The Paradox of Marketing Automation

As more and more consumers are getting connected to digital way of working via their smartphones, more and more marketers are jumping on the digital marketing bandwagon to reach out to these always on, uber-digital consumers and in-turn, further fuelling today’s digital economy boom.

Gradually the days of spray and pray techniques that were quite prevalent few years back, are fading away and marketers are becoming more automation-savvy to adopt marketing automation techniques. Techniques that range from data consolidations through CRMs to using various digital channels to reach out to their consumers to generating unified view of consumers by using  Marketing Automation tools to even analysing trends of the behaviours of their consumers.

While more and more marketers are evolving to understand and practice these new-age marketing automation techniques, one might wonder what happens to the old marketing trends and where are we headed. One might also wonder if “marketing automation” would take away some of the jobs of traditional marketers.

This question might also proclaim that Automation is already throwing a lot of humans out of their regular jobs and rendering them unemployed. So if the system is going to do the marketing then what are marketers going to do?

Dr. Lisanne Bainbridge, a psychologist at University College London, was one of the firsts to rigorously study the ramifications of efficient and reliable systems. She was the first to identify and express the “Paradox” of automated systems: efficient automated systems reduce the need for human effort, but make human involvement even more critical.

Efficient marketing Automation makes marketers more important, not less!

The Paradox of Marketing Automation says that the more efficient the automation system, the more crucial the human contribution of the operators. Humans are less involved, but their involvement becomes even more critical, especially in case of brands whose marketing campaigns reach out to their consumers and affect their business growth.

In fact, Marketing Automation is an excellent opportunity for marketers to actually concentrate on core marketing efforts while the systems handle all the mundane marketing jobs for them.

Marketing Automation enables marketers to enjoy the freedom from segmentation, scheduling of broadcasts, repeating certain marketing campaigns, etc. While the marketing intelligence would be required to think through and plan these automation campaigns – which certainly would be done by the Marketers and not the Systems. Once these plans are thought-through and set in a Marketing Automation tool like Netcore Smartech, and the activity data starts coming in – the system builds the trend reports and generates behavioural patterns of these customer activities.

With tools like Netcore Smartech, Marketers can then read through these analytics and plan effective marketing strategies to reach out to their consumers accordingly.

The latest version of Netcore Smartech also allows brands to add offline activities and provide an evolved marketing mix of online and offline. This can enable richer and actual 360 degree Unified View of the Consumers.

So while the marketing automation tools do the job of automating certain business functions, it does not throw the humans out of job. Humans are required to plan and instruct the systems to work on their mundane, repetitive jobs.

Here’s the Paradox of Automation: the more efficient the automation system, the more crucial the contribution of the human operator.

And for Netcore Smartech, we even go one step further by giving you the human operators in form of Marketing Technology Experts. The people in these teams have specialised skillsets to help you structure your unstructured consumer data along with helping you plan automation campaigns and schedule them for optimal responses. We also help you analyse the responses and help you deep optimise Customer Lifecycle Value.

So the effective question remains – For any marketing automation systems you choose, do you have qualified human operators ready to jump in and fix issues quickly?

We help you answer that exact question! Get in touch with us to know more.