11.
Using Automation to Guide Journeys
Now that you’ve mapped out customer journeys of your various buyer personas and understand how to use triggers to meet buyers where they are and move them forward, it’s time to put those ideas into practice at scale. As I’ve mentioned, none of the concepts I’ve described so far are easy to implement. But technology can help by creating a strong enough current to carry customers through their journey, stage by stage. Such levels of individualized context require a new form of technology able to instantly create and execute programs in real time: automation.
Marketing automation platforms aren’t new. But despite being around for more than twenty years, only 44 percent of brands currently use them.1 With hundreds of automation tools now available to meet any price point for any kind of company—and the expansive list of positive results—overconfidence in limited media era methods is the only way to explain why companies have failed to adopt automation. But whether it’s today or tomorrow, all brands will have to make the shift to automated technology, even the very smallest of businesses. The numerous experiences brands must create are possible only through automation, shifting all brands’ creative efforts into a new realm: engineering.
Engineering a system of experiences requires embracing new tactics (or old tactics used in new ways) and investing in a set of connected tools that I call a contextual platform. When these connected tools share data, you can automatically reach the highest context in every moment—and guide prospects and customers to the next stage of their journey. Do that, and you will have mastered context marketing.
Crafting Journeys that Flow
A contextual platform absolutely demands that every technology across the organization cooperate so that data can be managed to create a composite picture of every prospect and current customer. This cohesive set of technology solutions not only connects every experience across the customer life cycle, but it also leverages the data gathered from each one. The platform’s excellent cross communication of data is what powers the granular automations needed to accommodate the many different series of automated personalized experiences. Within each of these separate “currents” in your river, individuals progress in the step order and speed that makes sense for their personal circumstances. Automation is key to keeping your currents strong and moving as many customers forward as possible.
The technologies that make up a contextual platform will be familiar to you, but again, you must rethink how you use them. Most brands currently function under a traditional departmental setup, in which each tool, channel, and internal department operates in its own silo. Because the various tools used by different departments cannot easily share data, there’s no chance to leverage that data to trigger brand experiences along the entire customer journey. Reporting is piecemeal, which leads to multiple views of a single customer. Such fragmentation is bad enough within the organization—but worse still, it means that customers receive an incoherent series of brand experiences that undo all your attempts to meet them in context.
For example, a potential customer in the consideration stage might engage with the website, digging deeply into the product and features he or she is interested in. While on the site, the individual also gave permission to receive emails. Next the brand sends an email, yet all the brand knows is that the individual is interested in the brand—not specifically what aspect. So the brand crafts an email about its newest products (what the brand wants to talk about) and sends it to the full email list. But even though the customer has shown interest in the brand, in the infinite media era that email is dead on arrival.
For a brand with a contextual platform, all the data is combined, allowing for each experience (in this case email) to be hyperpersonal, showcasing the products the individual is interested in. Recall from an earlier chapter how Room & Board combined data from many places (website, email, purchase history) to make all experiences better. The website presented a contextual experience, and each email was highly context-based on each person’s combined individual engagement. Those resulting experiences broke through, driving a 50 percent increase in sales in the first month alone.
A brand leveraging a contextual platform not only can connect the dots but also can open up new marketing possibilities. Where the brand with a siloed journey can send an email to everyone (mass or segmented), the contextual platform can create a personal moment for a single person, based on his or her individual interactions along the entire journey. And because all of the tools and channels are connected, the brand could go ever further by creating a series of experiences deployed across any channel.
You can see this in figure 11-1. On the left side of the figure, the brand has invested in all of the required technology to create an experience in each department. However, the tools are not connected, so there are seven views of the customer (each tool—email, website, social, CRM, backend, service, and community—has its own view). On the right side, you see the opposite: a platform with a single view of the customer. In addition to the way the tools are interconnected, a shared layer of automation allows for any experience at any time to be as contextual as possible. Brands leveraging a contextual platform are not just gaining greater efficiency by consolidation; they are radically increasing the power of the marketing capabilities and opening up new marketing possibilities.
In context marketing, all experiences, data sources, and technologies are connected in a contextual platform, with three defining qualities:
- All experiences are connected to outcomes.
- Data is connected and flows freely between applications.
- The automation layer enables greater context along the customer journey.
Siloed technology stack vs. interconnected platform
The fact is that data interconnectivity isn’t optional in the infinite media era. If your tools aren’t able to connect easily via an app store, you’ll need to invest in new tools or build a platform from scratch, using application protocol interfaces (APIs) to dictate which data can be connected and how. With a connected system that allows data sharing and customer outreach to work in concert, your brand can deliver a seamless experience to every prospect and customer, which has a direct effect on your revenue.
Although the tools that make up your contextual platform will vary by business, you’ll need a minimum of five tools to create the platform:
- CRM (customer relationship management, which is your customer database)
- Website
- Product
- Marketing execution
- Customer support
Those five tools could represent an investment of anywhere from hundreds of dollars per month for small businesses to tens of thousands per month for larger enterprises. That’s why support and buy-in from company leadership is so critical. And those are just the five essential tools. I’ve seen brands using up to thirty-nine tools, though according to Salesforce’s 2017 State of Marketing study, high-performing marketing organizations on average use a combination of fourteen tools to create a cohesive customer journey.2 The number of tools isn’t the important part; it is how well they’re connected that makes the difference.
Let’s look at a few examples. Craveable Brands, the Australian group of 570 quick-serve restaurants, including the brands Oporto, Red Rooster, and Chicken Treat, connects its in-store ordering systems with its marketing systems to make it easier to identify and retain loyal customers. Its most recent success was leveraging the customer data and permission gained in the stores’ point-of-sale system to onboard customers via short message service (SMS) to a new online delivery service. That move alone produced an additional $9 million in online sales. Ken Russell, the company’s head of digital marketing and strategy, commented on that recent success: “We want our brands to be Australia’s best known and most loved restaurant brands. The customer experience across all channels is vital—not just in-store.”3
A contextual platform also links demand generation to a complete view of the sales and marketing pipeline. All progress made in the customer journeys of individuals can be measured and automated across the organization. For example, Associa, a large US property management firm, uses its contextual platform to automate lead nurturing and provide sales teams insights into their prospects in real time. As a result, marketing is able to create more leads, and sales can track prospects’ interaction with marketing collateral, allowing them to focus on the most sales-ready opportunities. Matt Kraft, SVP of marketing and sales at Associa, says the combined effort produced a 40 percent increase in sales.4
Harnessing Automated Programs to Meet Your Goals
Automations are a relatively new topic in marketing, and many marketers have little experience with even basic automations. But such programs are the connective tissue between contextual experiences. Therefore we’ll examine in this section the basic premise of an automation and how contextual experiences connect to become automated programs. We’ll also look at more advanced possibilities of what can be automated.
All of this means that when you begin to design your automations, you’ll need to think as an engineer does. Automations are complex systems, requiring a different approach from typical marketing procedures. To get us all on the same page, provide you with that new approach, and demonstrate how automations can scale contextual experiences across the journey, I’ll cover six things you should consider when working with automated programs.
Keep Multiple Triggers Firing
Automated programs challenge marketers to think differently: it’s no longer a brilliant advertising concept with copy written to convert the unsuspecting masses into customers; the creativity is in how to leverage the data and the technology to reliably, and repeatably, create the perfect experience for each person in any moment. Learning to shift your thinking to these very granular experiences means thinking in Boolean logic, which, in short, means the following: IF this happens, THEN do this. Such as, IF a prospect has not returned to the website within thirty days, THEN send an email. This is a targeted trigger sent by the brand in response to a consumer’s action, or lack thereof. The logic is composed of three parts: commands, a trigger, and function(s).
There are, of course, many commands that can be combined to create very specific automations, creating an extended network of triggers firing for each person at the exact moment, in real time. Your platform and its tools will determine exactly which specific commands and programs are possible. Here’s the general type of data each tool of the “bare minimum” set provides:
- CRM—sales engagement and purchase history data
- Website—page views, number of visits, search terms, and content engagement data
- Product—product usage data
- Marketing execution—marketing engagement data (email opens, chatbot conversations, link clicks, video plays, content downloads)
- Customer support—when, what, level and type of issue, resolution
A single program, as seen in figure 11-2, may have eighteen or more different lines of logic, which read more like a decision tree than lines of code. These types of automated programs turn each trickling journey you start into a strong flow of demand.
The more data you can connect among the tools in your contextual platform, the more creative you can be with how your automated programs are triggered, and where and when you can initiate or guide individuals to the next stage of their customer journey.
Create Triggers for Next-Stage Content
Automated programs move individuals forward (or “downriver” if that’s how you think of the journey), but to do so, they must (1) be able to identify the prospect’s/customer’s current stage of the journey, (2) be capable of reading an individual’s specific activity, and (3) be able to deliver the appropriate experience that will guide that prospect/customer to the next step.
The easiest way to determine the stage of the journey is by observing a direct action a person takes. That’s because people will only engage with what is contextual, so if they are engaging, they are telling you where on the journey they are—that is, if you mapped your content to your journey. Such knowledge is key to motivating them to take the next steps. Let’s say someone engages with a “best of” list you have published to your blog. Once she has opened that article, your automated program might suggest two more pieces of content for her in a sidebar or at the bottom of the web page. The first suggestion should be another piece of content designed for the stage she’s in, and the second should answer a question in the next stage. Thus you are able to fulfill her current needs while also guiding her to move to the next question she needs to ask. The motivation to move forward is her idea—you just made the step easy to take.
Using an automated program to nurture customer reengagement
With high-consideration purchases, you’ll automate programs that collect information in a way that looks much like lead scoring—a technique of assigning points to an individual based on the person’s specific attributes measuring intent—though again, you will be using it in a new way. Rather than gathering a user’s demographic data, such as job title, industry, budget, and timeline (measures of how interested you are in the user), you’ll ask a program to measure how many times the person has engaged in content tailored for the awareness stage and use that to measure the person’s interest in you. In this way, lead scoring becomes a new data point used by programs to measure current interest, triggering a wide range of possibilities.
For example, you might have an automated program giving individuals five points for each engagement with awareness content; once their score reaches fifteen or more, an automated program sends each person an invitation to a webinar targeted for prospects in the consideration stage. Similarly, a person who has built up a lead score of 100 points might automatically receive a human-to-human brand experience—outreach by a sales rep, perhaps—aligning marketing and sales into a seamless process.
Lead scoring is a critical data point for contextual marketing. If this is something your brand has always left to the sales team, there’s an easy way for you to get started: look at the past ten closed deals for each persona in your map and the series of actions leading up to the sale. Now that your tools are all connected, you should have access to this data. Next, divide the number of actions into the stages of the customer journey to arrive at your sales-ready score.
I suggest using 100 as the sales-ready score, the threshold someone must meet before being passed to sales. To illustrate, if you had 20 actions, each action would award 5 points to the individual (100/20 = 5). The individual will accumulate points with each engagement, and when the individual reaches 100 he or she will be sales-ready. This basic formula gets you started, and as you pass leads over to sales, work with them to refine your scores into their correct value. Many brands fall short here because they forget lead scoring is a living and breathing program that must be refined over time as products and customer journeys evolve.
Ease the Permissions Process
Permission, in theory, is simple: just ask for it. In practice, however, the theory works best when leveraging contextual methods that are conversational (see chapter 5 for more about permission). At first glance, automations may sound ill suited to the task, but they have proved to help brands gain more permissions to keep your prospects moving downriver.
As we learned in chapter 5, gaining permission to contact people directly is essential to breaking through in context, and one of the most common methods is the value exchange. This method requires consumers to fill out forms with their personal information in exchange for access to useful content, or other form of value, that meets their need or desire of the moment. Requiring someone to fill out a form is something people expect, but that doesn’t mean it won’t cause them to bail at the last minute. You can avoid having people ditch you at the sight of a form and improve your engagement by using “progressive profiling.”
Progressive profiling was first proposed in Seth Godin’s book Permission Marketing, published in 1999. Back then, however, we didn’t have the technology to automatically break up the questions over a number of interactions with your brand. For example, your first request might be only for a valid email address. Your next interaction—in response to their request to access a webinar, for example—would require people to give their name, such as in figure 11-3.
A strong contextual platform has a single, 360-degree view of the customer at all times, so it can make progressive profiling happen across channels. For example, a first interaction on a social channel asks for the email, then a subsequent visit to your website asks for their name. The progressive nature of the experience ensures that you aren’t asking them to type in the same information repeatedly.
Example of progressive profiling
Using a chatbot to gain permission
You can ease permission requests using a chatbot. More advanced marketers have already begun to use chatbots to gain the required permission information via conversation while on the website—instead of using a form. Figure 11-4 provides an example of how that might look.
Chatbots can be triggered to pop up at any time on different channels. They can be deployed on websites to gain email permission, as the figure shows, or they can be used to expand permissions to social media channels, such as using a Facebook Messenger bot to communicate directly with your social audience, which you can then cross-pollinate to grow your email audience.
The other great news about chatbots is that people like them. They are conversational, are efficient at getting to the point (the good ones, at least), and eliminate the irritating task of filling out forms. Segment.io, an enterprise software vendor, uses chatbots to gain permission on its website and has seen a fivefold increase in engagement and a twofold increase in conversions.5
Scale Personal Customer Journeys
Most customers pause at some point along their journeys and don’t interact with your brand. Yet as a brand, you must be ready to meet your prospects and customers the moment they reengage, as if no time has passed. In other words, brand experiences must be connected experiences. Automated programs provide the power to scale thousands of such connected, personal currents, as seen in figure 11-5 for a hypothetical clothing company.
From its customer research interviews, this brand knows visitors to its adventure clothing section are most likely in the process of planning a trip. They feel excited about the trip, and if it is a new sport or a new location, a little nervous too. Customers are hungry for content that will answer their questions and offer a picture of what to expect when they arrive at their destination. Fulfill those desires, and your brand can simultaneously feed customers’ excitement and ease their anxiety. In figure 11-5, this brand has programmed a vast network of possible actions to keep various currents flowing in the purchase stage of the customer journey. Each experience is triggered to just a single individual and only when the correct conditions apply.
In this low-consideration scenario (i.e., a low-cost product compared with, say, a computer), the brand begins by asking whether the visitor added an item to a shopping cart. If yes, then the obvious work is to find out why that item has not been purchased. If no item has been selected, then content must nurture the visitor’s interest in the items viewed. With this visual flowchart, you can see how the flow of the current is dependent on automated technology to scale purchases. Without this level of targeting, it’s impossible to guide customers toward their desired outcome in context. Precise decisions on when to use ads, where the ads take them, and what content to offer are all done at scale to carry prospects along the journey, moment to moment.
Automated programs keep things moving during and after the purchase stage
Where the automation depicted above is a single program, brands can have hundreds of these programs running, meaning there are situations where a single prospect may be actively engaged in more than one automated program at a time. This complexity is solved by another simple automated program called a frequency cap, which introduces global rules—across programs—that limit the number of exposures, experiences, or times a brand reaches out to a single person over a certain number of days.
For high-consideration products and services, automated programs are just as essential for moving prospects through customer journeys—and they can produce rapid results, and for any industry. A great example comes from higher education and the online school of an Ivy League university. The prestigious school, listed as a top ten business school by U.S. News & World Report, needed to improve its enrollment numbers. Its marketing team had exhausted traditional marketing methods, and after being introduced to context-based marketing, they decided to implement it. Their first step was to make the case to the university’s leadership to invest in a contextual platform. The marketing team proved it would cost less than $50,000 per year—a small fraction of the university’s annual investment in current advertising costs, which exceeded $1 million at the time. This implied that the new form of marketing would need to improve the enrollment rate by only a fraction of a percent to justify the investment. Unsurprisingly, their request was granted.
The university’s marketing team followed the steps outlined in this book and shared their story with me. The team began by identifying the stages and personas of the customer journey by undertaking detailed interviews. Using the results, they mapped journeys for each college course, setting up triggers for each relevant search term to capture prospective students in the exact moment they were looking to learn more. By delivering strong content, the prestigious university gained permission to contact interested students directly.
Next, the automated programs took over, identifying each person’s stage in the journey based on the moment the individual entered. Guided by each individual’s cumulative interactions (tracked as their lead score), the program then delivered a series of direct email communications helping guide prospective students along their journey. The higher the score, the more sales-ready content the programs would deliver. The emails delivering the experiences were crafted in rich text, with a look and feel similar to personal email correspondence; the marketing team adopted a conversational tone as well, allowing the brand experience to reach high levels of context.
Every interaction and data point was fed back into the contextual platform, where another program was waiting to fire off content, testimonials, or video links during the consideration stage. Once the individual’s lead score reached the sales-ready threshold (= 100), another program would alert an enrollment representative from the university to reach out (human-to-human) to guide the student through the enrollment process.
A comparison of the school’s traditional campaign results with those achieved through contextual marketing makes the difference in outcomes clear:
- Traditional campaign: Using a paid search campaign powered by Google AdWords (now GoogleAds), the university drove prospects to a landing page to receive information about a course. Of those who landed on the page, 7 percent converted into sales qualified leads, and of those sales qualified leads, 3 percent converted into students. For every one hundred people, 0.02 percent became a student, meaning the campaign needed to reach five hundred people to equal one enrolled student.
- Contextual program: The contextual program was run on thirty thousand new and incumbent prospects. Of those thirty thousand, 18 percent converted into a sales qualified lead, and of those sales qualified leads, 50 percent converted into students. So, for every one hundred people exposed to the program, nine became students. To put this on equal terms with the traditional campaign: every five hundred people exposed to the contextual program produced forty students—generating forty times the revenue of the traditional campaign.
Close the Sale
Late-stage buyers who have yet to move to the purchase stage can also be guided using automated programs. Whether it’s an email with an additional discount or a message reminding them of the items left in their cart, automations can help close the purchase. Taking this idea a step further, during the 2017 holiday season, Lego connected its online shopping experience with a chatbot, named Ralph, on social media to create an extremely contextual brand experience designed especially for late-stage buyers.6
Ralph was designed to help people find the best Lego gift possible, which can be difficult since Lego has such an enormous product catalog. Ralph operated within Facebook Messenger, moving him much closer in context than an ad or email ever could. To put Ralph in play, Lego used its tracking data on all visitors to the Lego website and created a program triggered to communicate only with people who had (1) visited the site in the past fourteen days; and (2) had not bought anything in the prior seven days. This program required a connected platform able to gather the required information across Lego’s website and ordering system, then used it to produce an experience within Facebook.
Once people who met the criteria logged on to Facebook, they received an ad from Lego—a great example of how advertising can be part of a larger journey. The ad wasn’t designed to drive people back to Lego’s site but rather to invite them into a conversation on Facebook Messenger with Ralph, the chatbot (see figure 11-6).
The program that drove Ralph’s conversation was designed to guide each consumer through a series of questions that progressively filled in a profile of the person who would be receiving the Lego gift. This information allowed Ralph to offer the most suitable Lego set—all in a “conversation” that lasted, on average, about four minutes.
Source: 1) Lego website; 2) https://www.facebook.com/business/success/2-lego; 3) https://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/lego-ralph-chatbot-facebook-messenger-news-feed-christmas.
The entire automated program that powered Ralph ran seamlessly across the Lego website, Facebook advertising, and Facebook Messenger, closing sales at scale while staying in close context with each individual shopper. To be clear, the sale happened during the chat. Ralph helped buyers find the best gifts and allowed them to make a purchase without ever leaving Facebook Messenger. The experience was connected in an entirely new way, and purchases made through Ralph were 1.9 times higher than average orders on the Lego site (non–bot assisted). Even more outstanding: this single automated program accounted for 25 percent of Lego’s 2017 in-season, annual online sales.7
Increase Lifetime Customer Value
On top of everything else, automation goes a long way toward keeping communication with existing customers alive and increasing lifetime customer value (LCV). Ultimately that means guiding customers toward advocacy for your brand—a stage that often gets overlooked, especially if your marketing team is still stuck in “filling the funnel” mode. Postpurchase automation programs stay on top of repeat purchases and drive the customer retention needed to keep company performance strong and numbers growing.
Salesforce uses automation to onboard thousands of new customers each quarter, providing those individuals everything they need to become a super-user of our services and an advocate for our brand. The program starts with an automated welcome email that contains two calls to action (CTA): a primary action (register for a webinar) and a secondary action (join the Success Community). The primary CTA offers registration for a free “Welcome to Salesforce” webinar, while further down in the email, the secondary CTA offers membership in our Trailblazer Community. These emails are dynamic: the next automated program will send an experience based on the recipient’s engagement (or lack thereof) with the first. For example, if the person attended the most recently recommended webinar, the program will follow up with the next webinar in the series. If the person didn’t attend, the program will customize a message to encourage him or her to do so.
In the weeks following the welcome email, new customers will continue to receive a series of emails pointing them to increasingly advanced webinars, as well as other supportive resources, such as videos and walk-throughs. Each communication guides customers deeper into all the functionality that Salesforce offers. If engaged with the content and deployment is going well, these newer customers continue hearing from our Success Services team for a month, or until they are up and running successfully on our platform. Eventually they are put on another automated program to expand their use of our products and solutions.
If the program detects low engagement, as well as low usage patterns with the product, the individual is sent on a different journey, with content designed to break through contextually (for example, in moments of frustration). If that doesn’t rectify the issue, a case is automatically created and assigned to a customer success manager who reaches out to help (human-to-human). These programs have proved to be highly effective: customers who complete the onboarding program and join the Trailblazer Community (including Trailhead) buy, on average, twice as many Salesforce products and services and remain customers four times as long, producing significant overall increases for Salesforce in user adoption and LCV.
Next: Decentralize Your Automated Programs
Once you’ve embraced the power of automations, you can start moving toward what comes next in the infinite era: decentralized automation.
While each tool is capable of automations, such as using your marketing automation platform to send email or your website to change content, they are centralized tools—meaning they ingest data, process that data, and execute on that data. Everything they do happens within the walls of that tool. But decentralized automations happen across a network of tools, expanding the total possibilities of experiences. That’s one of the keys to how Airbnb grew so quickly—and how a new idea of automations will fuel future brand experiences.
When the company was getting started, Airbnb identified the moments where its audiences were naturally engaging. It had two audiences: people looking to rent out their place (host), and people looking to rent a place (consumer). It found those audiences—and the right moment to approach them—on Craigslist. Reaching them at scale meant creating automations. Following the context framework, it leveraged the elements of available, personal, permission, and authentic to break through.
To reach its first audience, hosts, Airbnb leveraged the native communication channel for the Craigslist website: email. Creating an automation that would find each new Craigslist posting for a place to rent, pull data from it, and create a highly personal email sent directly to the person who posted—that’s a targeted trigger. Here’s one of those actual emails:8
I’m emailing you because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in the Tahoe area, and I wanted to recommend you feature it on one of the largest vacation rental marketplaces on the web, AirBnB. The site already has 3,000,000 page views per month. Check it out here (URL to AirBnB).
Jill D.
The permission was assumed, and the message highly authentic. It was written as a person would write it, even being signed by a person, “Jill D.” This simple automation is what brought so many people to Airbnb, and was the trigger to get them to list their spaces on the new site. Now Airbnb had to get those listings rented out. To accomplish that, it created another automation, in reverse. The company automatically reposted all Airbnb listings back onto Craigslist, effectively introducing a natural moment found on the customer journey, while helping customers achieve their goal at the moment, which was to find the best place to rent.
Note that Airbnb didn’t create either of those automations using just one single tool. Rather, it used a combination of tools, pulling data from different sources and using different tools for execution. That’s decentralized automation.
But while the Airbnb example is very simplistic, today context marketers are leveraging decentralized automations in a way that’s far from simple. In the infinite era, we all need to understand that automations are already integrated into every tool your business uses. Your sales tools can automate emails, your chatbot tool can automate conversations, and your website can automatically change its content to meet the individual in the moment. Learning to combine these automations is the next step to creating even more contextual experiences.
For example, your product may already have a feed of data telling you what consumers are using and how they are using it. Accessing that data isn’t possible using a standard marketing automation tool, which is why a wave of technologies have entered the scene, allowing marketers to easily access backend data without having to involve engineers. These tools create a feed of data that other tools can leverage to transform into the information you need for your automations to operate when and how they should.
Now imagine you put a new feature in your product and want to ask your customers how they feel about it. In real time, the data directs another tool to deploy a survey asking about the feature. The results of that survey become fresh data telling you who is happy and who isn’t—data that can then be leveraged the next time a customer arrives (for example, “If the survey score is 8 or greater, do X; if it is lower than 8, do Y”). That could mean either popping up a chatbot that shows the customer how to get value from the new feature or, for those super happy customers, asking them to leave a review. Again, note that this string of experiences happens across many tools, yet does not include a traditional marketing automation platform.
Brands in the infinite media era must begin to see automations as the future of experiences, and realize that to create them, they’ll need to connect all tools and data together. This is why a platform is so critical. Marketing automation tools are a major piece of that platform. But automations won’t be happening only in traditional marketing execution. Automations will be everywhere along the customer journey, and for good reason. As brands begin to shift to contextual methods and embrace a customer journey strategy, put a platform of context in place, and begin to set up and manage a myriad of automations across them, the next radical shift becomes apparent. The increased requirements of the marketing department far exceed our current processes of working. Even with automations, there simply isn’t enough time in the day to do it all, which is why high-performing marketing organizations have embraced a new way of working that allows them to not only manage the chaos but also produce the highest level of value per unit of time. High performers embrace the agile method.