Examples of Tools for Marketing Automation
What do you mean by automation?
Automation in this context will mean to make a procedure less tedious by making certain operations happen automatically. The classic illustration is automation of the car manufacturing supply chain. Building a car by yourself would be extremely monotonous. The entire process has a lot of steps, each contributing to the desired final product. By automating, those steps would be taken care simultaneously and instead resources can be focused on other, more crucial, steps. Another example in the electronics industry where automation of transportation reduced transport labor by 63% (Neumann et al. 2010). In that same study, they concluded that “automation of transport and assembly both lead to increased productivity” (Neumann et al. 2010). Benefits of automation are well documented across many domains. Today, we’ll highlight methods for automating marketing processes, with hopes of simplifying modern digital marketing procedures.
What areas of marketing are we automating?
Two broad areas of marketing: advertising, and branding. Now, each of these areas are very complex and cannot be fully automated, but this post will highlight some tools that can make steps in each process less tedious. These web-based solutions are either free to use, or very inexpensive, which is ideal for start-ups with low levels of capital but high desire for digital marketing. The reason these areas were chosen for automation is that other areas of marketing, namely sales and distribution, would vary a lot across different businesses. Furthermore, distribution channels could have significant tangible aspects (Parasuraman et al. 1988) that require an abundance of forethought and financing (e.g. delivery service, or packaging). Whereas advertising and branding are predominately done online now, which perfectly suits the web-based automation solutions presented in this post.
Advertising
What to Automate
One of the key trends in social media advertising is the prevalent use of video. “100 million users in the USA will access online video content” on their smart phones (statista 2015). Billions of videos are watched on Youtube everyday (omnicoreagency.com). The process to be automated is the video creation step in advertising. A typical, high budget video requires a writer/producer, film crew, director, make-up artist, and costume designer. By automating the footage creation, the advertiser can focus on testing more ads or better defining their target audiences. Imagine spending advertisement budgets on a single advertisement video only to find out it doesn’t resonate with your target audience. By automating the video creation process, multiple versions of an advertisement can be made quickly and cheaply before spending money on a more polished version of the advertisement.
How to Automate
The two tools I will review in this section are Lumen 5 (https://lumen5.com) and wave video (https://wave.video).
First, Lumen 5 is a web based solution that makes creating a video very easy. Their main feature is that they use machine learning to automatically create a video based on an article. Simply, upload the article onto Lumen 5, and a short-form, slideshow type of video with texts from the article pasted onto images. This stock creation can be fully edited. The stock rendering made by Lumen 5 is a great starting point considering how fast and easy long blog post type articles can be automatically transformed into a video format.
Lumen 5 walkthrough
Step one: Find an article
Step two: copy the URL of the article
Step three: create an account on Lumen 5, go to your dashboard
Step four: from the dashboard, click on create a video near the top right corner of the screen.
Step five: Lumen 5 will present two options for creating video: choose to create the video from a link
Step six: paste your link into where Lumen 5 asks for it.
Step seven: on the right hand side of the screen will exist a transcript of the article. Browse through the transcript and click on key fragments from the article.
Step eight: as you click on key fragments, Lumen 5 will generate a video image behind the selected text and automatically animate it.
Here is an example of how I made a video on Lumen 5 from a wiki-how article.
If you don’t have an article as a base for your video, then resort to using one of the other video creation platforms there are online. For a site that is easy and cheap to use, check out wave.video. Their easy to use, drag and drop will feel intuitive when creating your first video. After making an account at wave.video, they offer numerous templates to choose from to springboard into your project. Their video creation is less automatic, but is still very low cost and easy to use.
Wave.video walkthrough
Step zero: Choose from a template (for now). Click on the template, then click on edit template.
Step one: Select format. These videos are ultimately meant for advertisements, so wave.video allows you to begin crafting with the end in mind. Choose a video format in accordance to the different ad types offered on wave.video
Step two: Add media. Search through their images/videos database and select your preferred media to add into the video. Your own picture/video files can be uploaded from your computer onto the website for use in your ad.
Step three: Edit. Trim the length of your video, add special effects to the production, and add text over the media files you chose in the step prior.
Step four: Final touches. The finalization of your video includes adding watermarks of your brand, music/narration files onto the video, and finally the video is ready to be published!
The learning curve is minimal regards of which platform you use. Automating the video creation process allows you to focus on getting feedback on the ad, and then improving the ad accordingly.
Branding
What to Automate
E-commerce is disrupting retailing practices across every industry. A focal point to successful e-commerce operation is strong branding. A typical google search yields millions of results, and billions of search queries are made every day (internetlivestats.com). Considering a crowd of that magnitude, standing out with strong branding online is essential.
Here, the branding procedures we aim to automate are: generating logos, and posting on social media.
Generating logos requires imagination, but there are web-based solutions that minimize the creative effort and generate creative logos automatically.
Keeping up with posting on social media is repetitive and time consuming. The most popular social media accounts (e.g. Vice or Buzzfeed posting on Facebook) routinely post new content everyday. Deciding on which content to post, when to post it, and the caption to accompany it takes strategy and creativity. However, there are online tools that can automate this process so you can carefully program your posts days or weeks in advance.
Communication with the consumer is fundamental to marketing. Social media and emails are great for responding to your customer, but those channels have inherent lag time that arises from slow human response times. To overcome this, chat bots automate the communication with your web-traffic while their attention is still on your website. A customer that sends you an email or tweets at your company likely won’t get a response right away. By the time they get their question answered, or their concern addressed, their interest might have shifted towards a competitor. Thus, adding an automate communication channel on your website will keep your customer engaged with your brand.
How to Automate
To automate logo generation use“LogoJoy” (https://logojoy.com) . To automate social media posting- try “Buffer” (https://buffer.com/). For automatic communication on your website use the chatbot function on “Gist” (https://getgist.com/).
LogoJoy walkthrough
Step one: Describe your company to LogoJoy. Answer their questions by clicking on the screen or typing where applicable. Simply tell them the name of your company, and then the type that best describes your business.
Step two: Choose from their templates. They will show you sample logos, choose from the samples a logo that would best represent your brand. Choose up to 5 logos so that their AI has some variety to work with when (automatically) designing your logo.
Step three: Choose colors and symbols. Here is the only bit of human creative input required. Choose the color pallet of your logo and the symbols you want to incorporate into the logo.
Step four: Logo generated. They will generate a page full of logos for your brand to choose from. Again, easy and inexpensive method of brainstorming design ideas in bulk.
If none of the generated designs are satisfactory representations of your brand, LogoJoy lets you download their generated logos for free so you can customize them elsewhere.
Buffer walkthrough
Step one: Connect your social media accounts. Create an account with Buffer, then proceed to connect your desired social media accounts. Buffer can connect with one account each from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Step two: Select content. Under the Queue tab found across the top of the screen, content can be scheduled for the future. Content is uploaded for each social media account you connected in step one. Look for this bar near the top, click on it to select content.
Step three: Once you’ve chosen content, add a caption/ text to your post.
Step four: Upload your content. Click on the blue dropdown arrow and notice the three options: Add to queue, share now, schedule post
Now, here is where you automate when you want to post the content you’ve selected. Rather than have to time your manual postings, the operation can be completed on your behalf, as requested in this step.
Conclusion
Automation in marketing is an emerging field with new solutions arising on a regular basis. The tools suggested here were chosen because they were all free to use and simple to learn. Many other tools exist that can replace the functionality of the tools outlined here, however most require payment after a free-trial period. Keep an eye out for the many web-based solutions that make marketing procedures as easy as possible. The more automation, the better.
