[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Marketing automation is essential for improving your campaigns’ all-around success probability because it coordinates every process related to marketing with speed and accuracy. A fully automated marketing process helps marketers understand the customer’s journey, generate, nurture and convert leads into sales.
Let’s discuss the definition of marketing automation and the various benefits it has to offer before discussing the top marketing automation trends for 2021.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”2270″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”What is marketing automation?” font_container=”tag:h2|text_align:left|color:%230a0a0a” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_column_text]Marketing automation refers to integrating software in your marketing efforts to automate them across diverse channels such as email, social media, websites, etc. The marketing automation software automatically coordinates repetitive tasks, which subsequently enhances accuracy and reduces possibilities of human errors. Summarily, it is a perfect technology that can help you plan your marketing campaigns, develop multiple contents, generate leads, segment consumers, and convert leads to sales.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”What are the benefits of marketing automation?” font_container=”tag:h2|text_align:left|color:%230a0a0a” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_column_text]For a business seeking to increase qualified leads flow, marketing automation provides numerous key benefits, and here are they;
1. Market costs reduction
Marketing automation significantly helps reduce resources required to coordinate various activities. For instance, you no longer need separate software or expertise to design a landing page for your pay-per-click adverts. One software performs all those tasks.
2. Spot bottlenecks in your sales pipeline
The totality of marketing is lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. However, some bottlenecks might affect your sales funnel if you don’t attend to the issue as soon as possible. Such bottlenecks may include a slow sales forecast, overwhelming leads data to track (such as emails, spreadsheets, papers, etc.), inability to collaborate with other marketers, etc. Marketing automation offers the solution to these challenges and helps business owners focus on other revenue generating factors.
3. Automate your marketing efforts
Marketing automation provides a single channel to automate several tasks at every buying cycle’s stage, such as:
- Mailing a list of qualified leads
- Evaluating customers’ behavior
- Referring qualified prospects to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for nurturing,
- Prospect nurturing via email and social media.
In summary, marketing automation is an intelligent approach to collecting, converting, and processing qualified leads.
4. Develop a long-lasting relationship with customers
Marketers who adopt omnichannel marketing have an approximate 250% higher engagement rate and a 90% higher customer retention rate than those who don’t. Marketing automation offers a strategy to help reach customers on multiple channels (omnichannel marketing) where they may be at any point in time.
5. Evaluate performance of multiple marketing campaigns
Both your sales and marketing teams are actively involved in sales generation, and there are different individuals in charge of various tasks in the entire marketing campaign. Hence, an exact measurement of performance can be quite tricky. Marketing automation will help you measure your performance effectively, resulting in proper lead management and optimization.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”2282″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Top 7 Marketing Automation Trends” font_container=”tag:h2|text_align:left|color:%230a0a0a” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_column_text]Marketing automation is a smart approach to saving your time and money. When you automate the fundamental processes, your team gets more time to work on more intricate activities. That said, here are seven marketing automation trends that you can implement to take your marketing campaigns to the next level.
1. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
There are two essential tactics in marketing automation’s future. If you want to stay afloat, it would be best to invest in machine learning to create better campaigns. With AI and ML, you can gather information about your prospects and audiences, which will help create better campaigns for them in the nearest future. ML enables you to collect data from users and their online behaviors and sort that data into handy marketing insights. Furthermore, this data also helps you create personalized content for your audience.
2. Personalized content
Personalized or customized content is another critical trend to take note. Personalized content allows you to concentrate on your audience preferences and behavior. This marketing automation trend helps in content delivery based on users’ interests, subsequently convincing and resonating with their product or service interests.
3. Chatbots
Chatbots are instrumental in improving customer engagement and services. Using chatbots, you can interact with your customers and answer their questions without touching a keyboard. Take a moment to imagine those questions people ask you several times daily. Now, imagine having someone answer them for you, giving you more free time to answer the complex ones. That situation is precisely what chatbots will offer your business.
4. Automated social media marketing
The use of social media keeps growing yearly. In 2019, there were approximately 3.9 billion social media users, which is a 9% increase to 2018. As more people gain access to the network, this number will keep increasing. Hence, social media has become a core location to engage leads and familiarize them with your brand. By implementing automated social media marketing, you can create content weeks before the actual airing date. With tools like buffer and Hootsuite, you can save your energy and focus on more critical projects.
5. Personalized email automation
Looking at the trends mentioned earlier, you’ll notice that personalization is the main point addressed. Email personalization helps you deliver a tailored experience to your prospects and customers. Automation will help you create customers’ profiles for prospects. You can collect vital information about them to know their preferences and deliver custom emails to them.
6. Conversational Marketing
Pay close attention to the tone of communication with customers when sending automated messages. Ensure that you add emotions; you don’t want your messages to come off as an emotionless or impersonal one. With conversational marketing, you can further authenticate your automated conversational responses. Natural Language Processing (NLP), an artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, is a smart approach to achieving this.
7. Mobile marketing automation
As mobile phones keep growing, you must develop a plan that will help you reach and engage its users. Hence, mobile marketing automation is a strategy to gather information about your mobile phone users. With it, you can learn information such as their location, device type, browsing habits, etc. After gathering this information, you can use them to send personalized emails, surveys, SMS updates, in-app updates, etc.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”2271″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”The Future Reality of Marketing Automation” font_container=”tag:h2|text_align:left|color:%230a0a0a” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_column_text]Marketing automation is very powerful, and as such, moving forward, we expect to see its widespread adoption by brands to create more personalization. A recent survey projected the marketing automation market size to reach 8.42 billion by 2027. Hence, it is becoming a force to reckon with. It becomes very challenging for marketers to handle that volume of tasks, and that’s where Artificial Intelligence sets in. Integrating AI and marketing automation will provide many radical benefits and give marketers vital insight into which underperforming campaigns to focus on. It will also direct them to new possibilities they might not have thought about yet.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”2292″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
I’m Julio Lopez, a dedicated digital marketing specialist. My passion is helping businesses grow by making meaningful connections through marketing. I’ve learned a lot on my journey in this field, focusing on both creative thinking and smart planning to achieve success.
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