The modern business environment compels one to leverage marketing to stand out amongst the rest in an ever-growing competition. Marketing is always changing, and keeping up with the newest trends and achieving new marketing objectives is becoming more difficult.
Marketing automation is the practice of employing technology to simplify and enhance a company’s marketing operations. A variety of repetitive marketing processes, including social media posting, keyword research, ad campaigns, email marketing, etc., may be automated by marketing teams. This is done for efficiency’s sake and to provide clients with a better, more customized experience. Ideally, you can leverage these by hiring a digital marketing agency in Canada to get the job done.
A recent report suggests that by 2027, the worldwide marketing automation industry will be worth $1.46 billion. Marketing automation is widely used by over 51% of businesses, with 40% aiming to use it in the coming years.
Seeing its importance, let us check out five key marketing automation trends that can help you enhance your marketing efforts.
#1. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
It is best to adopt the two most powerful technologies for marketing automation, viz; Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Investment in ML can help design stronger marketing strategies that empower your team to compete at the highest level. With ML and AI, you can collect information about your audience to develop better campaigns for them in the future.
Machine Learning allows you to gain data on users and analyze their behaviors (online), and automation via AI lets you sort that data. Marketers can use this data to create campaigns that create a buzz amongst your target audience in the future. It enables you to generate content tailored to their preferences, enabling better engagement.
Thanks to AI and ML, marketers can craft personalized communications for customers along the customer journey. Consider an example of ML; when someone clicks an ad, ML will pick up on this activity and use it for future campaigns by creating meaningful customer touchpoints as the user proceeds through their customer journey.
Consider this; 46% of all searches on Google have local search intent, and 97% of users have searched online to find a local business. Here, you can think of leveraging AI for local SEO, which includes getting the best out of your website with on-page SEO techniques.
SEO experts at Frendeal leverage tools like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest and more that help you identify best-ranked articles, use them as benchmarks, and provide you with necessary keywords to include in your next pieces of content.
The stats will include keyword difficulty, monthly search traffic, and other SERPs. Such a trend in marketing automation is bound to impact your overall marketing activities, making it one of the most important trends in marketing automation in 2022.
#2. Businesses rely on more automation tools
A report by ITPro suggests that 68% of companies automate one or the other marketing operations. But there is still a long way to drive cohesive automation that blends all the departments to reach the desired levels of efficiency.
Automation tools are driven by innovation and have plenty to offer for your business. Here are a few reasons you should consider marketing automation tools in 2022.
• Lowers operational costs: When you use a marketing automation SaaS tool, you won’t need a huge marketing team. This means you won’t need to invest much in hiring and training people as marketing automation tools undertake the same tasks. Also, you need not have multiple tools and software that demands higher integrations as marketing automation tools leverage ML and AI to deliver predetermined results.
• Higher efficiency: Marketing automation moves things faster with lesser effort. For instance, customers may connect with automated chatbots like ManyChat to get personalized answers and assistance (more on it later) from chatbots that were previously only possible with human interactions. This means your team will have spare time to focus on new projects and drive innovation with reduced stress at work.
• Personalization: A typical marketing activity would involve segmenting an audience, crafting content for the same, scheduling it, and sending it to a set of audiences. But, marketing automation tools can help segment the audience based on engagement and behavior. This will help you better understand and meet your audience’s needs and tailor content to post during a particular time frame to drive more meaningful conversions.
• More productivity: Your marketing team may pivot to key activities that deliver results instead of repetitive tasks. Marketing automation tools like Ontraport can use the Tasks feature embedded into automated workflows to remind your marketing team to accomplish something manually when the automation tasks are complete.
All these advantages imply that automation technologies are here to stay. They’ll improve with time and become a normal element of any business’s plan to enhance efficiency.
#3. Hyperautomation and Social Media Management
Social media will continue to expand in importance for many businesses in several years. This requires marketers to craft highly customized content across multiple social media accounts like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
You can adopt social media automation tools like Hootsuite for scheduling, social media analytics, and AI-powered content creation (integrating Lately with Hootsuite). Such prowess will help you create relevant content for the targeted audience and share it at the right time to boost engagement.
A report by Ascend2, 2021, suggests that 40% of businesses aim to use marketing automation to manage their social media accounts.
On the hyperautomation front, Deloitte’s 2021 Global Marketing Trends report indicated that 77% of polled CMOs had used AI to streamline their operations during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Artificial Intelligence plays an important part in marketing automation that goes far beyond just filling out a form in an email.
With AI and ML, a company may reimagine the whole customer experience as your marketing team gears up to blend ML, Internet of Things (IoT), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to drive hyperautomation. Your team does not need to follow the same drudgery if you have RPA, AI/ML, and IoT, making automating end-to-end processes easier.
It’s important to remember that hyperautomation must be done consistently. When separate bots must communicate in RPA implementations that don’t adhere to uniform protocols throughout the organization, your team may face dire consequences.
Also, with hyperautomation, you will have the powers of AI and ML to get historical customer insights into their preferred digital channels (social, emails, et.), their behaviors, and choices. Your marketing team can decide how to use such data, deliver content and enhance CX.
#4. Product information management
Most businesses will have their marketing approach geared around securing quick sales. However, it is important to realize that the customer experience is no longer linear. Customers today thoroughly research products and services before making a purchase, and reviews can make all the difference.
As a result, using Product Information Management (PIM) as part of your marketing automation strategy becomes necessary. A product data management system allows your marketing team to access information about your goods from a single source.
Marketing automation campaigns benefit greatly from PIM as they can reuse data from several internet sources. Adopting PIM as a data source for drip campaigns or marketing messages helps drive meaningful conversations with prospects and subscribers.
Developing product information becomes a team effort when using PIM as a collaboration tool. In this approach, you create a database of relevant information for potential clients and help fasten their purchase decision by responding to customer queries.
#5. Conversational chatbots
You cannot add value to customers’ lives with one-way communication. Therefore, your business should think of meaningful ways to connect with customers. This is where conversational chatbots can come in, making way for one of the highly sought-after marketing automation trends in 2022.
Conversational marketing will be the next direct marketing, thereby deciding the future course of your business’s marketing efforts. Choosing the manual way to employ customer conversations may prove counterproductive. Therefore, using chatbots for customer service and engagement can allow you to converse with your customers and respond to their questions instantly.
Customers always prefer one-on-one conversations, and you can adopt a human-centered approach by using chatbots that can address customer queries 24X7.
Note that you can not overtly rely on chatbots to eliminate the human connection. Use it to improve and enhance the quality of customer service. It helps you start the discussion, provide brief answers to common questions, and deal with minor issues without requiring your team’s input.
Bottomline
Recent growth in marketing automation due to technology advancements and growing customer demands. Pick up any of the trends mentioned above and take automation to the next level. Take advantage of technology and tools to stay ahead of your competitors for multiple marketing activities. Consider these trends when planning a marketing budget and gauge your ROI.
As more and more businesses create a digital ecosystem and compete to grow faster, automation may make all the difference. Therefore, it is critical in today’s competitive market to look ahead and be abreast of emerging technologies and automation developments that influence your Marketing team and your business’ other departments.
To begin leveraging marketing automation in 2022, consider issues you face and how automation solutions might help you overcome them.
