Will Margiloff, IgnitionOne CEO, tackles one of the ‘fuzziest’ of the industry buzzwords: ‘Marketing automation’, and challenges readers to reconsider its definition.

Our industry is drowning in buzzwords. This should come as no surprise to you if you have read any article, been to any conference or sat through any sales presentation. I hear them in my sleep… ‘big data’, ‘programmatic’, ‘real-time’, ‘earned/owned’, ‘discovery marketing’ and on and on...

But being a buzzword is not necessarily a bad thing.

There is usually a reason people are talking about it (beneath all the hype). Something new happens: there is a trend, a movement in the industry, and it needs a description, a term. But what starts off with a definition often gets fuzzy. People end up using the buzzword as a placeholder or a box they need to check, but don’t know what it means.

People string these buzzwords together into sentences and hope they mean something. The fact that this goes (mostly) unchallenged is a testament to the resignation and in some cases, the wilful ignorance, of members of our ecosystem.

It’s as if people enjoy the cover that complexity can offer in the digital marketing arena.

‘Marketing automation’ as the buzzword du jour

There is one buzzword in particular that has been on my mind a lot lately – one that is perhaps the most flagrant example of a catch-all phrase, the meaning of which has gotten increasingly fuzzy. I’m speaking, of course, of: ‘marketing automation’.

What I would like to challenge our industry to do is not just try to remove the fuzziness from the
definition of this particular buzzword, but also rethink the definition altogether. Marketing automation is an area of our industry which is ready for a rebirth.

What is the traditional meaning of the term? You’re thinking it probably has something to do with email marketing or delivering messages to customers you already know.

Marketing automation occupies a very narrow, specific segment of digital marketing-automated, rules-based email marketing with an emphasis on CRM and not so much on lead generation. But now as technology and marketers become increasingly more sophisticated, the notion of marketing automation is accruing new and broader significance.

Marketing automation is now as much about new customer acquisition and top of the funnel efforts as it is about retention and bottom of the funnel efforts. Where it was simple to automate communications to those consumers who have self-identified, setting up rules based on information they have outright told you, it is a trickier task to take those tactics and reach those potential customers who have not yet raised their hands.

Connecting the dots

Tricky but increasingly far from impossible. In fact, this type of thing is starting to help marketers all over the world expand their efforts in a scalable, programmatic way and reach the 90%-plus of visitors to their sites who never make it past the ‘just visiting’ part. I’m here to tell you it’s just about connecting the dots. The problem is too many marketers can’t take that step due to dealing with marketing channels mired in silos and not having centralised data.

I have made many calls to integrate marketing and unify data, and here are some compelling scenarios clamouring for it to happen:

• You already know where a user has come from.

• You know what media that user has been exposed to (Have they searched for your product? Have they clicked on an ad? Have they seen a banner, liked a post, mentioned you to their friends?)

• You know when they visit your site, how often they visit and how long between visits.

• You know what pages they look at, what their behaviour is like when they are there, if they act like a converter.

Now you understand the buzzword, you can understand the user

If you can put these things together in one place and understand the user, you have more than enough to communicate the right message to the right user at the right time - automatically. You just wouldn’t be doing it over email or traditional marketing automation channels. You’d be delivering the right message to the right user at the right time in a cohesive, nuanced multi-channel media plan with an emphasis on site conversion.

Why not take that intelligence and use it to deliver these messages when the user is visiting your site? Deliver promotions or chat or offer forms to push them to the next level. Not in an annoying one-size-fits-all way where everyone gets served the same message, but in an automated, personally tailored way.

Take those tactics and deliver those messages when they leave your site too – through partner
sites or through media. Why not call this marketing automation?

Yes, in other words, marketing automation is marketing! You may now be saying that I am just adding more fuzziness to an already fuzzy term. That is not my intention.

I want to remove the fuzziness and both expand and hone the term so that it is more inclusive with more clarity and will inspire marketers to actualise the term by delivering automated personally tailored messages to both their potential customers and current customers.

By doing this we not only usher in a new definition for a “buzz word” but welcome a new era for digital marketing.

Follow @wmargiloff on Twitter for more of Margiloff's musings on marketing.