| | 9 FEBRUARY 20239 July 2020CIO Advisorsomething that a clever marketing wordsmith created to introduce more jargon.These days new marketing technology solutions are almost launched daily, and the last count stood at 6,829 different offerings globally.Your organisation – like mine – likely has a very small percentage of those implemented to help deal with various marketing tasks – from sending emails at the most basic level, to sophisticated chatbots that interact with potential clients at the more advanced level. They tend to make the job of the marketer easier in a lot of ways, but also more demanding in others. Take marketing automation systems for example; these usually sit at the heart of many MarTech-stacks and can do everything from sending simple emails to automating entire nurture campaigns with invidualised content that help ‘accelerate contacts through the sales funnel’. (beware more marketing jargon!)These systems demand that marketers have a solid technical understanding and aptitude for digital marketing. Coupled with a deep understanding of their clients’ issues and knowledge of what messages and content are most effective at the various funnel stages, marketers can then design marketing programmes that have the client needs at their centre. Something that all our marketing efforts should strive for.Now this may sound simple on paper, but it requires a wealth of marketing content that is suited to the needs, interests and motives of your potential buyers during the different buying-stages – and of course the understanding of what these needs, interests and motives are.Once you have all that in place you can start setting up the rules, workflows and programmes in your marketing automation software to send the right messages and content at the right time – which sounds like the easy part but requires the previously mentioned digital marketing wizardry.Marketers who get this right – and use ‘conventional’ tools to their full potential – are already a step ahead of many of their competitors. They use technology to create customer-centric marketing programmes that meet their customers’ needs at every stage, from awareness through to (re)purchase – and generate superior marketing results and return on the way.If done well, the customers may feel like an Artificial Intelligence is at play, anticipating their needs and ‘computing’ what they need next in their buying-decision making – whereas in reality it’s just clever marketing by marketers that understand their clients and have put in the energy and time to set up the process thoroughly from the start.Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to the day when Watson can take over large chunks of our marketing automation and even content creation, but for the time being it remains a core tasks for the dedicated marketer.This article was written by AI. Just kidding. I thought I’d be writing an ad with the assistance of AI
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