Marketing automation has become standard technology for online businesses throughout recent years. As ordinary marketing processes begin to become more digital instead of personal, marketing automation is continuing to evolve into a mandatory platform that leverages business success.
The revenue for the marketing automation industry is growing by more than 30% each year, as evidenced by this chart.
This chart proves that not only has the implementation of marketing automation grown, but the technology has grown as a whole. Read on to learn about five important marketing trends.
1. Automated Strategy Optimization
Since its inception, marketing automation platforms helped marketers automate repetitive and tedious tasks while equipping them with the right tools to send personalized messages at the correct time. Now, marketing automation has changed from this simple objective.
Thanks for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), it’s now feasible to optimize your marketing message.
For example, marketing software uses AI technology to find and catalog your website copy and categorize it according to its relevance. Then, it automatically produces personalized content sourced from the data acquired from your website.
In addition, marketing automation platforms can track your client’s user behavior when they visit your site. Your selected platform can analyze this data to further understand your clients’ intent and interest, suggesting a marketing message suitable to boost the chances of securing a conversion. So, instead of just saving you time on completing repetitive tasks, marketing automation can improve your targeting and overall marketing strategy.
2. Improved Predictive Lead Scoring
Lead scoring isn’t a new marketing automation feature. However, there is new information suggesting that this feature will improve tremendously. Most marketers create their own custom lead scoring criteria (or use their software’s standard criteria) to calculate the value of leads based on email interaction, website behavior, interest, and various other factors.
Now, marketing automation platforms can utilize machine learning to refine the lead scoring process by improving algorithms. This makes it possible to generate comprehensive insights from raw data and make a better generalization of a lead based on their specific behavior.
Now that lead scoring is becoming more accurate, marketers will rely on it heavily to make precise marketing decisions. Savvy marketers will use lead scoring technology which leads require prioritization. These marketers will also provide greater insight into what kind of message is optimal for different sections of your sales funnel so you can engage your leads at critical junctures of their buying journey.
3. Enhanced Cross-Channel Marketing
In the early days of marketing automation, brand new technology was available for every marketing channel. Marketers could utilize social media marketing, blog management, and email automation tools all from one platform.
Since marketing automation has grown in popularity, there are countless platforms to choose from. While many marketers still prefer to use separate platforms to execute their marketing strategies, this won’t be the case much longer. That’s because it’s much more advantageous for businesses to use all-in-one marketing automation tools.
When you perform mobile, social media, and email marketing tasks in one place, it’s convenient to develop a cross-channel marketing strategy. Delivering a consistent marketing correspondence across your devices and channels helps to augment customer loyalty, optimize your sales funnel, and more.
As a matter of fact, organizations that employ a consistent cross-marketing strategy effectively retain 89% of their customers. Therefore, if you’re still using three of four different technologies to reach your audience, it’s now time to consolidate. Select a marketing automation platform that performs all of your necessary tasks, or one that integrates well with other software that does.
4. Increased Hands-On Marketing
Automation is all about streamlining specific processes and freeing up more time to work on strategic tasks to many marketers. Although saving time is essential, many professionals make the mistake of seeing marketing automation as a “set it and forget it” opportunity.
These individuals make countless damaging mistakes by automating social media posts while never taking the time to engage their audience, or they set up their email marketing campaigns but never check on its progress.
The most successful marketers understand that marketing automation brings the unique opportunity to focus their efforts on strategy optimization and direct engagement. Automation can help you relate to your audience, create the right message for a particular lead, and deliver it at the right time.
Marketers who realize this advantage are innately positioned to surpass competitors who simply want to save time by automating repetitive tasks.
5. More Chatbots
AI adds the extra benefit of implementing chatbots via marketing automation software. A chatbot is defined as an automated conversation initiated when a prospect reaches out to a business.
Don’t confuse this new feature as simply automated messaging. By using AI, marketing automation software can automatically suggest suitable content based on intent and customer behavior. This technology can also derive content according to a prospect’s location in your sales funnel.
This technology makes it possible to automate customer support, sales information, and other suggestions with bots. Furthermore, businesses can also utilize chatbots to recommend highlighted services and products, boost conversion rates, deliver marketing content, and more.
Most chatbots are accessed through Facebook Messenger, but you can also set up this technology as a widget on your website. Chatbots offer businesses the opportunity to interact with customers accurately based on their intent and past behavior.
Since consumers typically stay on websites for less than 15 seconds, more businesses will utilize this feature to engage prospects immediately in order to produce a conversion.
Automate Strategically
Marketing automation is steadily becoming a widely-used resource among businesses big and small. Nonetheless, this technology is improving to make marketing more convenient, accessible, and rewarding for users. It’s important to realize new trends in the marketing automation industry so you can gain a competitive edge over your competitors and optimize your organization’s revenue.