Marketing automation technology was a blessing for marketers who could now automate the monotonous and repetitive tasks of marketing and marketing communications to their machine counterparts. At the same time, programmatic ad buying – another example of marketing automation, tends to save marketers a lot of time and efforts of purchasing online ad space. It enables them to focus on more essential tasks around optimizing business revenues.
Automation tools and platforms allow marketers scale their marketing efforts and run relatively measurable marketing campaignsOpens a new window , through different channels and touchpoints. The great news is that marketing automation is still evolving and improving. New-age technologies and innovations are reshaping the future of automation while creating better opportunities for marketers to improve CX with data-backed decision making and strategies.Â
Today’s marketers are looking at campaign automation from a whole new angle that reflects more than just guiding and converting the customer through the sales funnel. Automation today also concerns itself with designing comprehensive campaigns to engage meaningfully with customers at every step of their decision journey and through the entire customer lifecycle. In fact, Customer lifecycle automation is proving to be a significant advantage for marketing teams across industries.
Let’s look at 5 top technological advancements and innovations that are set to impact marketing automation as it further evolves into 2020
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1. AI and predictive analytics
Marketing automation solutions backed by AI and machine learning are gaining momentum owing to their advanced functionalities like targeting customers with timely messages based on their current stage in the purchase journey.
AI-enabled toolsOpens a new window extract the most valuable actionable insights from an ocean of data, and empower marketers to build relevant and personalized marketing campaigns for each prospect.
AI-powered predictive analytics adds value to those campaigns by improving customer experience and optimizing media spend based on anticipated outcomes. Intelligent statistical models help analyze and identify your customer’s next move and automatically applies the insights to generate specific ‘next best actions’.
Machine and in-depth learning tools combined with marketing automation offer marketers opportunities to intelligently cross-sell and upsell while continually improving the CX.Â
SendGrid’s Chief Product Officer, Steve Sloan adds, “AI can inspire more authentic digital communication. AI is the key to unlocking a world where digital marketing feels much more like a real, human-to-human conversation. We need digital communications to feel like human communications and also scale. Paradoxically AI is the bridge that will help digital communications feel more human at Opens a new window broadOpens a new window scale.â€Opens a new window
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Also Read: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Marketing Automation ROIOpens a new window
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2. Hyper-personalized content to drive campaign outcomes
Context-driven content and communication is the new normal. Brands are expected to communicate and interact with customers in a hyper-personalized mannerOpens a new window , with content tailored to each prospect based on past purchase actions, user attributes, social media interactions, search queries, on-site behavioral attributes, content consumption and other qualitative and quantitative sources. When a marketing automation platformOpens a new window integrates with the customer data management platformOpens a new window and accesses this unified data to inform campaign choices, it is able to hyper-personalized campaign content at scale with ease.
Kim Jamerson, VP Marketing at SharpSpring, added, “One thing we hear often is that you need to have a good supply of relevant content (e.g. emails, collateral, etc.) ready to go. Marketing automation works best when you have content that’s relevant to each of your buyer personas, so that can mean having a series of emails and content pieces per persona.â€Opens a new window
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Also read: MTA’s exclusive CPD Explainer SeriesOpens a new window
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3. The Chatbot opportunity
Chatbots are fast emerging as an exciting medium to drive engagement and enable more effective customer service. Multiple studies and reports have already indicated that customers prefer to engage with a with a brand through a chatbot rather than an app. Platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp offer brands a place to set up chatbots that serve the needs of customers and prospects on these social platforms. While the CX and service benefits of this move are obvious, it also helps brands collect more customer insights and translate these into business actions at scale. Many email marketing activities could be fulfilled by shorter, real-time interactions with bots, especially in the customer service area. In addition, campaigns could be executed by chatbots directly in the app – that too at the right time and place. For example, chatbots could give away offers or coupons based on the context, timing, and location; instead of the brand sending those offers and coupons via email – which is neither real-time nor guaranteed to land at the opportune time.
In essence, chatbots coupled with AI could help marketing automation become real-time and proactive- an approach bound to drive higher conversions. However, marketers must ensure that the map and understand the customer journey thoroughly before applying a bot-based solution for the right outcomes.
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Check this out: 5 Marketing Processes that Must be Automated this yearOpens a new window
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4. Advanced Social Media Marketing Integration
Neither B2B nor B2C marketers can afford to ignore the importance of social media in their customer journeys. While automating social media marketing campaigns is an essential agenda for them to reach and engage with their target audiences, the area which is evolving rapidly is the integration between social media marketing platforms and marketing automation platformsOpens a new window .
With these advanced integrations, marketers can see how conversations and interactions on social media are linked to campaigns and offers, track qualitative feedback by way of sentiment analysis and use that insight to improve the campaign. B2B marketers can track conversations and social interactions back to an account level and use that to inform ABM initiatives.
Naor Chazan, Executive Director of Marketing at SmartLinx said, “While we have a lean marketing department, we do not outsource key marketing functions such as social media. This means we must work as efficiently as possible. That’s where Hootsuite comes in. We use it to schedule posts on our social media channels – LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It not only streamlines the process but enables us to view all our social media content at once.Opens a new window “
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Also read: 7 ways marketing automation can optimize b2B social media effortsOpens a new window
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5. Data visualization for complex automated workflows
A company with multiple automated campaign workflows needs to understand how they interact with each other to arrive at insights. While dealing with a web of connected automation, it is necessary to have a singular view of all the workflows – a visualization tool that can critically show the big picture of the customer journey and all interventions made thereof. Mapping out of automation workflowsOpens a new window is crucial for the marketers to take necessary and real-time decisions based on customers’ purchase path, to create marketing campaigns/messages that will be relevant to their behavioral patterns and to optimize spends and prioritize resources on the right interventions. Visualization tools help marketers to understand how many automation workflows work together and these are further evolving with data visualization capabilities to tell the story in a way that even non-tech or data-driven marketers can use to drive action and performance.
“The data is interesting and actionable within the MAP or ESP, but it needs to tie into the overall picture to truly be effective and for marketers to learn more about their customers,Opens a new window “ said Will Devlin, Sr. Director of Marketing for MessageGears.
There are other areas in Marketing Automation that are benefitting from technology advancements – including attribution and measurement; as well as integration with key martech components from programmatic to UX and CRO. But that’s a story for another day!
Interested in the best marketing automation tools? Don’t miss our super popular Marketing Automation Buyers Guide for SMBsOpens a new window here.