Collaboration between strategic and creative marketing is critical to the success of any campaign. Alana Griffiths, marketing strategy director at Mason Zimbler, and Ray Coppinger, online marketing manager EMEA at Marketo, reveal how to combine automation and emotion
Marketing automation and emotion-led creative may seem like opposite ends of the marketing spectrum. But best-in-class B2B brands are finding ways to nurture a symbiotic relationship between the two. After all, creativity is supported and enabled by marketing automation; while marketing automation requires creativity to reach its full potential.
On the surface, emotional marketing – which taps into individuals’ needs and aspirations –embodies different principles to marketing automation which enables scalable processes and data-driven decision making. Emotional marketing targets the heart while marketing automation provides the tools and data for marketers to use their heads. However, achieving harmony between the two can result in powerful, high-impact campaigns. Collaboration between strategic, creative marketing specialists and automation experts is a critical success factor.
Here’s five practical tips for B2B marketers wanting to fuse automation and emotion:
1. Treat automation as a conduit for creativity
Marketing automation can provide an intersection between demographic and behavioural data, enabling real one-to-one relationships to be created with large proportions of your audience.
So, you want to target all business decision makers over the age of 40 in London, who subscribe to your newsletter and have visited your pricing page in the last week? No problem. You want to thank everyone who subscribed to your blog today and give them a gift-card because you reached 1,000 subscribers? Easy.
Marketing automation gives marketers a single, complete view of the people in their database. Think of it as providing the creative ‘dots’ that can be joined-up to create intelligent and helpful marketing experiences.
2. Develop insight-rich personas
Tapping into audiences’ motivators and pain points is a vital differentiator between generic batch and blast activity and communications that are truly dynamic and personal.
Business personas are partly impacted by consumer-related factors: status, financial security, personal satisfaction, family commitments and peer approval can all have a bearing on workplace decisions. Hypothesise about your audiences’ aspirations and priorities, both in the workplace and outside it.
For instance, overlaying behavioural and demographic data might provide clues as to whether the audience is more likely to respond to a proposition about finishing work on time or one about workplace efficiency. Or securing a personal promotion versus boosting departmental productivity.
Persona development represents a stepping stone between the clinical segmentation capabilities of marketing automation and emotional engagement. Insight-rich personas can shape communications that leave your audience feeling ‘this brand knows what I want, and can help me achieve it’.
3. Invest in behavioural and transactional analysis
Personas and demographics are a vital part of the emotional marketing equation, indicating what might resonate with your audience. But tracking and interpreting online body language reveals actual priorities and characteristics of individuals at a given point in time. You can identify any challenges your decision makers are currently dealing with, as well as what interests, frustrates or – importantly –persuades them. This knowledge can underpin super-segmentation where marketing automation becomes more precisely targeted and creative can be crafted for maximum emotional appeal.
Overlaying online body language with transactional data provides a strong foundation for automated emotional marketing. Any decision maker on a tight budget is going to be pretty annoyed if they purchase a product on Thursday and you send them a discount coupon on Friday. On the flipside, sending well-timed advice on how to make best use of a product they’ve recently invested in can help foster loyalty and repeat business.
4. Say the right things, in the right way
Marketing automation is an incredibly powerful vehicle for helping marketers to be in the right place, at the right time. But getting there becomes the easy part – engagement is the ultimate objective.
Creativity is the secret sauce. In email marketing alone, there are an almost infinite number of ways that creativity in content, design and overall experience (from inbox to landing page) can impact resonance at an emotional as well as a rational level.
Take the humble subject line as an example; a very significant 64 per cent of emails are opened just because of the subject line. So how creative can you get? Are you educating, asking a question or conveying an emotion-led proposition? The impact of this very small part of an email demonstrates perfectly how creative content matters; without it, the value of marketing automation is greatly reduced. And how about the content of the email itself? Is your copy human? Does it read like a template prepared for a batch and blast email? Or does it sound like someone typed out a note directly for the recipient? All these questions point to the importance of creative content in taking full advantage of being in the right place at the right time.
5. Test and learn – always improving
Marketing automation and emotional marketing have come to the fore in the past few years. Yet together they offer a mechanism for the continual improvement ‘test and learn’ approaches that were fundamental to direct marketing back in the 80s and 90s.
Split-testing and benchmarking activity can now be condensed into hours and days rather than weeks and months. And the superior tracking and analytics systems available today allow marketers to pinpoint what does or doesn’t work and why. It’s possible to assess audiences’ engagement with creative, and forecast with some certainty how emotional marketing will convert into commercial impact.
More than 100 years on from Wannamaker’s infamous ‘half the money I spend on advertising is wasted’ quote, we can finally predict creative approaches that will work – and those that won’t. Marketing automation is an important catalyst for this progression.
