When my Marketing Automation Lunch with Jake and Eric post blew up on our blog and LinkedIn (I embedded a link to the post in a tab below). I’ve been a digital marketer for a long time and learned the double down on winners rule the hard way, so using this Flipboard Friday to discuss the SMB Marketing Automation Challenge felt like a good idea.
Purchasing my first PC, An Apple II, in 1984 because I wanted help managing the mountains of paperwork my M&M/Mars sales territory required gave me a glimpse into my and marketing’s future. Technology is needed to make any marketer’s dream a reality, and tech geeks like my friend and boss Eric Garrison would need to understand marketing. Sitting at lunch with Eric and Jake was like watching a play from fellow Choatie Edward Albee though more inspiring than depressing.
Today’s search for inspiration looks at why marketing automation is blowing up and starts with exploring the promise of marketing automation to understand the Digital First Gold Rush and the demand flood websites and social media create. Finally, I share the marketing automation tools I use now and why OpenAI’s little chatbot may save us all.
Please use the links below to learn more about the SMB Marketing Automation Challenge and please share your marketing automation stories. martin (at) wte.net Martin Wescott Smith (on LinkedIn) 919.360.1224
Marketing automation is software or tools that streamline repetitive tasks and improve the efficiency of marketing teams. Marketing contains an evil paradox. We marketers decide to spend our lives chasing the 10% of the time we get challenged to use our creativity and dreams. The rest of the time, we do mindlessly repetitive tasks such as writing, collecting, and reporting. Mindless is a tad harsh, but I bought a personal computer in 1984 with money my wife (at the time) and I didn't have because the paperwork drove me crazy. That's how crazy repetitive task drives marketers like me - we spend money we don't have to fix it.
Before jumping into the CRM, CMS pool, let's begin at the beginning. Marketing is the art and science of understanding and satisfying customers' needs. It involves researching, identifying, and reaching out to potential customers with an eye toward persuading them to purchase a product or service. Marketing maintains and strengthens relationships after the sale. It drives sales, builds brand recognition, and fosters customer loyalty.
The poor practices of a few marketing and salespeople cast a greyish pall over marketing and sales. Let's put aside the Mad Men manipulators of the past and focus on how marketing connects your "why" with your customer's needs, desires, and dreams.
As a marketer, my typical day thinks about or touches most of the following tasks:
Market Research Market research is the first step in marketing. It is hard for me to separate the dreams, ideas, and thinking that start with the research, I will do today, tomorrow, and next. The Holy Grail of understanding our target audiences, including their needs, preferences, and buying behavior, is more a journey than a process with a clear beginning, middle, and end. My 80/20 Rule allocates eighty percent of my time trying to understand customers, with 20% for competition and everything else. Customers can teach me, you, and every marketer we know almost everything.
Product Development: Working on new products is one of my favorite things because some creative destruction is needed. I've created many products, and about half came from customer research. The other half came out of wherever strange creative alchemy lives. Some idea hits me, and then I use market research as Devil's Advocate to talk me in or out of the concept. My batting average on market research first is about 10x the intuitive process I just described, but marketers will be marketers. We know much more than we do, so we're humans, not the superheroes we see in the mirror.
Campaigns: Email drip campaigns, Facebook ads, and social media create awareness and generate interest among your potential customers. Every marketing pitch needs creativity, graphics, and copy and must get observed. We use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and analytics to determine when our marketing campaigns are working. Creating and tracking your marketing sounds like a lot of work because they are, but there is a lot of repetitive work in campaign creation and monitoring.
Sales and Distribution: Digital first interactions (websites, apps, social media) produce increased demand. Sales and distribution are where most small to medium-sized businesses underestimate the power of the web and the commitment every website or social media account implies. Every website and social media account is a promise to listen and respond, yet most new to digital marketing SMBs think of their websites as a static one-off. They don't see the implied customer convenience for fresh, relevant content and responding to customers. Websites are organic. They need constant care and feeding.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Like content, customers are organic because of their interaction with your company, and digital-first marketing evolves. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software as a service (SaaS) such as SalesForce is where customers who've bought from your company in the past, subscribed to your email, or follow you on social media live. SalesForce purchased Pardot because they realized marketers need a way to engage with and learn from customers with records in their CRM.
Analysis and Adjustments: Much of what I do is search for reliable signals inside a "noise" of marketing. I look for 80/20 Rules where twenty percent of links receive eighty percent of the clicks, or twenty percent of customers buy eighty percent of your services. The web and your customers change minute to minute and day to day, so having a tool to help separate signal from noise in a rapidly changing world is something we marketers want, dream about, and desire.
Will's frusration shows the rub. When marketers ideas work, demand increases, and bailing with coffee cans can't stop the flood. That's why the promise of Adobe's Marketo or SalesForce's Pardot is so seductive and disappointing when the steep learning curve, non-intuitive user interface (UI), and hefty price tag means those tools can't work for everyone. They get used by larger companies with big marketing teams and lots of cash. I worked for several of those kinds of companies - Procter and Gamble and M&M/Mars -and I bet they share Will's frustrations with the current state of marketing automation.
CRM marketing automation helps marketers use thier customer relationship management (CRM) tool, such as SalesForce, to automate tasks, collect customer data, and manage of your customers' content journies with offers, sharing values, and ideas. It's like your CRM is waiting for the magic "engagement tool."
CRM software manages customer relationships and tracks their journey through your sales funnel. Marketing automation software focuses on automating marketing tasks and workflows such as sending automated emails, A/B testing, optimizing landing pages, and about thirty other necessary tasks that are pains in you-know-where. Marketing automation platforms, like HubSpot or Marketo, take advantage of the one (CRM) to do the other (automate your marketing).
If you read those first two paragraphs to mean you'll go through some severe learning curve pain as you adapt to having your marketing automated, you're spot on. Eventually, and this transformation can take years, your team thinks like the tool. The problem is that left-brain methodical coders develop marketing automation software, so raising a fist in protest is what right-brain "creatives" do as surely as your knee jerks.
Once I recover from the mind-bending learning curve, I love how marketing automation tools segment customers into different demographic, psychographic, and behavioral groups. Broadcast email is all dead, so using marketing automation tools to create relevant personal customer journeys, track customer interactions, score leads based on engagement, and panning our digital demand for gold requires advanced tools these days.
The $4.5B marketing automation market tells you two things simultaneously - today's marketing automation doesn't work for SMBs, and it's too damn hard. When PR Newswire puts the size of marketing automation at just under $5B while SalesForce sells more than $31B, we know there's a problem. And it's that problem my lunch with Eric and Jake tapped into.
I love automated social media marketing (SMM) workflows tools like Buffer, helping our team schedule and analyze posts, monitor engagements in real-time, and follow up with leads. Compared to the quiet sanity of email drip campaigns, social media marketing can blow the doors off your company's demand-side equations in the blink of an eye, and that's the good and bad news. The good news is that one of your SMM posts has gone viral, but the bad news is that your lead gen blew up too.
Creating viral social media is so challenging and unpredictable. I've always lived with the lightning-in-a-bottle necessity of how a home run can blow up the demand side, creating an all-hands-on-deck emergency to respond before we blow the web's implied promise - we listen, appreciate feedback and interest, and respond in kind.
Marketers like me can use digital tools like websites and social media to create a demand-side train wreck. Since no one can control or teach you what will blow up tomorrow and why every website and social media account can create a demand side train wreck for unsuspecting new to digital-first gold rush companies - the small to medium-sized businesses drowning under their marketing tasks.
Jake and his new company 10Cubed.co, with their "easy to use and less expensive" marketing automation position, tap into the reason marketing automation isn't a $50B market today - because current tools are too damn hard, cost too much, and aren't built for right brain creatives.
We need marketing automation software to play a critical role in customer loyalty and retention. By automating follow-up processes and providing personalization based on customer segments, buying signals, and our "marketing stack" models, we create marketing nirvana - the automatically improving positive customer experiences and increased customer loyalty we want, need, and desire. Throw in something WTE is getting excellent at - SMS marketing automation and Omni channel support - and life is good.
Now let's think about the pressure the Digital First Gold Rush puts on unsuspecting SMBs.
I can be foolish. When the first website I built, FoundObjects.com (I'll include a picture in a tab), one of the first B2C2B websites, made a lot of money, it showed my brilliance. Not so much because in 1999, it was hard NOT to make money online. Today is a very different story.
The game changes when everyone has a website and uses social media marketing. Our digital first future is crowded, noisy, and loud. As every company who may ever read this post go through this "digital first" journey, your marketing will need to change.
And if I realized half of what I just wrote, my Chris Heivly and Dave Neal-funded startup Curagami would still exist. Since wishing doesn't make it so, Eric and I pledge to help and support Jake's marketing automation for SMB's toolset. I can't get here fast enough.
When retirement was too boring I signed up to help Eric as his "Content Marketing Director." That means I write and create content daily with these tools.
ChatGPT Almost every first draft starts with ChatGPT. I stole a ClearScope tip from Phil Buckley and created a ChatGPT prompt from ClearScope's keywords and questions for this post. I LOVE ChatGPT because starting is often the most challenging content creation. ChatGPT content doesn't move from OpoenAI to anything I'm writing or creating because it sounds like a robot. Here is what I mean:
Marketing is the process of understanding and satisfying customer needs. It involves researching, identifying, and reaching out to potential customers, persuading them to purchase a product or service, and maintaining a relationship with them after the sale. Marketing is essential for businesses of all sizes and industries as it drives sales, builds brand recognition, and fosters customer loyalty.
Great first draft, but the day I let "process of," "it involves," or "marketing is essential" make it into something I wrote, just shoot me. Great content has a distinct voice because it shares the writer's vulnerabilities. Robots aren't vulnerable, have insecurities, or wonder if they matter. Nope, that kind of second-guessing insecurity comes from being human, and you're reading this because you know a funny, time-limited, flawed is sharing experience, expertise, memories, and loves - good luck training a robot on that (my story and sticking to it).
ClearScope My friend and master SEO, Phil Buckley, got me addicted to ClearScope. ClearScope is an AI tool that scrapes the web for pages that rank on the topics you're keyword research says you need on your website. ClearScope's gamification is brilliant. It gives you a list of keywords based on its AI magic. As you use keywords on the list, they are highlighted and checked off as your grade moves up from the F all posts start from. Brilliant, since a lot of expensive education has me working hard to reach an A+++.
The other day, Phil taught me a new trick: feed ClearScope's keywords, questions, and themes into a ChatGPT prompt. Feeding keys, questions, and themes into ChatGPT for this post earned the first A- from AI robot (ClearScope) to robot (ChatGPT).
ClearScope has an IBM-like cost, but I closed my eyes and added my credit card after Phil hooked me beyond redemption. The tool is changing how I write an outline, so I use it less, and that is a good thing since I can't afford more than I'm paying now ($750 for ten posts a month).
Dall-E & Photoshop AI Beta WTE has a great graphic designer, but demand for Rachelle's help far exceeds supply, so I use Dall-E's text-to-image generator to craft images. I say "craft" images because every Dall-E image gets run through Photoshop's new AI assistant.
I couldn't live without those four "marketing automation" tools, and they may help Jake create a user-friendly marketing automation tool. As I noted in a comment on my LinkedIn post, I used a ChatGPT Add On tool from Keywords Everywhere to draft buyer personas, and it was a great first draft, too, so ChatGPT may save us if it doesn't destroy us - so it is a trade-offs thing.
Our social media marketing team uses a gaggle of other tools, and I promise to write about those soon, but it's Friday, and I can smell the weekend - a sentence no robot would ever write, and I'm not sure if that is good or bad.
FoundObjects.com, one of the first B2B2C websites, launched in November 1999, is long gone, sadly a victim of divorce and selling the URL to a rock group.
Here is what my friend John Kean just Imed me:
🥸just scrolled up to see your mention of marketing automation and CRM and email marketing. I’ll be using Zapier for the drag/drop if-this-then-that automations. Short-term it will be manual as I don’t think my subject lines and content are gonna make it rain. But eventually. I believe in Starloop’s product/service (also will be available in the Zapier App Store soon)
Apollo.io-Smartlead.ai-HubSpot stack as I’m doing some freelancing (John mentioned the company but I'm going to leave their name off until he tells me it is okay to say).
I met John at a tech conference somewhere (not in NC). An instant and enduring friendship happened when we discovered we were both from North Carolina and fellow tech/marketing travelers. John told me he would ask one of his vendors to pay for a trip up a scenic mountain. I'd never heard of the mountain, but John sold me on cutting class and going to the top. I wish I had the pictures we took after the cable car trip because it was a fantastic view and an experience I owe to my friend and wizard, John Kean.
I made dinner with John and his son at a stop on Martin's Ride to Cure Cancer, my 2010 bicycle ride across America. We watched fireworks, and I wished John was riding with us, but he is way too intelligent for that (kidding). John is SMART. He does innovative work for banks and other FinTechers—a great guy, a good friend, and smarter than smart. I can keep up most of the time, but like Eric and Jake, I hear the wind whistle over my head. When that happens, I get them to slow down and teach me. They don't seem to mind :). Martin