Is Digital Marketing Moving into a New Era?

From helpful chatbots to internet streaming sites (Netflix and chill, anyone?), AI-powered apps are used constantly to explore, record, analyze, and understand consumer preferences and behaviors. Whether it’s your phone, your car, your bank, or your home, smart machines are everywhere – and they’re getting smarter every minute!

A Watershed Year: 2020

When the pandemic blasted across the global economy, marketing automation was following in the footsteps of many other mass-market industries (think world cars and fast fashion). But as traditional trade flows congealed under quarantine, alternative communications pathways were opening up at a dizzying rate: thirteen new social networks were launched in 2020, with sixteen more in 2021.

The Way Things Were

As machines got smarter, they replaced people at increasingly complex levels in every industry. For the digital marketing segment, this initially consisted of:

completing repetitive routine tasks through template-based workflows, running on tighter schedules, available 24/7, and with fewer errors;

integrating marketing channels into centralized platforms, subsequently divided into sub-segments like social media management, data analytics, and email scheduling;

Once machines could handle the tactical stuff with minimal supervision and easy programming, marketers were able to allocate more time and energy to crafting inventive strategies, seeking innovative solutions, and planning novel campaigns with pioneering placements of creative content.

Dawn of a New Marketing Era?

But today, digital marketing automation is not limited to merely automating repetitive tasks and easing the HR burden. It now has cognitive depth and reactivity , thanks to quantum leaps in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Applying automation to offline marketing activities has some limitations, although it’s still effective for streamlining workflows and managing databases with CRM software. But when it comes to hardcore online marketing activities like email, social media, and advertising, smart automation is the only way to go in 2023.

Automated Certainties Replace Human Guesses

The main challenge faced by any marketer is picking the perfect keywords for every campaign, tailored to each audience. But ads won’t hit their targets if their keywords have low searchbot appeal, or their selected audiences are too broad / too narrow. This is where massive databases feeding into AI decisions can outweigh human judgment, using analytical metrics to pinpoint the best choices.

For some broad-ranging social networks, audience selection can be even more tricky. For instance, choosing Facebook groups based on interests, intentions and behaviors shouldn’t be based on guesswork. The same applies to Google search ads, where rankings and competitive keywords must be analyzed before composing creative content.

Deeper Insights = Greater Customer Satisfaction

In 2023, campaigns are going to be smarter than ever, with higher ROAS. Backed by AI apps providing a steady stream of insights, interest-based marketing will help businesses pursue their goals through more accurate targeting.

This is where an automated digital advertising platform run by a trustworthy agency can serve as a one-stop solution for all your marketing needs. Tapping into user behaviors lets companies cater to their every preference, with no overburdened sales teams or strained marketing budgets.

Keeping It Real

A recent survey showed that 71% of marketers are eager to use AI for personalization purposes; 68% of marketers believe that predictive techniques are now critical components of any digital marketing strategy.

But the truth is, automation has its limits, despite the apparently magical powers of some of the latest apps. Effective marketers must  test every launch, discover these limits, and then decide what they can adopt (often with some ingenious tweaks). In today’s high-speed markets, this is one of the best ways of keeping competitive advantages razor-sharp.

Thinking Outside the Box

For marketing automation to work effectively, it’s not enough to simply optimize keywords, tinker with bids, or rewrite copy. In the years ahead, impressive ROIs will demand deeper analyses and more creative thinking than ever before.

Marketers must consider the full consumer experience, asking: Is this content still relevant? In what channels? When’s the best time to present it?

Without automation, innovation is hobbled. With machines handling so much of the heavy lifting for campaign scheduling, marketers should be setting aside at least 20% of their time for brainstorming, swapping happy hours for deep-diving into crazy concepts. Because – thanks to virtual and augmented reality – even the wildest ideas can now be materialized in the Metaverse.