How Far Should We Take Marketing Automation?

Where can and should we draw the line with mar­ket­ing automa­tion?

Andrew Smith By Andrew Smith from Escherman. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Mar­ket­ing automa­tion con­tin­ues to grow. From the ear­ly days of sim­ply cre­at­ing auto­mat­ed email replies, there are now whole enter­prise suites of soft­ware designed to low­er the cost and increase the effi­cien­cy of the over­all mar­ket­ing cycle. But are there lim­its to the amount of work that can be out­sourced to an algo­rithm? Are we at the end of the begin­ning of the mar­ket­ing automa­tion jour­ney? Or is “peak automa­tion” just around the cor­ner?


I’ve just sent an email to Jeff, the sales direc­tor at Acme Wid­gets Inc. I know with Jeff that it is extreme­ly impor­tant to state my pur­pose clear­ly in the first sen­tence and that I shouldn’t send him lots of extra infor­ma­tion like links and attach­ments. And when I call Jeff on the phone, I know I should stay focused on one point and get right to the bot­tom line and not ask lots of ques­tions.

You might imag­ine that I’ve known Jeff for some time in order to have such a clear and spe­cif­ic view on how I should inter­act and com­mu­ni­cate with him.

But here’s the thing. I’ve nev­er met Jeff. And I’ve been able to write my email to him pure­ly based on what I could find out on the pub­lic Inter­net. The same goes for my tele­phone style. Not only that, my research took approx­i­mate­ly 2 sec­onds.

This is all thanks to a new tool called Crys­tal Knows. Dubbed as the “the biggest improve­ment to email since spellcheck”, Crys­tal Knows claims to cre­ate unique per­son­al­i­ty pro­files “for every per­son with an online pres­ence, prepar­ing you to speak or write in some­one else’s nat­ur­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion style.”

By sim­ply search­ing for the per­son you want to get in touch with, the tool pro­vides a detailed report on the per­son­al­i­ty of your tar­get con­tact. You can then use this infor­ma­tion to tai­lor your email or phone call to them.

But how accu­rate is it? The tool itself pro­vides its own con­fi­dence lev­el.

Above 80pc and it is extreme­ly con­fi­dent that it is pro­vid­ing you with an accu­rate assess­ment of the per­son con­cerned. Some ear­ly users have expressed skep­ti­cism (like Lucy Kell­away at the FT), but many oth­ers report back that the results aren’t bad at all.

But What Does This Have To Do With Consumer Marketing?

Imag­ine I could com­bine Crys­tal Knows with my CRM and mar­ket­ing automa­tion sys­tems? It pre­sum­ably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to auto­mate not only when and how I con­tact my prospects and cus­tomers but also per­son­alise the con­tent and spe­cial offers to them based upon this kind of insight? Crys­tal Knows already pro­vides an API so you can see that this is already an area where the tech­nol­o­gy is head­ing.

The role of automa­tion con­tin­ues to advance in oth­er areas as well. Com­pa­nies like Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence and Auto­mat­ed Insights are remov­ing the need for human beings to ana­lyze and write reports or, in the lat­ter case, write news sto­ries.

Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence, for exam­ple, pro­vides a free ser­vice for Google Ana­lyt­ics users called Quill Engage. (There is a sim­i­lar free ser­vice for Twit­ter too). By allow­ing access to your Google Ana­lyt­ics account, the tool will ana­lyze your web­site data and auto­mat­i­cal­ly write a nat­ur­al lan­guage report based on the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed. Every week, you receive a detailed analy­sis that is hard to detect as being gen­er­at­ed by a com­put­er pro­gram rather than a human being.

Auto­mat­ed Insights is already being used by major news out­lets such as the Asso­ci­at­ed Press to write press arti­cles algo­rith­mi­cal­ly. The com­pa­ny claims to have auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed 1 bil­lion sto­ries in the last 12 months and is capa­ble of cre­at­ing 2,000 sto­ries per sec­ond.

Last week, the tech­nol­o­gy was pit­ted against an expe­ri­enced jour­nal­ist to see who could write up a news sto­ry faster. The Auto­mat­ed Insights “robot reporter” won the speed tri­al eas­i­ly – 2 min­utes ver­sus over 7 min­utes.

But what of the qual­i­ty of the con­tent? At the moment, the pub­lic vote appears to still favor the human being. But is it only a mat­ter of time before we find it tough to dis­tin­guish between con­tent cre­at­ed by a human being and con­tent gen­er­at­ed by some lines of soft­ware code?

The New York Times has already help­ful­ly pro­vid­ed an online quiz to see just how far you can tell the dif­fer­ence. You may be sur­prised or appalled by the results.

The Limits Of Automation

But sure­ly there are lim­its to the use of automa­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the realm of con­sumer mar­ket­ing? Tech­nol­o­gy is clear­ly being used to reduce the cost of pre­vi­ous­ly expen­sive, inef­fi­cient, and inef­fec­tive mar­ket­ing tech­niques.

Gini Diet­rich argued recent­ly in her blog post Why PR Can’t Be Auto­mat­ed that here was an exam­ple of a dis­ci­pline that would remain immune to the tide of algo­rithms threat­en­ing to over­whelm the mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion. It is a famil­iar posi­tion.

Things like rela­tion­ships can’t be auto­mat­ed. There­fore there will always be a need in mar­ket­ing for high­ly paid pro­fes­sion­als who can pro­vide this lev­el of valu­able human insight and inter­ac­tion.

How­ev­er, just because you don’t believe some­thing shouldn’t be auto­mat­ed, it won’t stop peo­ple from try­ing. The inex­orable pres­sure on dri­ving down costs will inevitably lead to peo­ple attempt­ing to replace expen­sive human beings with cheap­er tech­nol­o­gy.

And it isn’t just mar­ket­ing being impact­ed by the relent­less rise of automa­tion. As Har­vard aca­d­e­m­ic Justin Reich, an expert on the impact of tech­nol­o­gy, com­ment­ed: “Robots and AI will increas­ing­ly replace rou­tine kinds of work – even the com­plex rou­tines per­formed by arti­sans, fac­to­ry work­ers, lawyers and accoun­tants.”

He could eas­i­ly have added mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Even dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Although the prospects look good at the moment, it would be risky to assume that one’s cur­rent area of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing exper­tise will remain immune for­ev­er to the forces of automa­tion.

Conclusion

Con­sumer mar­ket­ing pre­sum­ably will con­tin­ue to ben­e­fit from tech­nol­o­gy and automa­tion for some time. But where can and should we draw the line? Or is the ulti­mate end game to allow the machines to get on with it and remove the need for messy, illog­i­cal, inef­fi­cient and down­right con­trary human beings alto­geth­er?


Where do you think this will all end?

Andrew Smith

Written by Andrew Smith

Director, Escherman

Andrew Bruce Smith is the founder and Managing Director of digital communications consultancy Escherman. With a career spanning 29 years, Andrew has implemented many successful marketing communications programmes for brands such as IBM, MySQL, and Apple. He is co-author of two best-selling social media books - Share This: a practical handbook to the biggest changes taking place in the media and its professions (Wiley 2012). And Share This Too: More Social Media Solutions for PR Professionals (Wiley 2013). Andrew is also a trainer in measurement, evaluation, social media, analytics and SEO for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), a member of the CIPR Social Media panel and a guest lecturer at the University of Leeds Business School.

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