How to Drive Innovation Through Automation

Let’s say that we have the storage, the speed, and the networks to accomplish our marketing goals. But innovation doesn’t sleep. If it’s not the hardware that’s fueling it today, what is it? The answer is marketing automation software.

This is a particularly noticeable phenomenon in marketing, right now. It’s no longer about what print ads, what coupons, what physical mailings go out—it’s about what platforms you engage your audience on, and how.

As digital marketing keeps growing as one of the fastest growing marketing platforms, it is important to streamline your marketing campaigns. Within a multifaceted approach to marketing, such as email marketing, social media marketing, live charts, website analytics, and lead scoring, wouldn’t it be great to have a solution that can consolidate all these aspects? The solution is here and it is what we refer to as marketing automation software. 

And that’s not the only way in which marketing automation software is becoming more important by the day: it’s also making big waves when it comes to collecting and utilizing information that results in data-driven, technologically advanced, efficient, and effective marketing campaigns. 

No more guesstimating, because not only do you have the data, but you also have a huge selection of quality tools to analyze that data and truly put it to work. Data driven campaigns deliver, there’s no doubt about it. Marketing automation software helps you streamline these processes and free up precious human work hours to work on other creative ideas. 

We all like to think that technology will continue to learn and come up with new solutions all the time. Leading marketing automation software will also continue to improve upon itself due to the growing changes of digital marketing requirements. The sheer quantities of useful data will continue to grow as more people and more devices become increasingly interconnected.

Marketing has always been part art and part science. Through the use of marketing automation software, we’re learning more and more about how to harness the science to see results. Software isn’t vulnerable to the prejudices, habits, or biases that a human marketer is, and of course, it is far more efficient at those tasks that it can perform. 

Because of the nature of marketing itself, its purpose, and the requirements it must meet to achieve that purpose—influencing other people—it also shouldn’t be surprising that advances in marketing automation software are making their mark in other industries, as well. 

Many of these insights and software innovations were first dreamed up during marketing and email software development. And now, marketing automation software will allow your company to be more strategic in your approach. 

Automated Insights’ Wordsmith API, for example, translates raw data into natural language. Narrative Science’s Quill is doing something similar. Marketing automation software innovations that track behavioral data are teaching us a great deal about consumers and in the process, we’re also learning more human nature and society. Artificial intelligence research has benefited immensely from the desire to incorporate the technology into email marketing software and similar products. 

We have to always remember that AI learns by observing hence, it will be aware of the current trends and happenings to predict what type of innovation we will benefit from. Simply by creating a strong commercial demand for better AI, better natural language generation, better predictive analytics, and better voice recognition, marketing automation software is encouraging innovation.

None of this means that marketing automation software is putting human marketing experts out of their jobs. On the contrary, many in the profession welcome these developments for the simple reason that marketing automation frees the human marketer from the drudgery associated with the science of marketing—allowing them, instead, to focus on the art of marketing. Top marketing automation software platforms will free up the time for your marketing team to come up with better and personalized strategies for their customers. 

Right now, think about how much time the average human marketer spends on the vital (but surely, for most, not enjoyable) things like trying to make sense of the data they’ve collected, trying to communicate that information with the rest of their team, scheduling and carrying out repetitive social media tasks.

Today’s software is very capable of accomplishing most of these things in an automated fashion, and it’s only getting better. Allowing people more time to focus on the art of marketing can help inspire the next phase of marketing and continue to deploy campaigns that can bring even stronger results. 

So, in one sense—yes, machines are replacing humans. As Mike Rhodin, a Senior Vice President for IBM’s influential AI-oriented Watson groups points out, human beings have always taken freedom from repetitive, mundane chores to be an opportunity to create and innovate. Imagine putting all of that human brain power to work on creative marketing pursuits rather than collating data. The software is far better at dealing with data than most humans—but that frees us up to make our creativity, our spark, our human touch the priority.

Marketing automation software lets you manage your company’s brand identity by allowing the different marketing teams in the company to control the brand visual. With the use of templates that can be used across different platforms, you can maintain brand image uniformity using a marketing automation software. This can also help your company’s customer conversion rates and allow for more growth. 

There are as many top marketing automation software options out there today as there are types of companies. If you’re interested in seeing how marketing software can change your business and give you the opportunity to innovate, it’s a good idea to educate yourself a bit about the top options. First, consider what your company’s marketing needs are and determine what marketing automation software solution is right for you. Our marketing automation software comparison guide is a great place to start your research!