Automation Will Change Marketing’s Role In 2 Big Ways

We don’t need more data. We’re drowning in it. We need to find the data that tells a story. And the ability to see a narrative in data is our guiding light in the storm, the Wilson to our Tom Hanks - it’s how marketers will not only survive but stay in demand.

Or at least, that’s what new reports from major market research companies like Forrester suggest.

Specialization Through Data
Automation, data collection, and data analysis through artificial intelligence are primary reasons for rapid growth within the marketing industry. This colossal access to data (or the increasing availability of segmented and narrative data) has divided marketing into segments such as social media marketing, performance marketing, growth marketing, and content strategy.

Since much of the job is data-driven, marketing professionals spend one-third of their workweek on repetitive tasks. The primary offenders include sending emails and connecting data from various platforms. The obvious way to switch things up is to rely on automation tools such as HubSpot’s workflows for marketing nurture campaigns, or SalesLoft’s email cadences.

Companies like Drift (or the concept of conversational lead gen) and Full Story (or user session recordings) automate assumptions about the customer journey in a way that was inaccessible ten years ago. This leaves room for marketers to hone their storytelling ability, rather than spend time collecting the data that creates a narrative.

Storytelling is as ancient as fire - something we use to communicate technological change, but not a change itself. As marketing automation scales, this skill is what marketers will be increasingly valued for.

Automation Will Inspire New Storyboarding Methods
Chief marketing officers are experiencing a creative rut initiated in part by a high reliance on tech, according to Forrester. That means brand experiences are starting to look more like a factory-baked candy bar than gourmet chocolate - delicious, but indecipherable.

The fix for this rut means re-thinking the way we talk about our products. When your team brainstorms, do you commit to an idea backed by data? How would you develop a concept with no data? Think about the last time that you did.

This thought process and skill can lead to a new kind of emotional positioning for your product, which creates tension (positive anticipation or surrounding excitement, much like the climactic scene of a narrative) between your brand message and the item or service you sell. It also highlights the importance of customer segmentation.

A speaking engagement to announce a product launch probably excites executive decision-makers; an advanced skills webinar used synonymously with your existing product probably relieves market researchers.

Data can shed light on this tension, but not create it. This gap is where demand generation, or urgency, is created and where a level of emotional intelligence is required beyond automation.

The Future of Marketing’s Role
How will the role of marketers change in the age of automation? The answer is strategy. And the definition of strategy is what you don’t do. Marketers can think of that in two ways:

1) strategy is what you would do without access to data
2) strategy is the leftover data you don’t use

These prompts are not to suggest that strategy is not driven in some way (or most of the way) by data, but to encourage a gap analysis between what automation can do for marketers and what it can not yet do.

Artificially intelligent systems and data insights can’t write clever emails or develop relationships with people (yet). And that’s where the value of the creative marketer thrives: our Cast Away-style resilience in the face of colossal change.

This is not a doom and gloom perception of the future. It’s a prediction - as a marketer who believes in the power of data to reveal human nuance - that marketers will weather the island. And that automation will raise the dollar value of creativity.