The world of marketing has always been associated with an ever – growing number of tools, tips, and tricks to adapt to, but due to the rapidly developing tech scene, in recent years, it has been undergoing a real renaissance.
Although automation is nothing new to a marketer, the staggering increase in the number of companies such as BlueVenn, that have taken marketing automation to another level, signifies an end of an era, and opens the doors to new and exciting opportunities for those who create internet-based marketing strategies. An era which, according to a report by McKinsey in Oct 2017, states the majority of European companies still struggle to exploit marketing automation for creating better results, and higher revenues.
Why are Worldwide marketing trends sinking in Europe?
Digitisation is the most common trend that companies around the world adapt to improve their performance and leverage their business creating new streams of revenue. The possibilities digitisation allows, are not only being explored by emerging tech companies, but also by established ones, who through automation and AI see a potential to engender future growth.
General Motors, for instance, experiment with a new model of a car ownership that would allow its customers to switch in and out of different types of Cadillac model up to 18 times per year thanks to its new online leasing service. But although a lot of progress is being made in the United States, and China, according to McKinsey, Europe still lags behind with tapping into the promises of AI and automation, despite having most, if not everything needed that could lift its GDP up to 10 % above baseline projections.
The prerequisites for Europe’s progress in the digital age are endless. To begin with, Europe has the largest share of data flows among all regions. Experts believe, that despite the heavy hand of data protection regulations, the flow of information between EU members will still remain relatively easy, allowing business to continue to experiment with digitisation.
Nevertheless, the results show that although the companies such as ABB, Bosch, BMW, and Siemens has started to invest in AI, generally, EU firms are behind US and China with AI acquisition. In 2016, Europe invested only $3 to $4 billion in automation, whereas in North America the number of assets for that year summed to $15 to $23 billion.
An additional advantage for marketers ready to disturb the European digital market with automated tools, comes from the prevailing optimism that most of the European executives share. 55 % of German CEOs expect the increasing trend of digitisation to have a positive impact on their businesses in the future. This is partially because, the reverberation of the previous automation, that was a major boost for European economy in the late 1990s.
More evenly distributed digitisation, and bigger investments in automation processes could close the gap of unrealized potential between European and more technologically- advanced countries such as China and the United States. The European market, although undergoing major legislative changes due to GDPR, is only at the begging of their digital transformation, and still has unrealized potential that marketers should tap into, if they want to position their companies as technological breakthroughs and established international recognition.
