Founders find there isn’t much to AI marketing, except for the massive lead generation

Contxto – Nowadays, when you hear about artificial intelligence in online marketing the underlying threat is that marketers who miss the trend will be swiftly left behind. Not so with marketing automation for startups.

You may be well aware of the benefits of automated advertising, but, at the end of the day, you might still end up saying:

“That all sounds great for big multinationals. I’m afraid my company is just not there yet.”

Quite the contrary, startups and small companies stand to benefit more from automation in terms of targeted marketing, saving resources, and thus reduced CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs).

However, for all the promises of optimized campaigns, strategies, and results in the charge of intelligent machines, the truth is, most of us don’t really know how much we can personally be benefited by automation. Meanwhile, the implied costs seem ominously clear.

Luckily, thanks to recent advances, machine learning has turned the tables.

Online marketing automation solutions like those offered by Adjust have reduced barriers of entry in terms of pricing, knowhow, and time consumption.

Today’s automated marketing is now open to everyone. 

AI makes marketing accessible 

Just as we saw it happen in the factories of the past century; automated online marketing massively reduces the time it takes to do certain monotonous and repetitive tasks. But, fret not, marketers: Automation is not going to replace you thanks to the way it has evolved into AI. 

Artificial Intelligence actually enables marketers to continue focusing on understanding and engaging their audience. They do this with the capabilities of machines to manage campaigns end-to-end.

For instance, creative automation makes machines able to better deliver the right ad to the right audience at the right time. In fact, the number of variations and variables needed to make this decision for each situation, segment, and channel (in a nano-second or less) has grown beyond human capacity.

The AI not only pulls together data from different sources, it also learns from it to generate new audiences. Indeed, as technology advances—particularly IoT (the Internet of Things)—the ability to unify and combine online and offline data will be the game-changer.

What this all means is that, the times are changing, offering more marketing power than ever in a way that is more simple than ever.

Bottom line: Not only does marketing automation for startups make marketing an open field to those who may not be experts; it blows current human experts out of the water on many levels!

AI makes marketing affordable 

AI, machine learning, IoT… All these fancy words tend to have a hefty price tag stuck to them. 

This is another beauty of machine learning advancement in recent years. Modern AI allows for marketing budgets to be minimized while getting maximum benefits. 

The reason is this: Much of your campaign success depends on your ability to pick the right channel. That means hours in front of a screen to see the trends and user personas within your market. And you’ll probably still miss the subtleties. 

This is where machine learning kicks in, since campaign performance depends on many factors. They range from the amount to be spent, the mix of channels, the day of the week, even seasonality.

Here’s where budget automation is set to assess what is worth your dime and what is not. Start-stop automation increases bids on high performance campaigns and stops poorly performing ones automatically.

Bottom line: Budget automation helps marketers allocate budgets to campaigns (and channels like FB, Twitter, or IG), allowing them to meet their target KPIs with the highest efficiency. 

AI saves time in marketing

The point of all this is that automated and intelligent marketing should free up the company’s human staff to dig deeper into the things that matter. 

Automation enabled marketers will spend less time controlling single campaigns and more time wielding real-time analytics and fine-tuning efforts based on algorithmic recommendations.

Marketers can dedicate more time and effort to optimize their creatives, and their campaigns, thus increasing operational efficiency and generating more revenue faster.

This is actually pretty important when even contemplating acquiring an automated marketing solution.

In the old days, for a founder or employee that did not live and breathe advertising, to set up a top marketing campaign may simply have not been worth the time invested.

Sure, the advertising geeks say your company will never grow without it, but, most don’t have a second to spare. The question isn’t: “Do I use advertising to grow or not?” its “Will me focusing on marketing end up killing my company from negligence?”

Bottom line: AI has eliminated that cost-benefit analysis surrounding old-school marketing. Now, the people that make up a company are able to sit at the helm while a machine does all the detailed busy-work required for a successful campaign.

Ultimately, marketing automation for startups assures their bottom line

Time is money, but never more so than in bidding. At its core, the world of digital marketing is bots bidding on people’s screen space. 

In this sense, “old-school marketing” isn’t Mad Men style advertising; it’s barely a couple of years ago:

Back then, a “dumb” bot would do stuff like stop bidding on ad space once a price threshold was reached.

Now, an intelligent bot acts instantly but thinks deeply about how and why they are bidding on ad space. 

This way, you’re not just optimizing for single variables like budget, ad space, audience… You can get granular and optimizing for individuals in a certain space at a specific time. That’s how marketing automation for startups can make ads look tailor made for the person who is looking at them:

As a user, it is the difference between getting an ad for a new phone case and getting one for precisely the case you didn’t even know you needed. Click. Basket. Purchase. 

That’s automation. 

If you want to learn more about the difference between Personalized, Creative, Budget, Targeting, and Bigging Automation, read Adjust’s “A marketer’s guide to automation” for deeper knowledge and a keener insight into the future of getting your product to the people.

If you think you’re ready for your own automated marketing campaign, or you just want to know if it is the right fit for your company, drop our friends at Adjust a line. 

-AG