Welcome Anna Fomina, Marketing Systems Lead, Revenue Operations, Wrike, sharing her insights on AI Tools, Marketing Automation, & MarTech Stack Optimisation, as part of the MarTech Thoughts series.

How do you describe your job to a 5-year-old?

My industry is IT. Wrike is a platform that helps people organize work, manage projects, and automate routine tasks, giving them more time to do fun and interesting things.

To the 5-year-old, I’d say this:
Imagine you are playing with a toy set. This toy set has different parts, like cars, trains, buildings, and roads. Now, you want all these parts to play nicely together to have the most fun. But sometimes, a car might stop working, a train might not fit on the tracks, or a building might be out of place.

A Marketing Systems Lead is like a master toy manager — they make sure all the pieces of the “toy set” (which are different marketing tools and sales systems) work well together. If a “car” (or a tool) isn’t working, they fix it. If the “train” (another tool) isn’t fitting on the tracks (or working with another system), they figure out a way to make it fit. And they always make sure we are using our “toys” (or tools and systems) in the best way possible for the most fun (or success in business).

What is the one marketing platform/app/solution you can’t live without? Why?

That’s a tough one! There are three tools I can’t imagine my work without, and I’d like to mention them all.

Marketo comes first as it’s one of the key components of our lead flow. All new leads are coming there, and they are enriched, scored, and nurtured in Marketo.

Then we have Workato, which allows us to set up integrations and automations that are not available with native tools’ functionality. For example, we have a monitoring process that alerts us in case we have an unusual number of new leads created per hour (either too many or too few). It also informs us about a long Marketo campaign queue, Marketo incidents published on their status page, and many other things across our lead flow.

Wrike would be the third (but definitely not the least) as that’s the place where all my team’s work lives. We receive new requests, plan, communicate, and review there, and I wouldn’t know my plan for the day and what to do next without it.

At your organisation, what tasks in marketing are good to automate and what tasks still need a human touch?

We are big advocates for automating all repetitive work that follows a clear algorithm. For example, we have automation that creates Marketo programs and Salesforce campaigns for us based on marketing campaign description in the Wrike task. (https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/10135872234519–From-Wrike-Marketing-Ops-and-Wrike-Integrate-How-We-Streamline-the-Campaign-Creation-Process) It saves us up to 4–6 hours weekly.

Another example would be monitoring and reporting. It’s still up to marketing professionals to review the reports and build hypotheses based on the data, but automation is great for validating if the systems and campaigns are working correctly and notifying us when an urgent review is required.

Furthermore, with tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT, we can automate or delegate parts of the marketing assets creation process. However, it definitely still requires a human touch before going to customers and prospects.

What will be the next evolution in marketing technology that we can expect in the coming years?

Here are the key points that come to mind:

• AI everywhere: We will see more tools that help normalize data, create content, build emails, and create landing pages, as well as aid sales teams in navigating conversations. The tools that currently form our tech stack will increasingly integrate AI features to keep up with trends.
  
• VR: This technology has been around for a while, but I’m really curious about where it will go after Apple releases Vision Pro next January.
  
• SEO is evolving to Chat Engine Optimization: There are tools like Perplexity.ai that make searching simpler and faster. I believe it will become increasingly important for such tools to represent your product and brand in a positive light.

What challenges do you see in processing data coming from different sources? How to overcome?

In my opinion, the main issue is inconsistency in formatting. Even with something as simple as country names — there are dozens of different ways to spell them. And when it comes to classifying industries and job titles, it’s even more varied.

Data normalization automation helps to overcome this. There are different ways to build it, and the right choice depends on things like the size of your database, how many sources you have, and what tools and resources are available to your team.

For instance, I’ve seen relatively simple campaigns in Marketo handling this issue (e.g., if the country equals “USA,” then change it to “United States”). More complex formulas can be used on the analytics side. And if your team includes data engineering and data science specialists, you can use machine learning models and OpenAI. So it all comes down to finding what works best for your business.

How do you balance experimenting with new technologies vs investing in current technologies that you already utilise?

We review our current stack when renewal time comes up to see what else is on the market, compare features, and calculate the cost of migration from the existing tool to a new one.

As for experimenting, we follow industry trends and regularly research new technologies. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to our business needs and whether this new technology can help increase revenue, reduce complexity, or save time.

If we are not sure what results we can get from the new tool, we do pilot projects, launching it on a small scale first and evaluating the results before a general rollout.

A big thank you to Anna Fomina, Marketing Systems Lead, Revenue Operations, Wrike, sharing her insights on MarTech Stack Optimisation, Marketing Automation, & AI Tools.

If you want to connect with Anna after reading her MarTech Thoughts, please reach out to her via her LinkedIn Profile!

See more MarTech Thoughts interview pieces here!

Last updated: Nov 2023