In the first part of this blog series, we explored a peculiar phenomenon. A recent Gartner survey indicates that over 50% of marketing leaders are “unimpressed by the results they receive from marketing analytics investments”, yet 85% predicted “significantly more” use of analytics by 2022.

If the current approach isn’t working, why are companies doubling down on it? By their own admission, their problem isn’t a lack of analytics. It’s that 32% of leaders don’t trust the data quality, and 31% feel that the results don’t present clear, actionable recommendations.

Intelligent hyperautomation gives marketing teams a practical solution for identifying relevant, accurate and significant data, and producing actionable, predictive insights that are reliable and explainable.

Oliver Sheerin, Senior Customer Intelligence Advisor, SAS

From data analysis to business impact

The solution is to pivot. Instead of throwing more resources at the problem, invest in equipping your people with the tools and skills they need to derive real value from your data. The goal is to create a reliable production line for predictive insights that are not only actionable but also explainable.

That’s impossible if your analytics processes rely on siloed data and individual expertise. The results need to be consistent and repeatable, regardless of which department produces them or who the lead analyst is. Moreover, your processes need to be scalable so that you can ramp up your use of data-driven decision making without increasing head count and costs at the same rate.

At this point, you’re probably thinking the answer is automation. But it’s not enough just to use robotic process automation (RPA) to take over the routine work. You’ll still be tied to the same old approach: design a campaign, execute it and hope you see results. Success or failure still depends entirely on human intuition, and analytics remains external to the process.

Introducing intelligent hyperautomation

Instead, I want to talk about a new approach, which we’re calling intelligent hyperautomation. It’s all about moving away from monolithic campaigns and towards an always-on, event-driven approach to marketing. In the intelligent hyperautomation model, there’s a short feedback loop between executing marketing activities and reacting to the market’s response, so you can rapidly amplify successful ideas and fail fast when they don’t land as well as expected.

Unlike traditional campaigns, which have clear-cut design and execution phases, always-on marketing requires your marketing team to be continuously adapting its activities to current trends. The level of agility required means it’s practically impossible to do this successfully without intelligent hyperautomation to monitor trends, derive relevant insights and present recommendations to marketing decision makers in real time.

Two aspects of intelligent hyperautomation

Intelligent hyperautomation is not about cutting head count or replacing people with machines. It’s about freeing teams to do more with their skills instead of getting bogged down in repetitive routine tasks. It’s about encouraging creativity, rather than completing checklists. And ultimately, it doesn’t just drive marketing performance. It also boosts morale and employee satisfaction in your marketing team.

In practical terms, intelligent hyperautomation has both front-end and back-end components. On the front end, you have the tools that your marketers will use day to day: segmentation and targeting, customer journey orchestration, and recommendations and personalisation.

Meanwhile, on the back end, you have the core decisioning engine that brings together data from across the business, analyses customer behaviour, and generates the insights that feed into those front-end systems. By integrating predictive models not only for propensity to buy and churn but also for risk and fraud analysis, you can gain a holistic view of each customer that enables confident decision making.

How SAS can help

SAS is working with marketers across every industry, from banking and insurance to telecommunications and retail, to help our clients get the most out of marketing analytics.

For example, we’ve worked with Telenor, one of the leading telecoms companies in the Nordic region and Asia, to establish an event-driven approach to marketing, where activities are automated based on contextual triggers. Within a year, the company’s intelligent hyperautomation platform was generating 50 million personalised next-best offers for customers. Within two years, personalised upsales increased by up to 50%. And today, 40% of all sales come from personalised recommendations. Telenor has also seen an 8% reduction in churn among younger customers, helping the company build strong relationships with the next generation of consumers.

Wherever you are on your journey, SAS can help you take advantage of intelligent hyperautomation to drive business growth in the years to come. With clear recommendations based on data you can trust, you’ll get real value from your analytics investments. And by becoming a marketing team that can truly take advantage of actionable insights, you can outperform your competitors and enhance the customer experience.

If you’d like to learn more about how SAS can help marketing teams like yours take the next step, reach out to me at oliver.sheerin@sas.com or visit sas.com.