As a CMO, your job is to be ready for every marketing development. You’re never allowed to stand still, because the moment you do, something in your industry will change, and you’ll fall behind the competition.
Unfortunately, turnover for marketing jobs is increasing. One survey revealed that the average tenure of a marketing CMO is less than four years, and burnout is the number one cause. Automation is the solution to avoiding this burnout. It’s one of those constantly-evolving trends that’s a hot topic for marketers.
Many CMOs are hesitant to engage in automation because it can have negative effects, like being banned from accounts or poor engagement. However, the landscape for automation is changing, and CMOs don’t have to be as scared of automation as they once were. In fact, you should be using it to your advantage as it continues to improve.
You have enough on your plate without having to worry about spending enough time on social media to engage with users and create a strong brand. Here are some automation advancements that you’ll likely appreciate as a CMO.
1. Real Engagement Is Possible
In the past, automation bots were always a problem. Many CMOs refused to work with them because they caused awkward situations, lost your followers, and even got your account suspended or banned.
However, automation has come a long way. There are still bots and automation services that can pose problems, but many more offer high-quality services that allow you to connect with real followers and not fake accounts. For example, SocialCaptain gets Instagram followers with strategic automation. The platform gets you real engagement as a result of authentic strategies guided by AI expert algorithms.
There are great tools for every social media platform, not just Instagram. You can free up a lot of your time by using these tools while maintaining the desired engagement from your target audience.
2. More Accessible Data
In an interview with, Forbes, Matt Gay, CMO for Accenture, said that data is one of the marketers’ biggest challenges, particularly when it comes to the ability to use it. “It’s got to be in a form and format that is easily accessible and useable going forward, so you don’t have to have an IT person sorting through and making static reports,” he says.
Thankfully, there is automation to handle a lot of the legwork in data analysis. The right software tools can help CMOs not only gather data but turn it into insights that can be used for advertising and marketing purposes.
“CMOs would traditionally use data scientists and their analytics,” Gay says, pointing out that this is no longer a necessity with today’s machine algorithms that can do more than data scientists ever could.
“Even with analytics and algorithms, these processes are manual, slow, and not leveraging the full capability of data scientists,” he continues. “As well, since machines can process massive amounts of data quickly, they will uncover insights faster and more efficiently than humans…allowing the data scientists to use their brains more and continue to seed the algorithms.”
It’s an incredible tool that every chief marketer should be leveraging for the promotion of their business.
3. Provides More Context
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have come leaps and bounds in the last few years. They can now gather contextual clues much better than before, limiting inaccurate and sometimes embarrassing mistakes of the past.
“Brands can use automation for contextual marketing, offering more personalized interactions,” says Linda Turley, an attorney at Turley Law Firm, who has experienced this first hand. “For example, data shows you when your target audience is usually online. Then, you can set your content calendar to post content at these times,” she explained.
Additionally, data can show you trending topics, high-performing posts on social media, and highly effective advertisements in your industry. This information gathered with bots and other automated tools can give consumers the customized experience they most desire.
4. More Valuable SEO
SEO was once all about the use of keywords and link building to make your content searchable. However, it’s turning into a more personalized experience where quality content that’s highly valuable is king.
Automation offers us what’s known as semantic SEO, “which aims to decipher what kind of question the person typing words into a search bar is actually trying to answer,” says Matthew Walker-Jones of Marketing Tech News.
These semantics add value to SEO everywhere, offering a more tailored approach to understanding and catering to user behavior.
“This marketing technique goes a long way to improve the traffic of a website by employing meaningful metadata through the removal of ambiguity in search queries and further creates clusters of content, grouped semantically by topic rather than keywords, developing meaningfully-connected networks that better respond to user searches,” he says.
5. Augmented Reality Changes Social Media
Connecting with consumers on social media is getting much more complicated and involved now that augmented reality is a part of the automation chapter. More and more users are demanding augmented reality, especially on social media.
Many brands are responding, including major makeup producers like Estée Lauder and Loreal that allow you to try on colors with Facebook Messenger bots before they make a purchase through the app. Brick-and-mortar companies are also using AR to give consumers a tour of their businesses.
AR is not out of your reach, no matter the size of your business. Automation tools not only provide insights on the highest-performing AR platforms, but they also make them more readily available. Simple smartphone apps and software tools are affordable and provide many options for incorporating these themes into existing marketing campaigns.
6. Improved Integrations
In the past, very few automation tools worked together. You utilized separate tools that ignored the others, giving you an incomplete picture of the collected data. Non-integrating automation tools still exist, but they’re becoming the minority.
This is good news because seamless integration of every automation tool you use is vital to delivering a holistic experience for the customer.
“The strategic focus of marketing automation needs to shift from the campaign or component approach to the customer journey in totality to deliver on the seamless customer experience promise,” advises an article from Martech Advisor that focuses on where automation will be by 2020.
By the time we reach 2020, the current marketing landscape will be completely different, thanks to the prevalence of automation. These changes continue for the better, helping CMOs focus on what’s most important while staying on top of their engagement and marketing campaigns.
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