Marketers today have a lot on their plate. They are continuously generating new leads for their campaigns on multiple platforms, dealing with new data generated every day, and pushing out more content to engage their audience.
As the complexity of digital marketing increases, automation has emerged as the savior.
Marketing automation lets marketers put certain aspects of their campaigns and strategies on autopilot, allowing teams to spend more time accomplishing critical tasks.
The automation industry has grown considerably amid increasing business demand to reach and engage customers, automate workflows, etc. Customers reward omnichannel engagement across digital touchpoints, so marketers need to scale their personalization efforts to remain competitive.
So, as businesses continue to rely on marketing automation to achieve their goals, here are the top 10 marketing automation trends expected in 2023 and beyond.
Marketing automation trends in 2023
1. AI-powered personalization
We cannot talk about automation and not start with artificial intelligence.
AI is revolutionizing the marketing automation industry by enabling more personalized customer experiences. Behavioral analytics is one of the most critical aspects of marketing that run on AI and ML, allowing companies to understand better how their customers function across channels.
Customer experience is dominated by hyper-personalization. Using real-time data analysis powered by artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms helps companies deliver tailored marketing campaigns that are more reliable than traditional methods.
2. Chatbot integration
AI-powered conversational intelligence has had an overall positive impact on marketing and customer service.
Advancements in technology have made chatbots more sophisticated and natural in their responses. By integrating data analytics, chatbots can answer simple customer queries more quickly and accurately, saving companies money on customer service.
As Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology progresses, expect chatbots to become even more refined as a part of marketing automation. Chatbots will help businesses not only automate customer service but also increase customer engagement through personalized interactions.
3. Automated lead generation
Generating and nurturing new leads amid fierce competition is hectic and time-consuming.
Automating manual and repetitive lead generation tasks can help businesses boost the number of qualified leads. Marketing automation tools can help you create highly-converting channels (e.g., landing pages) as lead magnets.
Data from these pages can then be used to score leads based on their likeliness to convert, allowing you to focus on a specific group that will bring more revenue. You can run personalized campaigns, offer discounts, follow up with them, and let them know what is new in store for you.
4. Predictive analytics for lead scoring
After generating leads automatically, marketing automation can also tell you where to focus your marketing efforts.
Accurately identifying and prioritizing high-quality leads can lead to better conversion rates. Predictive analytics can significantly enhance lead-scoring models in marketing automation. It can analyze vast amounts of data, and segment leads into different categories. You can identify buying signals, like specific engagement, sales interactions, etc., and make data-driven decisions.
Unlike traditional analytics that focused on static, predefined criteria, predictive analytics enables dynamic lead scoring. This flexible model lets you stay updated and make necessary changes to the scoring parameters to reflect the changing landscape.
5. Omnichannel automation
With over 50% of the world using the Internet (1), businesses no longer have to rely on traditional marketing channels to gather and nurture leads.
Integrating marketing efforts across multiple channels and touchpoints can give customers a more coherent and personalized experience. By integrating marketing automation platforms with various channels, like websites, mobile apps, social media, and email, businesses can collect and leverage data from different touchpoints to tailor messages and offers based on individual preferences, behavior, and engagement history.
Automating marketing activities across channels also simplifies and streamlines marketing operations. You can focus more on strategy and creativity rather than repetitive tasks.
6. Hyper-personalized email campaigns
It is not enough to just put the name of your lead on the email to personalize their experience.
With marketing noise flooding inboxes, customers expect a lot more than that. Delivering highly tailored and individualized email content to leads based on their unique preferences, behaviors, and characteristics helps nurture your leads better than generic emails.
It goes beyond basic personalization by leveraging advanced data analysis and automation to create highly targeted email campaigns. Some advanced email tools also let you create customer segments and run email campaigns without switching to another window.
7. Voice-activated marketing automation
With the rising popularity of voice assistants, more and more people are searching using their voice.
In the coming years, we are more likely to see marketing automation focusing on optimizing for voice-activated searches. It involves optimizing marketing efforts to be voice-search-friendly and leveraging voice commands to automate certain marketing activities. Businesses can capture this voice-based search traffic, leading to increased visibility, website traffic, and potential conversions.
Voice-activated marketing automation can also streamline customer support processes. You can automate common customer queries, provide voice-guided assistance, and offer self-service options through voice commands, enhancing customer engagement and convenience.
8. Integration of IoT data
Explore the integration of data from IoT devices into marketing automation systems.
Discuss the potential for leveraging real-time IoT data to deliver personalized marketing campaigns.
IoT data is still a primarily untapped data source that can be used to deliver personalized marketing campaigns.
IoT devices, such as smart appliances, wearables, beacons, and connected devices, generate a wealth of real-time data on customer behavior and preferences that can be used to drive personalized marketing campaigns and enhance marketing automation strategies.
By integrating IoT data with marketing automation platforms, businesses can better understand their customers. Moreover, IoT data can be used to run trigger-based campaigns. For instance, an energy company can send personalized energy-saving tips to customers when their smart meter detects higher energy consumption, encouraging more efficient usage.
9. Social media automation
With over 4.89 billion people using social media worldwide (2), these platforms are critical for engaging and nurturing leads.
Automation tools can work wonders in streamlining social media management, enabling businesses to save time and resources. Social media marketing automation tools can help you schedule and publish your posts in advance, allowing a hassle-free posting schedule. Moreover, you can also focus more on customer engagement strategy.
These automation tools can also monitor conversations and mentions of the business across various social media platforms, allowing brands to be more aware of their brand position in real-time. Sentiment analysis can also help you measure the campaign’s effectiveness, allowing you to make informed decisions.
10. Automated content creation
Another aspect of marketing automation and advancements in NLP that is likely to take off in 2023 is automated content creation.
Marketing automation platforms incorporate AI and NLP to generate and customize content at scale. It helps businesses save time and resources by generating omnichannel content quickly, enabling marketing teams to focus on strategy, editing, and optimization.
With automated content creation, businesses can generate a large volume of content in a short time while maintaining consistency in style, tone, and brand voice. This particularly benefits businesses with high content demands, such as e-commerce websites or content-driven platforms.
Conclusion
These trends above provide a glimpse into how marketing automation trends help businesses streamline marketing efforts. Automation, along with advancements in AI and ML, will allow companies to get better insights into customer behavior, equipping them with the right tools to create more coherent and personalized customer experiences across digital channels.