the concept that is Marketing Automation is the road ahead for a pioneering CMO.
