Future of Marketing Automation in Digital Marketing

Growing Businesses with online marketing automation tools

Expert marketer and entrepreneur, but the day’s tasks eat up your productivity? Posting on social, emailing, chatting with prospective customers are key tasks to marketing your business, brand and service. And you’re too busy doing these, while attending meetings and briefings. This leaves you no time to think, innovate, strategize or grow your business, brand and services. Where’s the time? Did you know that online marketing automation tools ease out your tasks and offer you more time?

“74% Marketers say the biggest benefit of automation is SAVING TIME!”

Time that should be used in strategy and planning to acquire new customers. In a nutshell, you need marketing automation tools and your business needs marketing automation tools to grow, thrive and prosper.

Online marketing tools contribute to your business revenue, by automating regular marketing tasks, such as emailing customers, social media posting, blog posting and more. Marketing automation allows you to offer the right message to the right audience. Using the right marketing automation tools, can help you analyze and understand your target audience. Thus, customizing the right message for your customer at each stage of his / her purchase cycle or Lifetime value. There is a good reason 75% of marketers globally use at least one type of marketing automation tool. (Social Media Today “State of Marketing Automation Survey Report” (2019))

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Bill Gates, Co-Founder, Microsoft

However, before you can invest in marketing automation tools, you need to decide if your business, teams and you are ready. The setup, training and adoption of a marketing automation tool is a challenge several companies and entrepreneurs face.

“61% companies said that the implementation process of Marketing Automation was difficult”

Source

Very often businesses invest in marketing automation tools without any organic growth in the businesses. They invest with no organic traffic on their website or social media and lack sufficient leads in the marketing funnel. In such cases, marketers need to focus the digital marketing on generating new leads, rather than spending time on marketing automation tools

Marketing Automation Tools can help you scale your business and streamline daily marketing tasks. You cannot replace a marketing manager or marketing knowledge with marketing automation platforms. It will not do your marketing for you or generate new leads for you.

Now that we are clear, let’s look at a few things to consider before investing in online marketing automation tools:

What is the objective of marketing automation?

1. Driving revenue is obvious.
2. Do you want to nurture your leads or convert the leads to customers?
3. Do you want to leverage the traffic on a particular marketing channel?

Is your team equipped to comfortably handle marketing automation platforms daily?

1. Are you an entrepreneur who runs a business and handles the marketing? Then marketing automation is not going to help you. You need to focus on acquiring more customers.  
2. Do you have at least one dedicated marketing person who can manage the marketing automation platform and share the reports with you?
3. Does your team keep up with marketing automation trends and can they handle upgrades?

Do you have…?

1. Sufficient funds to invest in marketing automation platforms?
2. A Robust CRM system with customer details?
3. Quality content to deliver digital marketing campaigns to convert leads?
4. Leads in your marketing funnel to achieve sales targets?

Before you can invest your time and resources, businesses need to be mindful of the above. First focus on generating traffic and leads for your business through social media,digital marketing, SEO and landing pages.

For businesses that are ready to scale and are armed with a database of customers, we’re charting out some marketing automation trends. Your marketing team can now leverage an integrated CRM system with a some off these marketing automation platforms.

Omni- Channel Marketing Automation

Predicting consumer behavior, creating personal experiences through each stage of a customer’s lifetime value and reaching customers with a cross-channel strategy; is the future of marketing automation.

From creating customer personas to customized product notifications over mobile and reaching customers over display campaigns. Omnichannel marketing offers you this and much more with robust marketing automation platforms. Ideal for larger operations and enterprises, here’s what an omnichannel marketing automation tool allows you to do.

1. An omnichannel marketing automation tool allows you to create an automated marketing workflow for each customer, connected across platforms. For e.g. User clicks on your campaign on Google. You can now reach this customer through your website, Facebook and retargeting. Maybe create an elaborate push campaign to convert the customer.  
2. Understand your customer’s journey by analyzing customer data from the app, how they shop, how they engage with the brand and their purchase cycles
3. Segment your customers as per brand categories and product categories, based on their buying and engagement behaviors and demographics.
4. Create customized email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns to SMS marketing campaigns based on the customer journey and send personalized communications.
5. Mobile marketing campaigns are a driving factor for several brands, because the average smartphone user checks their smartphone 150 times a day (Source). Mobile marketing automation tools allow you to engage with your customer over Facebook notifications, mobile and app push notifications and web notifications.

Some omnichannel automation tools to consider are Marketo, Smartech, WebEngage Oracle Eloqua, Customer.io, Pardot.

Email Marketing Automation

55% of e-commerce marketers use email marketing software. (Source: Thuiswinkel.org and Spotler “e-commerce marketing Trendrapport” (2019)) And many more are likely to sign up for email marketing automation, because it is easiest to implement and execute. Personalised emails and customer retention have become central to marketing automation trends in 2020.

Email marketing automation platforms allow you to:

1. Segment customers and leads–to target personalized content, split testing mail campaigns, email tracking
2. Automate and manage campaigns through the customer lifecycle based on customer behavior
3. Set up customized drip campaigns–that systematically drive customers towards a purchase
4. Automate personalized emails to leads–to nurture them and convert them
5. Create interactive mail templates and forms–to get feedback, create brand recall and retain customers

 Some email marketing tools to consider are – ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, Drip, Customer.io and GetResponse. Each of them offers several plans for small start-ups, SMBs and enterprise customers.

Social Media Marketing Automation

The number of global social media users is expected to reach almost 3.43 billion in 2023. (Statista, 2020) And close to 70% marketers want to increase their social media budget spends. This data makes marketing automation tools indispensable for social media campaigns.

 83% digital marketers sought marketing automation tools for social media post scheduling and 58% sought it for social media advertising (Social Media Today “State of Marketing Automation Survey Report” (2019)) Deliver your content strategy across all platforms- timely and effectively -by automating social media marketing. One of the key marketing automation trends in social media is real time analysis of customer data, auto responding in messengers and social listening.

Social media marketing automation tools allows you to:

1. Automate posting content, managing posts and engagement with audiences seamlessly. A whopping 94% of marketers use social media for content distribution. (SEMrush, 2019)
2. Get a complete overview of your social media marketing campaigns and data on content that works best. Create personalized content, interactive stories and videos on social media.
3. Monitor conversations about your brand and industry across social media platforms, as well as automatically track your competitors’ conversations. Social listening is the number one tactic used by marketers. (HubSpot, 2020)
4. Understand your audience, respond and optimize engagement across platforms
5. Analyse data, influencer marketing data for your social media advertising campaigns and leveraging your content for better amplification

Some social media marketing automation tools to consider are – HootSuite, Sprout Social, AgoraPulse, Buffer, SnapApp, BuzzSumo

SEO and PPC Campaign Automation

As B2B Marketers, your company website is a crucial part of generating leads. SEO, Google display Ads and PPC campaigns become vital to your digital marketing campaigns. Each of these digital marketing tactics focus on your customers through the customer lifetime value.

The future of marketing automation lies in understanding customer’s online behavior, segmenting customers and creating highly personalized marketing campaigns to convert and retain them.  

Digital Advertising marketing automation tools allow you to:

1. Run multiple digital campaigns across platforms, be it display or social media
2. Execute powerful targeted remarketing campaigns to engage with inactive customers and create top-of-the-mind recall.
3. Access in-depth campaign analytics, website traffic analytics, conversions and campaign ROI’s to improve campaign performance
4. Optimising bidding strategies and keywords in digital and social media campaigns.

Some marketing automation tools for digital advertising to consider are AdRoll, RevealBot, Wordtracker, Google Analytics and Google Search Console, Screaming Frog

Conversational Marketing Automation

AI and Machine Learning (ML) have is now becoming the future of marketing automation. Machine Learning algorithms offer deeper understanding into customer behavior. And AI -marketing automation tools leverage this learning for targeted campaigns and product recommendations through the customer lifecycle.

AI systems and ML will predict your customer’s behavior and respond accordingly to customer’s requirements. Your CRM and sales team cannot spend their time chatting with customers for feedback, solving queries or predicting their behavior. This is probably why 58% of B2B companies use a chatbot on their website (Source) and 23% of customer service organizations are using AI chatbots (Source)

Conversational marketing automation tools allow you to:

1. Respond to customer queries, address basic issues and solve complaints faster. 69% total chatbots chats were resolved from start to finish (Source)
2. Improve your conversions online. 47% of consumers would be open to making a purchase from a chatbot (Source)
3. Provide live personalized conversations with customers online 60% millennials have used chatbots to engage with businesses (Source)
4. Automate lead generation online such as bookings and reservations, especially in times of the current pandemic situation.

Some Conversational automation tools to consider are LeadBot, FreshChat, Mobile Monkey, Gushup.io, SnatchBot

Customer loyalty is fleeting and it only takes an email or SMS of a new sale offer for a customer to switch. Several other brands are targeting your customer through various marketing communication channels every day. And your competitor is probably using one of these online marketing automation tools to reach the customer.

Thus making marketing automation platforms vital to digital marketing campaigns and marketing strategies to grow your business.  It is up to your brand to be proactive and pre-empt consumer behavior in the market. That is the future of marketing automation! We’d love help you evaluate and choose an online marketing automation tool based on your company needs, email us at aniketh@mindstorm.in.