Is Your Marketing Automation Strategy Killing Your Creativity?

by Johanna Rivard, Guest Contributor

Marketing automation is no longer that new kid on the block who’s trying to prove himself worthy of people’s time and attention. Since its emergence, marketing automation has proven itself a useful tool that relieves marketers of mundane, repetitive tasks.

More importantly, it has let us gain insight into priceless consumer data and buyer behavior. In fact, business of all shapes and sizes have adopted marketing automation strategies to tailor-fit the customer experience and fuel their marketing campaigns, both online and offline.
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Is creativity dying due to marketing automation? Find out!

In marketing, there are countless tasks that each marketer needs to think of—from knowing and understanding their target market to creating unique marketing strategies and implementing them to collecting data and analyzing results.

Now, those can all be performed automatically using marketing automation.

Creativity Will Forever Be Necessary
Some argue, however, that marketing automation is killing the creativity because marketing tasks can now be automated. But, let me ask you this – who controls and manages the marketing automation platform? It’s the marketer who’s trained to think outside the box and come up with ingenious solutions to difficult problems.

If any, marketing automation has just enabled us to save countless hours that would otherwise be spent manually gathering precious data. It has armed us with valuable information about our target markets, prospects, and existing customers. It has provided us the information we need to strengthen brand recall strategies and improve customer experience. The vast amount of information that marketing automation so efficiently provides doesn’t make creativity unnecessary.

If, based on your data analysis, you need to make some changes in your marketing strategy, it’s still the marketer who decides what changes to implement and how. You need innovation and creativity for this. If your competitors are one-upping you, then you still need innovation and creativity to figure out how to get ahead of them. If you decide on pursuing a different target market, then your innovation and creativity once again come into play.

No Machine Can Ever Replace Human Intuition
Yes, technology can automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise be performed by humans. But when it comes to marketing, reaching out to consumers, appealing to their emotions and logic, designing marketing collaterals, and other creative tasks, no machine or software can ever trump human intuition.

On the other hand, some marketers let their tools and software do all the work for them. When this happens, marketing can become all too programmatic, and it defeats the purpose. Marketing automation is supposed to aid marketers in creating and developing ways to personalize the customer experience.

Again, marketing automation was not designed to become a substitute for human creativity, innovation, and instinct. It’s there to provide information on which we base our strategies.

Its purpose is to guide marketers into making the right decisions, implementing the right strategies, and supplement their human instinct and skills with information.

Marketing Automation DOES NOT, NOR CAN IT EVER, Kill Creativity
To sum up, marketing automation is NOT killing creativity. In fact, it allows marketers to focus on harnessing their creativity while powering up their campaigns. As marketers, thinking outside the box is part of our talents and skills. It’s what we’re trained to do.

Now that marketing automation is here, we can focus on the creative tasks at hand such as creating compelling content that draws in prospects, heartfelt videos that touch the heart of audiences, or drawing up ads that encourage people to make a purchase.
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With marketing automation, marketers can do what they do best—reach out to people at the right time, with the right message, through the right channel.
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