According to Forrester, Robots and AI will replace 7% of US jobs by 2025. So, will marketers lose jobs as well? At this point, this is hard to say for sure. But it seems unlikely. Moreover, this cognitive era will help create new jobs like robot monitoring professionals, content curators, data scientists, etc. A marketer’s job description might change. But losing their jobs completely is something that no one can say for sure at this point.
Long back, Gartner had predicted that Marketing will take over IT in terms of tech spend. Now it’s all coming true. That means marketing departments are spending more on technology (read machines).
Is your marketing department then secretly trying to kick you out? It’s not that sinister, actually. And, neither will marketers lose jobs like this.
The Need for Machines
The first thing that we need to understand is why we need machines now, more than ever. Ever since the advent of technology has started touching people’s lives, humans have evolved as consumers. They have different requirements now than they had a decade back. To understand their needs, marketers have to study them. This is the era of big data. It is the era of collecting information and tracking consumers across all channels.
The end result is a huge repository of data that will help unearth the likes and dislikes of consumers. That, in turn, will help us marketers do our jobs better. Crunching data is a reality, and we cannot do it alone if we want to succeed. It’s a lot of grunt work, something that machines can do easily.
Also Read: Marketer vs. Machines- The Winner Takes it All
The Machines Aren’t Coming, They Are Already Here
If you follow the world of MarTech, I think you will know exactly what I am talking about. Marketing automation allows marketers to automate repetitive, manual, grunt marketing tasks. This helps marketers focus more on their campaigns. But that’s not all, such a platform also helps to understand data and take advantage of it to serve our audience better.
The better we are at marketing, the more our customers will like us. It will not only help us serve them better but also improve our products side-by-side.
But automation has already scared a lot of people. Will marketers also lose their jobs to marketing machines like marketing automation?
I can answer this for sure. Absolutely not. All marketing automation will do is eliminate all sorts of menial, time-intensive tasks from a marketer’s life. It will not automate marketing completely. It will automate tasks that are difficult and repetitive. So, it will not replace a marketer, it will aid a marketer.
Also Read: Will Marketing Automation Take Away Jobs?
So, Will Marketers Lose Jobs?
Seems unlikely. We humans have always feared anything new, anything that we cannot understand. Remember the time when there used to be bank tellers, and then they got replaced by ATMs? Banks found it was cheaper to open new branches, and these branches still needed human beings. So, the bankers did not lose their jobs, their job roles just evolved.
It’s the same here. Machines will not destroy jobs, they will change job definitions. This move towards automation and machine learning will start creating new jobs as well. But, what is important is that you develop a niche for yourself. The more expert you are in your field, the values you will be. And, no one would want to lose a valuable employee.
But, the truth is, there is something that we keep forgetting, every time we worry about this. Marketing machines will always lack the human touch. Marketing in general is a process that will always require the human touch. This is because we are catering to humans and not machines.
Machines lack the emotional side, the creative ingenuity that is ours. We will not be losing our jobs to marketing machines, we will probably be working alongside them in the near future.
What do you think? Will marketers lose jobs to marketing machines? Let us know.