It’s 2020. Marketing automation can boost your business. It’s time to find out how.

Emakina Marketing Automation Practice Lead Maarten De Neve invites you to see the world through new eyes in the new year.

Of course, marketing automation is a topic on the radar of many people in business today. But do you have a clear plan to make it a true value-adding factor for your company?  

To start the year on the right foot, here are some key marketing automation insights you need be aware of

The last years, many marketers have struggled to keep focused on long-term growth. They often downgraded data and technology to only serve short-term goals. Our experts would take center stage to create a small or big black box, that would leave much to be desired in terms of added value for marketeers. 

In the meantime, it has become clear that marketers must step away from generic experiences. So, it is the right moment to highlight the added value of marketing automation inside their marketing model. Let’s be clear, it’s their only option today to remain competitive. 

Emakina has an ace expert team working on Marketing Automation.
Contact Maarten De Neve and find out how they can help you.

How do we bring added value on 4 levels to marketing automation? 

1. Strategy: from buzzword to value creation 

A lot of the 2019 reports addressed the rising and unreasonable expectations of consumers.  In 2020, the moment is right: it is time to meet those expectations. Our advice? Grow your marketing automation maturity, because growing relevance and value, equals growing business.

How to become relevant to meet your users’ expectations?  

Fine tune your internal roadmap towards personalized experiences, by focusing on the value they bring to your business. That means going beyond simply automating an existing process, creating top-topical content calendars or birthday mails. It is essential for successful marketing to relieve pain points and create a personalized service that adds real value to your business. 

2. Data: sort your data strategy and grow maturity 

It’s less and less about collecting huge amounts of data. Think beyond the demographic or declarative segmentations.

We make a lot of our assumptions based on a persons’ age or life stage… consumers know their behavior shows the real-time needs and pain points they have. This means that as a marketer you are obliged to derive relevant insights and create experiences upon those insights. 

How to create relevant insights as a basis for rich user experiences?    

Find an individual’s desire or pains: assure you have a view on your unique customers’ interest and behavior (in every touch point in their journey) and build experiences upon those.  

Grow into real-time data: start by focusing on digital behavior and prepare for physical behavior (we are sure that in the near future, we all would be happy to use Alipay’s ‘Smile to Pay’). 

3. Creativity: choosing for automation and data is too often linked to ‘ditching creativity’ 

A lot of agencies and consultancy firms are looking for that perfect mixture between data and creativity.  But it shouldn’t be the battle it is often claimed to be. Data and creativity can be a perfect couple, a match made in heaven! Plenty of agencies and companies are still struggling to achieve this, but the benefits of doing so are clear.  

How to combine data and creativity?

It should be key for you to win the heart of your consumers by mixing both the short-term activations and the brand-building long-term mindset, based upon data.  

The right way forward is to install a process to assure you find your way to deriving the right insights upon the right data and sync them in a recurrent way with your creative teams.  

4. Platform: use your platform to the fullest 

We’ve optimized our e-mails for 100% deliverability, we’ve segmented to the best of our possibilities, etc. But we are often not mature in the use of our digital tools. Take a next step in making sure your money is well spent, by getting more value out of your marketing automation platform. 

How to optimize your marketing automation platform for best results?  

Go for real value for your team.  
These tools are made for automation, so make sure you ditch your manual/production work and allow your team to focus on strategy, growth and marketing- or business-results. 

Create a connected eco-system.  
Step away from e-mail marketing only and connect your owned media (website, app, chatbot, …) and paid media (audiences, automated advertising, …). This is the path to prevent that your customers have bad experiences, due to your platform- and data-silo’s. 

Conclusion 

In 2020, marketers who want to compete and beat businesses, need to make sure to use Marketing Automation as a real added value for their business. 

Start to create added value for the team by focusing less on production and more on results. That can easily be done by using digital (Marketing Automation-) platforms to their full capacity, 

Generate added value to your marketing-initiatives, by clearly reaching pre-defined objectives and improving results that add value to the business. 

It is high time to bring added value for consumers leveraging data, by connecting the data-silos still living today and by connecting the media-touchpoints to relieve pain points or add services. 

The year is off to a good start at Emakina. We hope to see creative communication, data and technology less used as instruments for short term goals. It is time to create a real movement of people working on innovation, focusing on relevant, behavioral data and building consumer experiences that add real-time value to your consumers.  

Let’s be clear, that should be the new golden standard to win the hearts of your clients and prospects in 2020!  

Want to boost your business with Marketing automation? Excellent.
Contact Maarten De Neve to help you optimize your marketing data management and activation initiatives.