Beat Fatigue: How Do Marketing Automation Platforms Actually Improve Performance using AI?
Today, every marketing leader understands the role of emerging artificial and augmented intelligence platforms in marketing automation. Without access to AI, most martech users would feel unproductive and redundant, costing their businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue opportunities. Martech users already leverage different types of automation tools for content creation, campaign designing, email marketing, social media management, customer journey orchestration, CRM data analytics, and business intelligence. From reporting accurate numbers to predicting the outcome of any marketing campaign, AI can improve the quality of marketing efforts by up to 90%, unlocking hidden opportunities in the economy using the top AI marketing automation platforms.
AI’s role doesn’t end with mere automation.
According to HubSpot’s “State of AI Report 2023,” marketing teams can save at least three hours on every piece of content they produce.
It is impossible to think of a modern CMO’s marketing technology (Martech) stack that doesn’t feature an automation tool. There are hundreds of marketing automation software innovation companies in the world with only a handful of these actually providing strong functionalities that can drive CRM and sales. In 2020, Instapage reported that 91% of marketers considered ‘marketing automation’ as important to the success of their campaigns. A majority of Marketing Automation software customers begin to reap ROI within the first year of adoption. However, challenges related to data integration, lack of skills, and, and technology gaps continue to be the biggest barriers to succeeding with marketing automation software. So, despite the visible challenges preventing the full utilization of marketing automation tools, marketers can earn a decent ROI quickly with AI-powered SaaS functionalities.
That’s why AI has emerged as the number one savior for Marketing Automation companies that want to top the choices of every customer they want to serve in the industry.
What is a Marketing Automation Software?
Marketing automation software is a standalone or a relatable collection of technologies that manage different types of marketing processes, strategies, and campaigns across multiple channels. These channels could be the web, mobile app, social media, email, text, SMS, messengers, video, and others.
As the name suggests, automation software automates repeatable tasks using technology– which could involve different types of Artificial Intelligence technologies such as deep learning, robotic process automation, predictive analytics, and text generation.
Most marketing automation software functions on the basis of programmable workflow instructions to automate the whole or a part of a marketing process. It could include a set of pre-configured customizable templates, recommendations, dashboards, drag-and-drop elements, or bot-assisted campaign creation knowledge centers. In its simplest form, marketing automation software simplifies and streamlines one or more marketing processes to save time, effort, and marketing resources. Each digital campaign could deploy its own set of automation tools, and therefore, marketing automation software could have as many automation tools to manage each of these.
For example, email marketing automation software is the most used martech tool. Popular marketing automation tools are now offered as part of a larger group of martech solutions, called Marketing Clouds, or Experience Clouds.
Marketing automation software enjoys a lion’s share of the marketing budget in 2023. Despite hard economic conditions and higher data governance norms, the spending on marketing automation software, particularly those with AI capabilities, is growing at an unprecedented rate.
How big is the marketing automation software industry?
Currently, the global marketing automation software industry stands at $5.75 billion. It is projected to grow to $13.48 billion by 2028. AI is likely to play a huge role in this growth. Considering the rampant adoption of AI in marketing and sales strategies, our AiThority analysts took a closer look at what is really happening with the AI capabilities in the Marketing Automation software industry and what B2B technology leaders think about their efficacy in improving marketing ROI in 2023.
Top Processes Where Marketing Automation Tools are Widely Used
- Email Automation
- Omnichannel campaign orchestration and management
- Offer customizations and loyalty management
- KPI tracking and reporting
- Social media marketing
- Content generation
- Contact data management
- Customer service and communications management (part of the CRM)
There are so many ways marketing automation software can solve your business problems. Yet, it is important to consider your brand values, product, service, and size and skill levels of your employees to proceed with an automation solution. Having access to AI-powered tools for marketing automation can optimize your marketing strategy quickly and efficiently.
What is AI Marketing Automation?
When you add AI capabilities such as Salesforce Einstein or GPT to the foundational marketing automation software, you get an AI marketing automation platform. With the rise of generative AI and conversational AI tools, AI marketing automation has emerged as a powerful buzzword in the current Martech industry. It does two important things for your marketing organization:
First, it helps you in creating meaningful marketing resources in fewer hours and with higher accuracy.
Second, AI helps you tap into the customer and other marketing data to orchestrate smarter, personalized customer journeys.
How AI works in marketing automation?
We referred to this useful guide published by SurveySparrow to highlight how AI ML fits into a marketing automation stack.
AI and Marketing Automation is a Match Made in the Heavens
The influence of AI-led technology transformation is set to expand the scope of business operability and sustainability. With AI and automation, it is possible to embrace a better and smarter workplace environment where top talent can thrive and impact the economy. By 2030, AI and deep learning technologies could add more than 15 billion US dollars every year to the global economy, which is more than the combined national GDP of over 150-plus nations.
How to create a hyper-personalized marketing campaign using AI
Deloitte provided the answer in one of their digital resources.
Hyper-personalizing the customer experience
using data, analytics, and AI
AI impacts the bottom line of the entire organization. This impact is more conspicuous in Marketing and Sales by virtue of the number of tasks within these departments which AI can improve and automate. By leveraging marketing automation tools, teams can reduce the overhead by 12.2%, and increase sales productivity by 14.5%. With AI, productivity numbers improve significantly in favor of the marketing and sales teams.
For example, AI users can take back 12.5 hours every week through a thoughtful deployment of marketing automation tools.
Moreover, AI in marketing improves the ROI by 30% without ever worrying about budget wastage. From optimizing content for your blogs and landing pages to creating tailor-made CTAs for your best-performing pages, to using prompts for creating a drip campaign, you can streamline every marketing action with a customer-centric approach within your marketing automation suite using AI.
Here are the top stats on the role of AI in B2B marketing.
- 80% of marketing professionals could be intelligently automating more than a quarter of their marketing tasks by 2026. [Drift / Marketing AI Institute]
- 42% of American B2B organizations planned to fuse AI and automation in their new marketing tactics and plans. [Statista]
- 86% of IT leaders surveyed by Salesforce admitted that generative AI will play a bigger role in their organizations. 35% of leaders feel their KPIs are now aligned with other departments, including Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. [Salesforce]
- A majority of market research professionals want to hand off their key processes such as data cleaning (96%), survey programming (89%), and localizing surveys (99%) to AI. [Qualtrics]
- 19% of marketing leaders spent at least 40% of their marketing budgets on AI-driven campaigns last year. [Influencer Marketing Hub]
- The use of AI in marketing campaigns can deliver an ROI lift of up to 30%. [Accenture]
- 86% of companies create better CX using AI; 70% did it by reducing costs. [Oracle Fusion Marketing survey]
- Natural language processing (NLP) is currently in use or considered for adoption in marketing operations related to data governance (47%), chatbots assistance or conversational marketing (44%), social listening (39%), intelligent email routing (34%), and the voice of the customer programs (28%). [The 2023 Expert NLP Survey Report by Expert.ai]
- 57% of respondents used AI for content research and content writing. [Contentwriters.com]
- Our ongoing analysis of the Martech stacks revealed that AI can solve problems related to customer data management, the marketing CRM alignment with sales intelligence, siloed marketing data, and disjointed integrations between the different Marketing Automation tools.
We asked top marketing leaders who are currently working with AI marketing automation tools. This is what they had to say about the role of AI in simplifying marketing operations with automated workflows.
Teams Run in the Right Direction With AI
Caroline Sherman, VP of Product Management at Tableau, Salesforce
Embrace the Power of Generative AI within your Marketing Automation Software
Marketing Teams should Tap into the Transformative Power of AI
Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications and Chief Communications Officer.
“At IBM, we have long recognized the transformative power of AI. As the latest advancements in generative AI have created a wave of awareness and excitement, businesses and organizations are waking up to its full potential. In fact, a recent study from IBM found 41% of IT professionals say that their company is currently exploring generative AI and 27% are actively using it. (IBM Institute for Business Value). After years of intense focus on developing AI built for businesses, IBM introduced watsonx in May – an enterprise-ready AI and data platform that will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data.
As for marketing operations, generative AI has the potential to create efficiencies – or entirely automate – certain marketing tasks. A CMO panel we recently surveyed ranked content creation and editing, SEO, and social media monitoring as some top use cases.
When we asked CMOs about the biggest challenges to using generative AI, their top concerns were data accuracy, privacy management, and having enough skilled resources.”
Marketing Teams with Limited Resources can Benefit Immensely from AI’s Usage
OneSignal’s Head of Marketing Operations, Monica Cordova
“Marketing teams can leverage AI and automation capabilities to improve processes and workflows with greater impact and efficiency, even with limited resources,” says Monica.
“Striking the right balance between people, data, processes, and tech to orchestrate memorable and personalized experiences for your user, customers, or target audiences at scale is challenging. Deep personalization requires understanding individual preferences and learning patterns, which involves gathering and analyzing large amounts of data. AI simplifies this process by leveraging machine learning to analyze data and identify patterns in user behavior. AI can automate personalized messaging and content delivery based on individual interests and communication preferences. Moreover, AI enables intelligent delivery, ensuring messages are sent at optimal times when they are more likely to be opened. It can also aid in translation and localization efforts, allowing marketers to reach a global audience with tailored content.”
Marketing Teams should Switch to Motivation AI for Better Engagements
Vipul Vyas, SVP of Go-To-Market Strategy, Persado
“Generative AI has proven its ability to synthesize massive amounts of data to generate content — but most generative AI models are designed to simply churn out content quickly and efficiently. Without technology capable of tapping into the emotional drivers of the intended audiences of AI-generated content, brands risk rendering their messages ineffective. These buzzy, publicly-available AI models are already looking toward generating vast amounts of personalized content at a high level, but, as this type of content becomes more recognizable in the mainstream, buyers will tune it out. A better strategy is to take your AI strategy to the next level: leveraging Motivation AI.
A specialized class of enterprise Generative AI technology, Motivation AI is specifically designed to identify and leverage the emotional drivers and narratives most likely to encourage individual consumers to act. And, Motivation AI is how many leading brands like Tapestry, Marks & Spencer, and GAP are already using generative AI to their advantage; moving beyond churning out mass amounts of content, to creating truly personalized, emotion-informed content that encourages audiences to act — whether that means confirming their appointment, learning more about a new product or service, or completing the checkout process.”
Where You Can Fit AI in Your Marketing Engine
Kristin Mills, Global Head of Marketing at FullStory
“In the current economic environment, it is increasingly critical for marketing teams to laser focus on articulating the value their company offers to the right audience at the right time. Additionally, marketing, as well as teams across the organization, must operate lean and efficiently. I bucket the major challenges in designing and implementing automated workflows to manage operations into 5 categories spanning the entire Marketing engine.
- Data Analysis and Insights
- Personalization and Customer Segmentation
- Lead Scoring and Qualification
- Content Creation and Optimization
- Predictive Analytics and Forecasting
Automated workflows powered by AI can schedule and deploy marketing campaigns across multiple channels, track campaign performance, and dynamically adjust campaign parameters based on real-time data, essentially removing or significantly reducing an individual’s time spent trying to look for issues that they can’t see. AI-powered tools can also automate A/B testing, campaign optimization, and budget allocation, freeing up time for marketers to focus on strategic planning and creative aspects.”
AI Adds Limitless Possibilities for Automation in Marketing and Customer Experience
Morgan Norman, Chief Marketing Officer, Dialpad
“The next generation of AI technology offers limitless possibilities for automation, and the challenges that once existed are now being overcome. AI is changing the dynamic overnight, enabling marketers to create and deploy automated workflows without the need for extensive coding knowledge. To address this, no-code AI apps and AI orchestration tools are emerging as game-changers, placing the power of innovation and productivity improvements directly into the hands of business process owners, who understand the challenges and best scenarios that will lead to true business outcomes.
AI-powered workflow brings forth new possibilities by extending customer support beyond the traditional model. This includes allowing a small business to act like a big enterprise and allowing an enterprise to act like a start-up. Imagine, a small business that can have hundreds of conversations without human input, or even go a step further to solve customer requests, such as ordering a new product or shipping a replacement item through automation and assistance.”
Erika Goldwater, CIPP/US, Fractional VP of Marketing, Consultant, Chameleon Collective explained the nature of challenges in working with Marketing Automation software.
Erika said, “The major challenges in designing automated workflows are thinking through all the different variations that are needed. Automating something doesn’t mean it isn’t challenging- there is still a lot to consider when building something like this. However, the beauty of using AI in this process is you can design one core workflow and use AI to see what different variations are possible. It’s the ability to see different options quickly that AI can help with. To be clear, it doesn’t solve the thinking and analysis part of this challenge. We do need our brains (to write relevant prompts and test results), but it does speed up the process and helps with scale for alternatives.”
Conclusion
When you are competing in a ruthless digital marketing space, AI that is stimulated by human efforts and supervision can help in fine-tuning any marketing strategy to increase sales growth. For regular automation users, AI-generated outcomes such as content and conversations can supercharge B2B, B2C, and B2B2C marketing efforts and deliver unprecedented growth.
If you have little or no experience in working with either Marketing automation tools or generative AI, remember this magical ratio of 7:2:1.
What does this ratio mean in marketing automation?
70% of your marketing budget should be reserved to handle existing strategies.
20% would go to new or transformational strategies.
The remaining 10% of the marketing budget should go to new experimental or experiential strategies involving AI and automation.
With S.M.A.R.T. strategies that are powered by AI-based marketing automation software, your can build and run a more customer-centric and cost-effective marketing engine in 2023.
So, what kind of AI and marketing automation platforms are you planning to explore this year? What are the key features that you are specifically looking at?
Top marketing automation features that you should focus on:
- Customer journey orchestration
- AI-based Recommendations and Bot Support
- Omnichannel Leads / Contact data management
- Workflow automation with A-B testing
- Multi-channel integration
- Unified automated content creation
- Real-time analytics and predictive intelligence
- Social Commerce
Here are the top Marketing automation software companies that could potentially fit into your current Martech stack:
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- HubSpot
- Oracle Marketing Cloud
- SAP Emarsys
- Iterable
- Marketo Engage (now part of Adobe)
- Zoho
- HCL Unica
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
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