Marketing Automation is just the beginning

Response to the article "Market Automation is dead".

This article was published in Resumé on October 6.

LastFriday (6th October 2017) an article was published on Resumé with the headline "Market Automation is dead" The article is misleading to say the least if it is Marketing Automation that is meant as we have only seen the beginning of the era of automated communication in many different forms.Last week (3rd October 2017) we at Leadfront had an overbooked event with a focus on Marketing Automation. The attendee list consisted of C-level audiences throughout and the speakers were leaders from sales and marketing departments at Vattenfall, Telenor, Mynewsdesk, ProSales and IBM. Their stories of process development and automation where both marketing and sales departments are involved speak a different language.

Strengthening the marketing department

In the large modern marketing department, traditional marketing functions such as creatives, copywriters and graphic designers are being augmented by process designers, data scientists, conversion specialists, analysts, MA administrators and systems engineers.Jonathan Bean (CMO, Mynewsdesk) believes that the move towards automated communications in no way excludes creative and brand-building communications. Both play an important role in achieving different objectives.Sebastian Thostrup (Nordic Sales Manager, IBM Watson Marketing) showed examples of how the supercomputer Watson is being used to create powerful communications and how the development curve in Artificial Intelligence and IBM predicts that we will probably be talking to computers more than our partners as early as 2020.

Content must be value-added

What the article is really referring to is that the content of certain communications is not of a higher creative level. This is not linked to Marketing Automation as a process or technology. If you use data and analytics, you will soon see which content is perceived as value-adding instead of "spammy". That kind of automated communication is not Marketing Automation but bad email marketing.A better headline suggestion might have been, "We who do content should find our way back to creativity...".Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter below. You can also contact us if you have any questions.