In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast, Hannah and Mike tackle the limits of AI in marketing strategy, reacting to a recent MarTech article that questions whether AI can truly plan campaigns.
They debate Adobe’s position in the marketing automation space and discuss the rise of AI-generated creatives.
Also in the episode, they break down why simplified customer journeys don’t work in B2B, and share a smart tip for improving your data quality over the quieter summer months.
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About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 – Introduction to The Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:01:01 – AI and Marketing Strategy
00:02:12 – The Reality of AI in Marketing
00:03:28 – Adobe’s Digital Experience Update
00:05:31 – Dynamic Image Generation
00:07:44 – Customer Journeys vs. Funnels
00:09:52 – Data Quality Improvement Tips
00:11:36 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn:Â https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn:Â https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website:Â https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn:Â https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Why AI Falls Short on Strategy and What Marketers Miss About Customer Journeys
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. This is Napier’s podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Whirly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. Today, I talk about how AI struggles to do marketing strategy.
Hannah: We discuss AI-generated customized adverts.
Mike: Hannah tells us all about customer journeys.
Hannah: And Mike gets all excited about data. Well, hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of Marble Automation Moment. How are you doing?
Mike: Hi, Hannah. Great to talk to you again.
Hannah: Well, I mean, you are doing me the biggest favor right now, Mike, because I know it’s nice weather, and I think I’ve had to literally drag you away from the cricket for you to be here today.
Mike: Well, clearly cricket is way more important than anything to do with marketing automation. No, it’s not. I’m really excited to be with you. And we’ve got some good things to talk about on marketing automation. So looking forward to it.
Hannah: Definitely. Well, let’s kick off. And I think you’re going to have some opinions about the things we talk about today. Not that you never have opinions, but I came across a really good article from MarTech. And I think it was really interesting because it talks about how, you know, AI is reshaping marketing. We’ve read a hundred articles on how great AI is. But the real crux of this article was actually, but is it? Is it actually reshaping marketing? Because if you actually dive down, AI is great in doing that basic stuff, but it actually can’t do that strategy and that planning that marketers are needed for in order for it to be successful. I don’t know, what did you think about it?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who’s actually tried using AI is going to be completely unsurprised by this, probably. If you look at AI, you can ask it to generate marketing strategies and marketing campaigns, and they’re all very generic. I mean, you may as well just Google 10 steps to creating a marketing campaign and go read an article, because that’s effectively what’s happening. It’s pulling generic content from the website. So the fact that AI is good for some implementation, but really hasn’t yet got there on the strategy, personally, I didn’t think it was much of a surprise.
Hannah: I totally agree. I think for me, though, it was nice just to see a bit of honesty. We see so much hyped nonsense, I guess, kind of in the press, in the media about how amazing it is, that it’s nice to have a bump down to realities once in a while.
Mike: You’re absolutely right. I think, you know, in AI, everything’s focused around, isn’t it amazing, it’s going to change the world, you know, the robots are here to take over, which, to be fair, if the robots get a lot smarter, may be a great move to start being overly nice to them now. But I think, you know, realistically, in MarTech, people struggle. I mean, we’ve done a lot of experimentation on AI, haven’t we, Hannah? And if you look at it, even generating, you know, small phrases within an email, you can actually end up with AI generating content that you look at and go, I really don’t want that going out. What do you think?
Hannah: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, we had a conversation earlier this week and we were really excited and we were like, yes, this is going to make our campaign so much easier. Use ChatGPT to really pull in this information. And we were really simple as well. We were just focusing on markets and target users. And actually the data it pulled through was terrible. And I would never send an email out with that data. So we were actually really disappointed that it wasn’t going to change my world at the moment.
Mike: No, well, it looks like you’ve got a job for the next week, at least, Hannah. I thought the other funny thing, though, was if you look at the report that you pulled out from MarTech, the research said that marketing teams say that it’s increasing productivity by 44%, which they equated to saving 11 hours. Now, you know I’m a bit of a maths geek. I want to know what’s happening, because that means that basically 25 hours were productive for marketers. What were marketers doing the other 15 hours that clearly were completely unproductive? Otherwise, those numbers don’t add up.
Hannah: No, I completely agree. I read it and thought, well, I think I’m working too hard, if that’s the case. One of the other things that we came across, and this is a little bit different, because we had a bit of a chat about this and whether we wanted to include it. But Adobe has basically come out and provided an update for its digital experience segment. Now, I had a little argument with you and I was like, I’m not sure that we can count Adobe as a market automation platform. And you slightly disagreed. But I think it was interesting because they’re focusing on customer experience. So they’re combining the creativity, data and AI. And in their real marketing phrase, they’ve done it as to help brands deliver personalized and real-time engagement. Now it was interesting because the article really positioned them as trying to compete against SAIL forces and Apton’s AI capabilities, but I’ve always just viewed them as not in the same wavelength, we’re in the same race really, but what do you think?
Mike: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I mean, Adobe bought Marketo, obviously, to give themselves the market automation platform. But then they have all these other platforms that kind of are sort of a bit related to it. And certainly the Adobe announcement. I mean, that’s all about automating the generation of images for advertising, which to me feels very marketing automation, even though it’s not a market automation platform. I guess the question is, you know, firstly, do we think it’s a good idea to have automated image generation? And then secondly, I’m really interested to know whether you think people are actually going to use it.
Hannah: Oh, wow. That’s a couple of great questions, Mike. I think for me, it’s what is the ease of use in actually using Adobe to generate images using AI? Because I think a lot of people instantly go to things like ChatGPT, they’ve maybe got the prompts down now, they know it’s going to be really helpful. So what is the benefit of using Adobe actually over something that’s more accessible to everybody on a day-to-day basis anyway?
Mike: Well, I guess it depends on whether you’re actually customizing the images for individual audiences. So I totally agree. I think a lot of people, when they’re generating images, they probably go to Chat GPT. You know, maybe some of the design teams are using Firefly from Adobe, but I actually think the truth is, and I think this is what you’re hinting at, most people don’t use these features. I’m pretty sure when I’m on the internet, I’m not getting served customized images. I’m getting served generic images that are served to, you know, huge numbers of people, whether that’s B2B or whether that’s consumer. I think it’s the same. And it’s really fascinating because for a long time, we moaned in marketing automation that people just use marketing automation systems as an email system, rather than really taking advantage of all the capabilities. I think now we’re seeing that change. But equally, we’re seeing all this new technology like dynamic image generation. I’m not sure that’s being used yet. I think people are buying it because the demos are cool. And then, you know, gut feel, I’m not seeing a lot of campaigns running using this technology.
Hannah: I think that’s a fantastic point, Mike, and I 100% agree. I think as well, you know, it comes down to, do people actually know how to use these tools? You said it yourself, they buy it, it looks cool. Do they understand how to do this dynamic image creation? Because as well, I’m on all the platforms, I don’t have anything personalized to me. As I think the companies that get up to speed first and actually really start to implement, no matter what industry you’re in, are really gonna be, you know, the leaders in their market.
Mike: Obviously, if the technology works. And I think that that’s going to be the interesting thing. I know that there are designers who probably listen to this who are saying, yeah, you can use AI to customize an image. But if I generate an image, it’s going to be more effective, it’s going to be a better image. Who knows? I think we’re going to have to see what happens as we go forward.
Hannah: Definitely. Well, let’s move on because look at the time and I want to have a chat about Acton. Markton have actually used my favourite phrase for this week, so we’ve had several pitches this week, I’ve written a lot of blogs this week, and it’s all been about customer journeys. So I saw it and I was like, this speaks to me, I want to talk about it. But really, they spoke about how market automation links into the customer journeys. But the real interesting thing about this is that if you look at the web and you look at what they’re talking about, actually, this is talking about building funnels. Did you notice the same?
Mike: Yeah, I agree. Actually, Hannah, I just want to jump in there. Firstly, you are genuinely the queen of customer journeys. I’m so impressed at what you’re doing with building them. And I think the problem is, is people talk customer journey, and then they have very simplistic customer journeys. Acton is basically engage, convert, connect three stages. That’s not really describing a customer journey. It’s absolutely describing a funnel. And I think if we’re going to be effective, particularly in B2B where the journeys can be very complex, we’ve got to go beyond these simplistic three, four, five stage journeys and really understand how a customer behaves and what happens throughout that whole buying process. Don’t you agree?
Hannah: Oh, I definitely agree. And I think this is often where marketers go wrong. They don’t actually do the job properly and then wonder why their campaigns aren’t working.
Mike: Yeah, and simplifying stuff is, you know, it’s always a terrible thing. I mean, convert is, it’s a really difficult thing to get someone from being interested in your product to actually get them to be a customer. And just to call it convert, it trivializes it. And I think it means people actually don’t think about what they need to do to get someone to become a customer. If you build a proper customer journey, it really makes a difference. Now, obviously, even a simplistic customer journey is better than none. So let’s be honest, it is a step forward for a lot of people. But for high involvement products, it’s really hard to simplify.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, Mike, let’s move on to our insightful tip of the week. Now, I know you wanted to talk about levering up our data. Do you want to have a bit of a chat about that?
Mike: Well, exactly. I mean, I think it’s something, you know, we do quite a lot of at Napier and we quite often see companies perhaps not taking advantage of some of the tools that they’ve got that they can use to really improve the quality and the detail behind their data. And as it’s summer, I believe that some people don’t spend all the summer watching cricket. So it’s a great time to actually, you know, when things are quiet, to think about how we can improve data quality.
Hannah: Definitely. And I mean, it’s something we do internally here. It’s something you should be looking at, I would say, more than once a year, at least once a quarter, if you can. But take advantage of those summer months and do the work on your database so that when you are ramping back up for the autumn, you’ve really got a higher chance of being more successful.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, we’re doing some projects for clients at the moment. You know, the work ranges from literally looking at where they’ve got data that’s bouncing. So people have left, get rid of those people who’ve gone away from a company. And if you’re in the EU or other areas with data protection legislation, that could actually ultimately land you in hot water if you’re holding old and out of date information. But it’s much more than that. It’s about adding to the data you have. There’s lots of ways to enrich the existing contact data through databases. And it’s super cheap. I don’t understand why people don’t do it more because it really doesn’t cost very much. And then finally, of course, the important thing, this is where marketers have the biggest opportunity, is growing the contact base in key targets. So it’s acquiring more contact names. And all of those things, if you add them together, they can make your market automation campaigns after the summer so much more effective.
Hannah: Well, I don’t think I could have summed it up any better myself, Mike. Thank you so much for another amazing conversation today. It was really insightful as always.
Mike: Thanks, Hannah. It was fun as always. Great to talk to you.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
