Generating strategic automations with marketing technologies.

Effective creative automation.

The buzzword at the moment is “AI”. There are a lot of discussions about whether AI will replace the role of the designer. Fundamentally, solely relying on AI to generate artwork is a dangerous game, and there are various other automations (AI-assisted and otherwise) to creative processes you can implement.

While various campaigns using generative artwork are a huge success (just look at Heinz’s “This is what “Ketchup” looks like to A.I.” campaign), there are many more accounts of failures. Hands are difficult to draw, but AI is yet to crack them at all, so, often simple inputs will generate Dalí-esque horrors. Simply generating artwork and using that as creative isn’t recommended.

So, how do you automate creative? AI is still a great tool that you can use, but it is a new building block in the creative process. It is great at helping break through creative blocks by generating various images with a word or two, but it can also speed up things like replacing a background or isolating an asset or identifying what type of item something is.

If you’re using a Digital Asset Management software alongside Product Information Management software, you can implement AI-driven, or system-based, automations to marry the two together, too. We live in the age of integrations, so, take advantage of the power of a great image library, marry it with AI-driven meta-tagging, find the most suitable image with ease and add your product over the top of a beautiful landscape or artwork, and you’ve got some artwork that sells in no time at all.

The first full length Disney movie, Snow White, was hand drawn and took three years to make. Now, we have the tools and technology to supercharge the same processes while maintaining a core, human creativity.

Simple omnichannel marketing.

Once you have your artwork, you’ll want to distribute it. Automation can help here, too. Instagram, TikTok, print, email HTML, all at a glance feel sparse and different, yet automations can help resize images, movies, artwork and help you get your message out.

This automation creates a much simpler omnichannel approach, according to shopify¹ “Some 70% of customers spend more on brands with a smart omnichannel strategy.” As you no longer need to generate creative for each channel in a silo and can create one piece of artwork suitable for a banner ad alongside an Instagram ad alongside an Out of Home ad, you have more time and resource to focus on campaign success and increase sales.

Marketing technologies allowing for this resizing and distribution are disruptive because they create a consistent brand journey for the user with ease, rather than sparse messages created by siloed teams. These marketing technologies have successfully centralised marketing strategies for businesses as all artwork can be pushed through the same system, distributed, and its success monitored.

This is revolutionising the market, one study found that “companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to customer retention rate of 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.”² It creates much more scalable processes that can be fulfilled by much smaller teams at a lower cost and by much bigger teams with a transparency that wasn’t simple in the past, as all teams can view and adhere to the same brand guidelines.

Leveraging these technologies is simple and inexpensive and available to all. All it comes down to is resizing artwork for various channels as a first step, and then automating your distribution with a variety of available systems.

Improving your audience and decreasing your spend.

Now that you’ve generated your artwork and decided your channels, who do you distribute it to? Data-driven automations are key here. You know your audience and the artwork they’ll respond to, but how do you reach them directly?

There are several marketing technologies that help you target campaigns. Most if not all advertising platforms will let you create a demographic and target them. A good example of this is programmatic advertising, which will choose which ad to serve when a web page loads based on that user’s demographic, serving the most relevant, in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second.

Effective targeting immediately cuts down your spend, but, how far can you go? With data-driven marketing technologies you can get your message out on a household level, aiming for the individuals most likely to interact with your message. Hyper-geolocated and hyper-targeted demographically, instead of spending thousands on a blanket campaign, generating a low conversion rate, and getting a small ROI, spend pennies on the person likely to spend thousands.

With door drop or direct mail campaigns, for example, targeting an area and demographic interested in buying a house, the return on investment can be in the hundreds of thousands. If your development is great for first time buyers, you can filter out homeowners and those too young to be looking to purchase and get your message out to the audience most relevant to you.

Then, as your distribution is also centralised, you can start to tie channels together using technologies such as QR codes and centralised advertising/marketing platforms. This way, you can view which campaign is the most successful, and which campaigns were unsuccessful, and use those metrics to improve your marketing. For example, if one postcode sector was a huge success, you can use data platforms to generate a demographic of that postcode. Are they wealthy? Are they generally above a certain age? Are they renting or homeowners? Do they have greener habits? Once you have that demographic, you can repeat it across the board.

With channels tied together, too, you can also retarget the most interested households and cut your spend down even more. If somebody scans your QR code and visits your website, you can retarget them with ads. If somebody isn’t interested, you don’t need to spend more money on them. This way, you can filter down to the most interested customers and get them on board with a product or service that will benefit them.

Leverage marketing technologies to automate your systems.

There are loads of marketing technologies out there, so where do you begin? Either you can view it with a modular approach and automate each building block. For example, you can automate your creative with some great tools separate to the audience management and distribution. Or you can find platforms that handle everything, from helping you find your perfect audience to helping you distribute your message.

With several automations out there, the best way to approach it is to look at what your resources are at the moment and what your needs are, and if it’s end to end change a single platform may be better, but if it’s piecemeal optimisations, you’ll be able to use singular technologies to improve.

This is where Precision can help. Not only do we have automation technologies, such as Precision Connects, but we can also help as a creative agency. We have a building block approach where any part of your marketing processes, or all of them, we’ll be able to help with using our data-driven mindset.

Automation is the future, and it’s allowing businesses to get their message to the right people at the right time at a low cost, without spending on national campaigns. This allows small to medium-sized businesses compete in a saturated market dominated by big brands as budget is less of an issue. This brings the importance of a brand’s message and story back to the fore, as the story is what will sell the service, but it also helps brands ensure they’re telling their story to the people who’ll listen.

¹https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/omni-channel-retailing-commerce-what

²https://www.invespcro.com/blog/state-of-omnichannel-shopping/