Marketing Automation And Personalization: A Possible Combination

Customize, supervise tools and carry out tests. Three simple tips for exploiting Marketing Automation technologies without forgetting the importance of creativity to guarantee a better customer experience and increase conversion Automation systems not only make the operational activities of marketing teams more efficient but also provide valuable data and metrics to make campaigns more effective.

At the expense of creativity and customization? No, they can coexist. The important thing is always to maintain sight of the user and the customer experience, which can benefit from the information obtained from technological tools. The American bloggers of Marketing Insider Group, a company founded by Michael Brenner recognized as one of the Top CMO Influencers globally, are giving some valuable suggestions on how to make the most of marketing automation tools.

First of all, we need to start from the primary culture with which we approach technological tools; the company’s experts suggest that we should consider them “data resources” and not mere efficiency tools because through these tools (which represent only the tip of the iceberg ) you can listen and understand your audience.

Let’s take, for example, email marketing platforms that offer marketers pre-configured templates to optimize content design: it is clear that such high automation dramatically speeds up the time it takes to create campaigns and send messages but, warn marketers, American consultants is a process followed by all those who only see time as the differentiating factor.

It is an approach that may work for some campaigns but not in the long term and systematically because the public, whether of a B2B or B2C company, is increasingly demanding and is not attracted by very standard messages and designs similar to others that it already has seen and received. It is essential that, alongside the search for operational efficiency, the creativity of notifications and personalization are never underestimated. So here’s what the Marketing Insider Group experts suggest:

personalize messages: according to a recent WP Engine study, personalized content performs 42% better than ‘standard’ or pre-configured content. Be careful, though; personalizing does not simply mean inserting the recipient’s name into the email but correctly defining the messages and studying the design based on the information that the same tools have returned in previous campaigns (for example, user segmentation and profiling data and their behavior with respect to the contents received);
supervise marketing automation tools: don’t make the mistake of thinking that technologies work for us; they are ‘only’ efficiency tools, and their effectiveness depends on how they are used.
Test and analyze data: Thinking that marketing should focus on numbers and metrics rather than the creative power of a successful marketing campaign needs to be revised. However, it is precisely the numbers that improve the creativity, personalization and effectiveness of campaigns, which is why it becomes of fundamental importance to test and analyze every single message and activity (through the marketing automation tools themselves) not only to quantify the results but also ‘qualify’ them. The success or otherwise of a campaign (from which new strategies and activities can then be derived).

The hegemony of Google and Facebook in the online advertising market is expanding. The confirmation comes from the latest forecasts released by the research company eMarketer and relating to the US market which speak of a 40.7% share of revenue in the hands of the search engine.

Together, therefore, the two giants manage 60% of the American market, which will be worth 83 billion dollars at the end of the year, with growth of 15.9% over the year. We are now close to a duopoly, as the Financial Times clearly writes, which assigns the two Big Internet players the role of “gatekeepers”, the guards who control who enters and exits the market.

In India, The Concentration Is Even Higher: 66%

The scenario is similar in our country, on the contrary. According to data from the Internet Media Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan, in Italy, two-thirds of the market, precisely 66%, is in the hands of Google and Facebook (2016 data), a share which rises to 68% if all the large Overs are considered The Top international (therefore also Linkedin, Twitter and Microsoft Bing ).

Furthermore, it is precisely the OTTs that are driving the overall growth (+16%): the remaining part of the Italian market is, in fact, substantially stable. And the figures increase if you look only at Mobile Advertising: 82%.

Google Dominates Search; Facebook Dominates Display Advertising

In particular, Google (which also owns YouTube) is the absolute number one in “search”, advertising linked to keyword searches on its search engines, and is eroding shares of Yahoo and Bing. The success is due, in particular, to investigations on smartphones because consumers are increasingly accustomed to using probes at any time of the day, whether for directions on maps or detailed information on a product.

Facebook (which also controls Instagram, the photo and video social network whose use is increasingly widespread) dominates the display market, i.e. that of banners, with video occupying a growing portion of the time spent by users, both for live broadcasts and recorded content, attracting growing investments.

A Rapidly Changing Market: TV Is Giving Way

Therefore, a rapid transformation of the advertising market is underway, in which digital is now neck and neck with television: in the United States, overtaking is imminent. What drives companies and media centers to direct a growing share of their budgets towards Google and Facebook? «Their ability to attract large user bases, the simplicity of planning allowed by their technological solutions, the frequent launch of new advertising formats, especially on social networks, and low costs are the main strengths», explains Marta Valsecchi, director of the Internet Media Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan.

But more generally, digital advertising wins over investors because it offers a vast capacity for user profiling, thanks to the data that online platforms collect on the behavior, interests and needs of potential customers. What attracts brands is, therefore, the opportunity for increasingly targeted advertising, which feeds on user data as precious fuel and allows companies to invest in a much more effective and targeted way.