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In today’s landscape marketers are under tremendous pressure to produce breakthrough ideas and creative that exceeds business objectives—and they’re being asked to do this with fewer and fewer resources.
In other words; do it faster, cheaper, better. The question is, how?
It begins with smart marketers using smart tools. In their book, How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, outline the importance of businesses attracting a new breed of multifaceted employees they call smart creatives. These smart creatives are part geek, MBA grad and artist. Eric and Jonathan point out that when you put today’s technology in their hands, smart creatives can produce amazing results, amazingly fast.
When you think about it, the best and most creative marketers today embody these qualities. They use a stack of digital marketing platforms to quickly activate and validate their ideas and measure every customer interaction. But most of all, they have figured out a way to seamlessly incorporate the customer into every step of the marketing process.
Automation is one way to achieve this.
Did you know that today there are approximately 2,000 marketing automation platforms available in the marketplace? Looking back to 2011 that number was only 200. And some predict that in five years, there will be more than 10,000 such platforms. Automation is not going away. The reality is; marketers have to look at automation tools and platforms to meet the demands of today’s business.
Earlier this month, Delvinia launched its own automation platform called Methodify. The digital platform automates much of the market research and reporting process so marketing teams can quickly and cost-effectively bring the customer into the marketing process by testing ideas, concepts and creative.
Designed from the ground up, with a simple user interface, to allow access from anywhere and any device, Methodify provides marketers with access to proven research methods. In three easy steps, marketers can select a research method, launch a study and see real-time results—with the final insights and data available in as little as 48 hours.
Born out of Delvinia’s innovation framework, Methodify has been in beta with a major Canadian financial institution since April. And as a result of the platform, our client went from four weeks to 48 hours when testing and validating concepts. Talk about a competitive advantage.
After the first test on the platform, the client’s marketing team walked into their regular meeting with their executives who took one look at the results, which clearly indicated the preferred concept, and the meeting was over. Every creative test since then has allowed everyday Canadians to choose the bank’s creative theme—allowing the marketing team to remove the spin caused by subjective input.
Automation undoubtedly answers one area powering smart marketing today. And while many are concerned that automation will kill creative, I couldn’t disagree more.
Smart marketing is powered by smart creatives—and more importantly, by even smarter customers. And with marketers today facing pressure to produce breakthrough creative that exceeds business objectives—with fewer and fewer resources—they need faster, cheaper and better solutions.
Steve Mast is president and chief innovation officer at Delvinia
