MARKETING
Why we care about marketing automation
Marketing automation is quite literally that — the automation of specific marketing tasks so that they are accomplished more speedily and efficiently, creating the opportunity to deliver personalized and relevant messages at scale. It can also deliver cost reductions as well as a better customer experience.
Below, we will introduce some of the basic concepts around marketing automation and ways you can get the most out of it.
Table of contents
What is marketing automation and why is it important?
Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) help automate activities across various marketing channels. The goal is to put repetitive tasks such as sending emails, posting on social media pages and managing data on autopilot.
Marketing departments use marketing automation to ensure their campaigns generate desired outcomes rapidly and efficiently. Employees can focus on thinking through higher-level problems when automation is working correctly. It can take some time to set up initially, but the results can significantly impact your business once it is up and running.
Marketing automation is often associated with email marketing. After all, marketing automation began with IBM’s Unica email platform in the early 1990s.
It’s useful to have an automated system for sending emails at scale to selected audiences or triggering emails in response to users’ certain actions (cart abandonment, for example). But using marketing automation only for emails can result in a disjointed customer experience. Thus, marketers must also consider its use across other channels too.
Key benefits of marketing automation
In addition to efficiency, marketing automation has several key benefits for marketing organizations:
Savings in time, energy and money
Marketing automation is responsible for increasing productivity among sales by 14.5% and reducing overhead in marketing initiatives by 12.2%. Intuitive marketing automation tools can give marketers their time back to invest in other initiatives and activities that boost a company’s bottom line in other ways.
Better targeting of audiences
A marketing automation platform that works for you will allow you to target your audience and monitor behaviors on your campaigns. Tracking real-time data and monitoring engagement allows you to capitalize on personalized communication across multiple channels. Consistent and relevant communication to your target audience results in major ROI and a boost in customer loyalty.
Embed a seamless omnichannel experience
Remember, marketing automation takes over all the repetitive tasks when done correctly. When this happens, you can craft a seamless and personalized customer experience. Targeted emails, pre-filled forms based on user data and anticipating customer behaviors help to ensure your customers receive the same service each time.
How does marketing automation work?
Marketing automation tools and platforms may have specific nuances to how they function, but at a high level, they automate workflows. They help us remove all the individualized sticky notes on our desks with reminders and put those reminders into a cadence that automatically gets done with minimal human involvement.
At a basic level, marketing automation campaigns will send content to a list of contacts based on a specified behavior or predetermined criteria to get them to take a certain action.
For example, let’s say you’re doing your last webinar before the end of the year, and you want to get some new leads into the pipeline to start January off strong. What would you typically do with marketing automation doing its part?
- You would send an invitation email to all the new leads to attend the stated webinar at a specific time.
- You might include an end-of-year incentive to get them to participate and perhaps invite their peers.
- Those leads automatically fill out a form that will funnel them into two lists based on a “Yes” that they will attend or a “No” that they cannot attend.
- The people on the “Yes” list will start receiving an email or text nurture cadence that will keep your upcoming webinar top of mind in their inboxes and on their phones.
- After attending the webinar, those attendees will be shipped over to the sales team to have a sales conversation about your product or service.
As you can see, you did nothing except craft the content and inject it into the automation tool. The tool did the rest of the work until the sales call, for which people generally prefer speaking with people.
Marketing automation best practices
There are plenty of marketing automation tools available. The first rule of thumb is to do your research and see which one would be best for your business and which will help you reach the goals you’re trying to achieve the best. Here are a few other best practices to follow.
Understand the journey of your buyers
For a marketing automation tool to benefit you, you must understand the journey of your target audience.
- What do they really want?
- What channels are they using?
- What questions are they asking?
If you know this information, you will find it easy to craft a workflow that works.
Ensure your content is relevant, engaging and consistent
Your audience is likely already bombarded by endless content, with most of it not being so good. How do you intend to cut through the noise? Test your content before feeding it to the automation tool.
You want to produce what people actually want, not what you think they want. Once you have found what your audience finds relevant and engaging, deliver it to them consistently.
Avoid lengthy processes
Delight your customers but don’t bog them down with lengthy forms and overbearing popups. In each piece of content, focus on one asset, one opportunity and one call to action. The “keep it simple” rule of thumb applies here.
Popular marketing automation vendors
Marketing automation software is very widely used by marketing automations. There are many solutions on the market.
Some specialize in B2B marketing, and as noted above, there are variations in the capabilities offered by each platform. Among the best-known and most popular are:
- Acoustic
- ActiveCampaign
- Adobe Experience Cloud
- Adobe Marketo
- HubSpot
- Mautik
- Oracle Marketing Cloud
- Salesforce Pardot
Dig deeper
A good marketing automation system keeps marketing to your target audience simple and consistent while being less time-consuming and cost-effective.
For best results, follow the key points in this article and allow marketing automation to improve communication with your target audience.
Here’s some further reading:
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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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