Marketing automation is gaining ground. The reason behind this is the growing need to produce interesting and relevant content to the recipient while saving resources and gaining economies of scale in marketing communications.
Unfortunately for many creative partners, the appearance of marketing automation has meant losing business to consultants and companies concentrated solely on technology. The situation is controversial since, with automations, the need for content production grows exponentially. As content has traditionally been the creative partner's speciality, the agencies should now be experiencing a new boom. It seems, however, that the money is spent elsewhere – why?
What does marketing automation mean for the creative partner?
The biggest problem with automation projects is their massive scale and lack of agility. It is often forgotten that automation does not mean that the software creates the content. On the contrary, automation refers to the technology that enables intrerpretation of micro signals and identifies limited segments all the way to individual level. Instead of one mass marketing message, you need segmented and carefully targeted content - i.e. more content.
In order for the creative parter to get into the automation project, you need agile and cooperative partners and technology that even the AD understands. Too often you hear about automation projects that have taken years and whose background work has taken a huge amount of time and energy. Background work is, of course, important but as important is getting to the implementation stage. Where in automation projects the processes needing automations are tried to be identified, the automations per se might change these processes. In other words, things do not look the same after automation is set up. This is the reason why automation tools and the parties involved need to be agile and able to quickly react to changes, which is not possible with massive initiation projects.
Marketing automation is not a campaign or a new channel - at its best, it can change the whole company's way of doing business and digital communications. For the creative partner, automations offer a way to closely work with the management of the company instead of just consulting the marketing department. In many companies, automation brings along a huge need for content. For the creative partner this means a lot of design. Is the software provider or the customer even able to carry out this kind of creative design?
Continuous content production
Automation is closely connected to analytics and follow-up. This is good new for the agencies, since automation is not a project that is finished at once, but a process that is fine-tuned and modified as things develop. For the creative partner this offers the chance for actual content development. When agile technology is chosen for automation, will the creative partner be a natural part of the entity and an important piece of the puzzle whose work is not sacrificed. In the end, the role of technology is to give high-quality content the best possible conditions to be seen and consumed.
Interested in discussing agile marketing automations in more detail? Contact us and let's talk some more. Liana Technologies' LianaCEM is truly a customer-based automation tool and a learning database that is used for agile marketing automation.
