The year 2020 will formally plunge in the books as one of the most unstable, ambiguous, and challenging years that global marketers have ever seen, which made all of us more empathetic, digital, and agile.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced marketers to innovate their processes and means to achieve their goals. Use of digital channels has grown exponentially since 2020, with consumers resorting to online shopping because markets across the globe kept shutting down periodically to contain the spread of the virus. It is seen that the enterprises which were able to transform digitally were more robust and resilient because of their digital adulthood.
The advertising world has also not been untouched by this digital transformation scenario. In the digital world, building a great imaginative advertisement has gained more prominence because it captures audience’s attention and as a result yield better ROI. According to a study by Forrester, 77% of respondents believe that an automated digital advertising strategy would be beneficial for their organization.
Personalization of marketing has been a great strategy in this domain that embraces agility and automation as some of the major parameters in delivering timely and relevant messaging services. Hence, personalization of digital advertisement through automation has become a key strategy to leverage creative opportunities to provide consumers with ads that are relevant to them.
Marketing automation are software platforms and tools which not only rationalize and measure lead management and other marketing activities to generate more revenue but also to make the marketers more efficient. There are many benefits of marketing automation tools which help to provide the most relevant and effective advertisement to the right customer, some of these benefits include:
Integrated Marketing Campaigns Across Channels: It delivers digital creative across channels, formats, and markets at scale. All-inclusive, automated systems are becoming more and more pervasive in their use. Marketers can now essentially automate their actions across the various Marketing channels, whether they are working on a best-in-breed system or a Marketing Cloud. Taking advantage of this automation process and by using data in real-time and beginning targeted interactions, marketers can experience real success. This can be accomplished by merging data for targeted cross-channel promotions while instituting a single customer view. Benefits of this include the curtailment of ineptitude and recording of campaign enactments across all channels. Some of the most important options for its use in Marketing are:
Messages Based on Behavioral Segmentation Methods: It includes Marketing Automation using exact target values and behavioral pattern from customer profiles to describe the needs-based exchange routes. This signifies those customers who demonstrate a definite behavior or remain indolent can be reactivated with a condition-specific message.
Setting Up Strategic Cross-Channel Marketing Campaigns: It is a fantastic approach to develop customer journeys that span across multiple channels in your marketing plan. It enables marketers to start a cross-channel promotional campaign with a simple, graphics-based user interface and expand it as needed. Through mobile, email, and online, the solutions exemplify intricate contact situations and shapes the prospective for snowballing one’s customer interaction.
- Optimum Utilization of Marketing Budget: Marketing automation is the freeing of your marketing budget from labor costs which are tied up in manual tasks. With a greater focus on breakthrough decisions and personalized advertising campaigns, your marketing budget can be optimally used to better serve and lead your team or invest it into advertising for an increased reach. Moreover, such an approach is more likely to yield a better ROI.
- Provides Effective Measurement of Campaigns: With automation and agility, also comes reporting and management tools that can help you measure effectiveness of your campaigns to assess what works and what does not. Not only this, but advanced automation tools use AI to even predict the future performance that can provide you with some important insights as far as decision making is concerned.
- Scalability of Campaigns: A great marketing automation tool facilitates scalability of your campaigns as your business grows. With all your hard work along with enabling technologies, you would expect your organization to grow at a faster rate and hence, having marketing automation tools that can handle targeting of up to 100x audience can work wonders for you to achieve cohesive and uninterrupted campaigns.
Hence, a cross-channel marketing strategy driven through automation is more likely to drive a better ROI by virtue of cohesive and consistent content experience offered to consumers across various channels.
What Key Processes can be Automated?
Distribution and Publishing of Ads can be automated across platforms that will enable marketers to publish the creatives at an opportune moment. Google, Bing, and Facebook offer ad scheduling features.
Ad Testing automation can be done to check ad visibility, correctness, and load time etc. SurveyMonkey & Zappi are a couple of good ad testing platforms.
Automation of Bids can help increase site visits and conversions. One of the most popular examples is the automated bidding feature of Google ads.
Businesses are now fully beginning to understand the importance of such automations and they seem keen to deploy their resources to exploit their full potential.
How to Achieve Personalization Through Agility and Automation?
How many times have you noticed that a product you were exploring on an ecommerce portal suddenly started appearing on your Facebook or Instagram ad feed? Quite common nowadays; right? Such targeted and personalized campaigns are examples of how effective such automations can be.
Consumers nowadays are getting smarter and do not just depend on a single channel to make their purchase. They tend to do extensive research on various platforms and ensure that they are getting best value for their money before finally making a purchase.
For example, I might get attracted towards a latest cell phone model from a particular company advertised on TV. However, that would not be enough to propel me into purchasing that product. I would still look at online purchasing options available, visit various ecommerce websites to check our customer reviews and best deals. I might still not make a purchase until I find an Instagram Ad offering me an even better deal to make a purchase of the same product.
It is not surprising that such campaigns can work wonders for your organization. Here are some of the ways to achieve automated personalization in digital advertising:
Data Collection and Data Mining: You need to collect as much data as possible from various marketing platforms and analytical tools and then observe the patterns, anomalies, and correlations to fix existing problems and predict future outcomes. Tools like Facebook analytics and Google analytics can be of great help. Please note that it is important to keep local laws governing usage of data in mind. Defaulting on regulations like GDPR can result in heavy penalties.
Creating Customer or Buyer Personas: Buyer personas are semi-fictitious representations of your ideal customer based on data and research. They contain information about the business interests of potential customers, demographic information and data on their likes and dislikes.
Buyer personas help you understand who your customers are and how your products or services are best suited to them. Creating your buyer personas to understand your target customers at a deeper level ensures that your team knows how to work with and engage your customers most effectively.
The need to develop these types of prototypes for our best customers has produced persona generators, tools that help us not only determine where our customers are, but also how to reach them today. A couple of examples are Mnemonic AI (B2B & B2C) and Live Persona by Delve AI (B2C and B2B).
Build and Personalize Content Based on Various Buyer Personas: Creating personalized content for marketing e-mails, social media posts, website content, chatbots or push notifications etc., is a great way to attract a buyer’s attention. If the content is based on buyer personas, it is highly likely that the buyer would be interested in your products or services.
According to an Accenture survey, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide personalized offers and recommendations.
Google Optimize, Personyze, Adobe Target and Hyperise are some great personalization tools.
Offering Integrated Marketing Experience with Omnichannel Marketing: Omni channel is about delivering a consistent experience across all channels–online, mobile, social media and more. It has become important because customers are no longer loyal to one brand or company. Instead, they go where the best offer is at any given moment.
For example, if you are trying to sell a new anti-aging cream it is important to advertise online, offline, through social media posts and e-mail newsletters etc. This way your brand will be seen everywhere customers go for information about skincare products improving likelihood of them buying your product.
