to balance core functions of marketing automation with innovation

The marketing automation leaders face a major challenge: how to integrate new technologies into their campaigns that offer fresh ways of engaging customers and executing them, while still maintaining the quality of old approaches.

Marketing automation can be used in three different areas.

Maintaining consistency and data quality

Milton Hwang, principal of Mission MarTech LLC , at The MarTech conference, said: “Data quality, and the ability for us to see across multiple systems, was really foundational in marketing automation’s history.”

He said that marketers never seem to be done cleaning data. It’s a continuous task, and we must be flexible with new data sources. We also need to maintain routines and rigor.

Data-driven marketing is based on marketing automation platforms. They have helped map unique data, IDs, and values as well as classifications such as state, country, and industry. As the digital landscape evolves, more data points are being produced. Marketers must now maintain a consistent and rigorous data management.

Hwang said that if we don’t get the routines right in the system, this can affect system performance and lead to inaccurate account routing, scoring, and attribution. This is a big part of all of this work.

The quality of data will be even more important when AI tools are used to train on it.

AI in marketing automation: six use cases that can improve data quality

Integrating and aligning sales processes

Marketing automation has traditionally helped execute campaigns to deliver leads to the sales team. In this evolution, the next step is to provide sales insights with the leads.

Hwang said that “Sales insights have been further modernized.” Make [sales] look good in front of customers by providing them with data on what the customer has done digitally. This will allow them to carry this insight forward when they meet with the customer for a demonstration or follow-up.

He said, “Many teams still embrace the fact that marketing automation is not only about engagement tracking, but can also be used for integrated tasks and work-flows.”

A further benefit of providing improved sales insights to new account executives is that they are better positioned to close sales right away, improving employee retention.

Next generation marketing operations

Marketing automation can not only help bridge the sales gap, but also bring together siloed departments within the organization.

Hwang said that native integrations in marketing automation platforms changed the game 10 years ago. This was the first inflection point for natural language. The decryption of what had been left to the database programmers was given to us as MAP administrators in the form attribute and field mappings. This allowed us to take back the time we would have spent asking our IT teams to create custom integration.

GenAI chatbots have been added to platforms that support marketing automation. This has allowed more team members, who don’t need to rely on IT teams, to perform marketing automation tasks in “no code” or “low-code”, situations.

Hwang stated, “We have to keep in mind that the marketing automation platforms as well as the rest of the ecosystem can offer us more.” It’s not just about moving data and synchronizing in real-time. It’s about looking beyond native integration to find additional business value.

The original post How do you balance core marketing automation with innovation first appeared on MarTech.