7 major trends in marketing automation in 2022!

Globally, marketing automation has become a trend that is widely used by enterprises with the support of technology and big data. According to a report by SharpSpring, the predicted market size in 2022 will exceed US$1 trillion. In the next few years, the annual growth rate of marketing automation is expected to reach more than 20%. Quantifying marketing results through marketing automation helps companies reduce costs and increase efficiency. This has made more and more decision makers begin to realize the value of marketing automation and are willing to invest more resources in it.

This issue of Overseas Observation is compiled from an article by Aiza Domingcil. It will predict the seven major trends in marketing automation in 2022 and explain how marketers can use marketing automation to help companies embrace the growth dividends of the digital age.

Today, the marketing environment is changing rapidly, but what remains unchanged is the consensus that “marketing is tricky”. The principles of marketing have remained largely unchanged, but the execution methods have undergone tremendous changes. These changes are mainly due to the rise of new platforms, iterations of algorithms, changes in policies, and the continuous evolution of consumer behavior, which have enabled marketing to begin to enter automation.

To adapt to these changes, marketing automation has become the go-to solution for most businesses. It enhances workflows, provides real-time analytics, and empowers marketers to reduce manual intervention in processes, giving them “superpowers” ​​that save them time. Therefore, marketing automation has become one of the most popular strategies among current marketers. Data shows that:

• It is estimated that by the end of 2023, the global marketing automation market will reach US$25.1 billion
• 63% of marketing teams plan to increase their marketing automation budget this year
• 90% of marketers regularly use more than one marketing automation software

But which form of marketing automation is best to use in your marketing campaigns? Which automation products offer the greatest ROI? What principles should marketers adhere to?

We asked 103 marketing experts from multinational companies. Next, we will bring readers our research results on the hottest marketing automation trends in 2022.

First, we need to answer the question, “What is marketing automation?” Marketing automation is a marketing method that allows marketers to send automated marketing messages to specific groups of people at predetermined times (or trigger events) under certain conditions. Marketing automation extends beyond emails and can be used across social media, text messaging, and other digital channels. Its goal is to transform the complex processes involved in B2C and B2B marketing into automated, simple and repeatable processes with less human intervention.

For many businesses, marketing automation is no longer just seen as a marketing necessity, but the key to their success. Well, these emerging marketing automation trends mentioned below will help you take your marketing to the next level in 2022.

1. Use funnels to optimize content and achieve high personalization of content

Generally speaking, personalization is a growing strategy to improve customer experience, but it is not limited to inserting the user's name in the content. This approach is no longer enough to meet customers' growing expectations for personalized experiences. Therefore, there is a trend to take marketing to the next level through hyper-personalization.

Marketers use more than just information like a user’s name, company name, or address; instead, they use behavioral data about the user as they interact with the brand in real time. Using data to send personalized content at different stages of the funnel is a form of hyper-personalization.

For example, your users visit your pricing page and leave without making any transactions. Marketing automation uses real-time analytics based on a user’s recent activity, allowing you to send a behavior-based in-site message or email to initiate an interaction about product pricing.

So how do we implement it? Marketing automation platforms can help marketers implement highly personalized email campaigns. Through user segmentation, marketers can set email triggers based on behavioral data such as visiting key functional pages or seeing who is opening emails. When you do this:

• You only send relevant messages
• You can customize the user experience with your branding
• Your NPS will improve

Experts say:

“Funnel optimization content: Marketing automation combines the best of both “personalization” and “automation”. With the power of marketing automation, your business can deliver highly personalized experiences directly to users by showcasing their unique challenges, industry, and goals. ”

—Jignesh Gohel, Founder and CMO, OLBUZ

“The biggest trend is continuing to improve how we deliver personalized content. Customers are looking for more and more customized content and experiences that are tailored to their specific needs. It’s a common topic, but marketing automation is really helping us get better at producing personalized content that reaches customers in the right way at the specific time.”

——Ryan Brown, Director of Integrated Marketing, Kenra Professional

"In 2022, I will focus on funnel-optimized content, using automation to create a more personalized experience for my customers. To do this, I am working closely with the sales and customer support teams to identify customer pain points. This will allow me to create more targeted content, increasing leads by making the funnel more customer-oriented."

——Milosz (ChiliFruit)

2. Omnichannel Marketing

Have you ever seen a funny ad on Facebook or Instagram, then clicked on it again when you saw its banner on Google? It feels like these ads are following you all the time, that’s omnichannel marketing.

So, where does marketing automation come into play? Marketing automation allows for automated content management throughout the entire customer journey. Marketing automation allows you to add content or ads to different channels simultaneously, which means you can deliver marketing messages based on the different stages of your customer lifecycle, enhancing the user experience overall.

It’s important to note that if your ad looks interesting but customers land on your homepage and it’s boring, they may get confused and wonder if it’s the same business. Therefore, providing customers with a consistent experience across platforms is the idea behind integrated cross-channel marketing.

Experts say:

“Omnichannel marketing allows each channel to be managed individually. By using different communication channels, companies can deliver personalized communications that customers are more likely to accept, understand and act on.”

——Stephen Curry (CEO, CocoSign)

“Marketing automation helps marketers automate the generation of consumer-centric content and deliver highly personalized, targeted customer experiences across channels.”

—— Jordon Scrinko (Founder and Marketing Director of Precondo)

“People are increasingly engaging with your brand digitally, which means your digital channels will have thousands of content touchpoints that need to be aligned with your brand standards. Because each touchpoint is an opportunity for you to connect with your audience and show them the value your product or service provides.”

——Charlotte (Acrolinx)

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Email, Content Marketing, and SEO

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are paving the way for content automation at scale. AI-powered writing tools help you write content faster. Artificial intelligence will “write” emails, blog posts, social media statuses, and even advertising copy for you.

On the other hand, SEO AI tools help you find those top-ranking articles to use as references and provide keywords to add to your articles, as well as provide metrics such as monthly search volume, keyword difficulty or SERP (Search Engine Results Page). There are also tools that can help you create outlines for your blog posts and score your posts from an SEO perspective as you write them.

Experts say:

“Adopting AI technology will improve the way businesses predict consumer behavior, allowing them to create more accurate content that ensures effective user engagement and interaction. The versatility of AI technology provides brands with endless opportunities to help marketers update their marketing strategies, especially by alleviating the challenges SEO poses to marketers.”

—Michael Knight, Co-founder and Head of Marketing, Incorporation Insight

“You can use AI and machine learning to gather information about your target audience, which will help you build better marketing with them. You can use machine learning to gather data about users’ online habits, and you can use marketing automation to apply that data to create marketing campaigns that attract and delight your target audience. AI and machine learning enable you to tailor content to your target audience.”

—Rodney Yo (CEO and Founder, Best Online Traffic School)

“Automated optimization content tools are becoming a tool used by many brands on a large scale. Although the quality of this content is not the highest, it can be used as a simple advertising text or as a basis for developing better content.”

——Leandro

4. Automation across departments

In 2016, an article titled “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing” highlighted the misalignment between sales and marketing teams at the time, with each department tending to ignore the other’s contribution to business growth.

Fast forward to 2020, and the authors say that while there are still some gaps between departments, there has been a massive realignment of team roles. Salespeople and marketers can now simultaneously participate in marketing across the customer lifecycle, both individually and across the company.

In the future, we will see better cross-departmental collaboration from sales teams to marketing teams and between the two. Automation across departments allows companies to standardize processes that improve the customer experience at every stage of sales. So, how does marketing automation bridge this gap?

The first trend is sales and marketing working together to complete the entire customer journey. This strategy is only feasible if departments work together and integrate properly with the customer relationship management (CRM) system. The CRM system stores information about all contacts, and when the team uses this information correctly and carefully, the team can implement lifecycle marketing for each customer stage. The marketing automation platform is connected to the CRM system.

The second trend is lead scoring, which is a process of assessing the quality of leads. When you quantify the likelihood of a lead converting into a paying customer, your marketing team can ensure only qualified leads come through. Sales and marketing departments can set sales-qualified criteria for leads and then determine the scores obtained by different touchpoints to determine specific plans for converting different potential customers into paying customers.

Experts say:

“An underrated marketing automation trend that will emerge in 2022 is the combination of marketing data and sales data for analysis. This will help in setting appropriate budgets for marketing campaigns, predicting the ROI of marketing campaigns, and even discussing the final results of marketing campaigns with marketing campaign managers.”

—Sally (Marketing Director and Co-founder, FastPeopleSearch.io)

“CRM distributes customer data through dashboards that marketing teams can access and use in marketing campaigns, such as emails, phone numbers, customer locations, and other data. CRM allows marketers to monitor where prospects are in the sales funnel, which helps convert potential customers.”

—Shiv Gupta, CEO of Incrementors Digital Marketing

“With the increased focus on first-party data, smart businesses will seek to automate strategies that are optimized based on their own data. This includes tiered scoring of leads and aligning marketing with sales processes. By scoring key activities along the customer’s path to purchase, marketers can see trends or opportunities to more effectively use marketing automation.”

——Katie (Founder of Smart Girl Digital)

5. Conversational Marketing and Chatbots

A truth that every business should practice: Stop one-way communication with customers and engage in interactive conversations with them. Companies demonstrate that they care about their customers' needs through interactive conversations with them. As Forbes said: “This is the future of direct selling”, so that’s why “conversational marketing” made the list.

Technology has now advanced to the point where personalized conversations are possible. Businesses use chatbots based on a human-centric strategy, and chatbots can run 24/7 to ensure that marketers continue to interact with customers even during their downtime. The use of automated chatbots is not meant to completely replace human employees; their purpose is to open up conversations with customers, answer common questions and resolve simple issues quickly.

While programming bots is a great option, marketers should pay attention to some best practices and always remember that today’s customers are more sophisticated and smarter.

• Define personalized name, image, and personality for chatbots
• Make chatbots talk like humans
• Tell your users they are still talking to a bot

Experts say:

“Most companies today are using chatbots to improve customer service and customer engagement by answering their important questions. Chatbots are so popular because they can answer basic customer questions and help businesses save time.”

—Scott Keever, Founder and CEO of Scott Keever SEO

“Chatbots have access to millions of customer-centric data points and can use that and other types of data for analytics to predict what’s causing issues for specific users and identify repeat issues.”

—Azza Shahid, Digital Marketer at Physicians Thrive

“If you haven’t started using chatbots yet, you’re missing out on one of the key marketing trends for 2022. Chatbots are invaluable for improving customer advocacy and engagement, allowing you to communicate with consumers and answer their questions effortlessly.”

——Susan Smith (Marketing Manager, Velden Engineering)

6. Value-oriented repositioning and retention

2022 is a world without cookies, and data privacy is sacred. As a quick recap, Cookies are small pieces of data that help a website “learn” more about its users. But Apple has given consumers the power to build a privacy firewall to block cookies from obtaining privacy through the iOS 14 update.

When a user allows a website to enable cookies, a cookie places a small snippet of code on the browser. In this way, the cookie can track and store information about the user's web session. This data is then used by advertisers to personalize the content they display to the user, making the user more likely to become a future customer.

But people really hate cookies. The absence of cookies means marketers need to find new ways to tap into potential customers. From 2022 onwards, marketers can expect to leverage first-party cookies and data-driven attribution models. First-party data sets can have a greater impact than third-party cookies in improving the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Experts say:

“The average consumer is getting smarter and wants perks. Connecting with consumers keeps them coming back, but marketers need to be extremely cautious when customers share sensitive personal information. Once you’ve collected data using AI tools, leverage proven retention campaigns to build valuable connections with consumers.”

—Klara Dumancic (Head of Digital Marketing, Investor Club)

“We’re already seeing high-growth brands lock in first-party data strategies and leave competitors who are less data-ready. The challenge entrepreneurs will face in the coming months will be fundamental, as they will need to rewrite their brand growth strategies to include thoughtful, first-party data-driven marketing.”

——Kamila Kotowska (Marketing Director, cux.io)

7. Mobile-first automation

One survey found that 71% of millennials allow service providers to use their mobile data for personalization. This means that today's generation of consumers is more dependent on their mobile phones. By 2022, mobile-first strategies will become increasingly popular, with mobile device users constituting the majority of website visitors.

Tools such as in-site advertising, push notifications and SMS will be used more frequently to improve user stickiness, retention and experience, so marketers must develop a mobile-first strategy.

Experts say:

“In an era where mobile devices are the primary source of content consumption and purchasing activity, marketers must develop mobile-first strategies. As a result, in-site advertising, push notifications, SMS and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) will be more effectively used to improve user stickiness, retention and user experience.”

——Daniel Gray (Market Media Connect Inc.)

“As more and more people rely on their phones, mobile marketing automation tools present a great opportunity for e-commerce businesses. Mobile marketing automation includes personalized and real-time messaging, analytics, and integration of other data sources from users’ mobile devices.”

——Madhurima (Recruit CRM)

“With the continuous advancement of mobile technology, you need a strategy to reach and engage these users. You can use mobile marketing automation to obtain data about mobile consumers. You can find out types of information such as the location of consumers, their browsing patterns, the gadgets they use, etc. Once you have collected enough information about mobile users, you can distribute automated content to mobile audiences.”

——Daniel Carter (IVA Advice Debt Advisor)

Conclusion

How to effectively use marketing automation tools to achieve growth goals and maintain competitive advantage has become a hot topic.

In this rapidly changing business environment, every branch of the enterprise must see actual growth. Marketing automation can help enterprises save time, help your company spend money where it is most needed, expand business more effectively, and break down the silos between sales and marketing.

Disclaimer:

Source of this article and images: https://encharge.io/marketing-automation-trends-2022/

Original author: Aiza Domingcil

Some deletions were made during the compilation process.

Author: Sensors Data

Source: Sensors Data