The Pitfalls of Traditional Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation has been a false promise. 

Reaching customers and prospects with the right message for them at the right time in their journey has been a pipe dream, even for the most sophisticated marketing orgs. 

People are too different, their buying journeys are too complex, and our tech has been too limited to deliver personalized journeys at scale. 

Sure, when your email list is big enough, and you have enough compelling, high-value content to cover the whole buying journey ten times over, the law of large numbers works in your favor, but that still isn’t the program that was promised. 

Advancements in AI are poised to reshape marketing automation and finally deliver on the original promise. 

How to Leverage AI for Marketing Automation 

To fully unlock the transformative power of AI for marketing automation, we recommend CMOs take the following steps.

1. Embrace a Culture of Continuous Innovation

To truly unlock AI's transformative potential for marketing automation, CMOs must shift their focus from simply automating existing processes to fostering a culture of continuous innovation within their teams. 

They must also be willing to advocate for culture change. Companies must recognize the market value of continuous learning and innovation and establish systems that support and reward this kind of work.

2. Assemble a Cross-Functional Exploratory Team

Bring together your most forward-thinking marketing automation expert, a customer-obsessed backend developer or marketing ops guru, an empathetic salesperson, and an expert creative.  

Assign this group the mission of uncovering game-changing opportunities to improve the experience of customers or prospects and give this team the time and resources to pursue those opportunities.

3. Establish High-Quality and Actionable Data Flow

More data does not equal better data. Accurate and actionable data is better data. 

By focusing data collection efforts on the data points that are most actionable, highest quality, and most important to meaningful personalization, brands can move beyond a traditional campaign-based approach and begin iteratively developing, improving, and delivering truly personalized experiences.

4. Anticipate Customer Needs with Proactive Experiences

CMO's with a supportive culture, cross-functional executional team, and valuable data with which to operate, are incredibly well-positioned to pursue predictive marketing automation. 

Lean on your team to develop models or experiment with out-of-the-box tooling that can predict customer needs, create hyper-personalized content to answer their questions, and connect them with real people who can solve their problems. 

The Next Frontier of AI-Driven Marketing Automation 

The new frontier can only be discovered if pioneers have the time and resources and to go forth and explore. 

By bringing generative and predictive AI together for high-impact applications, brands can unlock the value of AI-driven marketing automation, delivering unparalleled personalization and driving business growth in the process. 

Most brands will be distracted by the short-term gains that AI brings to their outdated system, that they’ll miss the window to go long on exploration and innovation. 

But the brands that figure it out? They’ll own the market. 

Ready to be that brand? Adcom can help you tackle AI powered marketing automation every step of the way. Whether it’s stack selection or turn-key execution, we’d love to partner with you to take on this next frontier.