Marketing automation, to a great extent, has become a popular medium of marketing amongst various businesses, thus continuously evolving in the process. Marketing automation enhances a company’s marketing efforts by embodying a buyer’s tour on and off the website.
The concept of marketing automation may be fairly new, nevertheless, its efficacy with business-to-business (B2B) companies has proven that this concept is here to stay and make a difference. By 2014, B2B companies that used marketing automation grew by 11 times more than those who didn’t. Hence, it can be said that advanced revenue tiers are directly proportional to the increasing use of marketing automation.
Although, marketing automation is most used by the enterprises, other organizations, irrespective of their size and type, have begun using it. The State of B2B Lead Generation 2013 Report, revealed that the size of a company matters when it comes down to the adoption of marketing automation. Companies with less than 500 employees were the ones who ranked on top of the list of buyers of the marketing automation software.
Let us go ahead and have a look at the 6 upcoming marketing automation trends that we should prepare for as well as have a look at how it will continue to change in subsequent time.
Marketing Automation will be easier to implement and use in future
It is an open truth that not all SMBs have a dedicated marketing or sales department filled with eager and enthusiastic people who are well equipped with the latest marketing automation developments.
In fact, because marketing automation has become the preferred choice for many businesses over the standard email marketing, marketing automation platforms will have to ease their onboarding and usage process.
Ascend’s study on approximately 291 global marketing businesses and sales professionals reveals that the largest obstacles these entities face were related to marketing automation.
- About 22% of the businesses reported that the biggest challenge was posed by the user interface
- 16% told that it was the presence of ineffective metrics
- 14% referred ‘insufficient number of leads’ to be the biggest obstacle.
Marketing Automation will be more personalized
In the coming days, we can expect an expansion of marketing automation in various spheres of the customer purchasing cycle, along with the addition of content that is much more exemplified and scores leads in real time.
CMS Wire predicted that there will be an additional shift in the marketing automation trends via which marketers will be able to predict conversions and interactions for every individual customer. This will allow interactions with clients and customers to take place on a much personal level, thus, generating more leads in the process.
With the advancement in technology, marketing automation will make use of unique algorithms to learn more about the purchasing habits of customers. Thus, businesses would be able to influence customers who are most valuable, based on the way they spend, their purchase history, as well as their browsing habits.
It is apparent that marketing automation will resume in telling businesses, much more about the people who visit their pages rather than what regular email marketing does.
Prevalence of mobile-friendly software
One of the most important trends across all types of technologies is the popularity of smartphones. This trend will definitely change the way in which marketing automation software can find the best leads for one’s business. One of the essential advantages for many companies when it comes to mobile marketing is the way in which it allows these companies to target customers based on the customer’s location, device, social media presence, etc. .
Invasion of the social media
Another essential tool for companies is social media, and marketing automation has already created its foundation in this particular area. Social media automation enables a business to engage with its customers in real time. While all social media are working on improving their analytics, companies are using automation tools to integrate data from all social platforms on one dashboard and gather consumer insights. Unlike email marketing automation, information for social media has to be short, crisp, and re-active to recent events. Combination of real time and automated social media marketing will create unimaginable source of power for businesses.
Power to predict behavior
Marketing automation systems are already able to evaluate ongoing leads for probability of sales for their business at every point of contact. Yet, marketers still require to snoop around the future with predictive behavior analysis. Some of the features that will continue to improve a marketer’s ability to predict future behavior are contact scoring, ???
Better Streamlined Software
With the increase in fragmentation of a customer’s buying experience, more streamlined software will become the first choice of marketers. Receiving all data pertaining to the sales and marketing in one place with the help of streamlined marketing automation, prioritizes the leads and offers holistic reports for marketing campaigns. Plus, with a unified dashboard, all teams are able to get a better idea of what others are doing, thus increasing efficiency and decreasing wastage of time.
As one can expect , a few of the marketing automation software offer extra characteristics than the others. Hence, one would see various additional elements in marketing automation software, such as landing pages and online shopping carts. The main purpose of marketing automation is to enable the engagement and sustenance of leads over a period of time, until they are equipped to make a purchase.
Down the years, every successful online business will use some form of marketing automation. At some point of time, companies will be able to anticipate the conversion path for each customer with the progress that marketing automation technology makes. This will allow the companies to target even hotter leads and as well as distinguish their best customers from the rest. Such is the power of marketing automation.
Download an interesting research on what works (and what doesn’t) in email marketing for ecommerce by TargetingMantra.
