Marketing automation helps businesses use automated technology to improve their digital marketing efforts, increase sales and client retention, and streamline company productivity. Research and Markets have predicted that the market size for marketing automation worldwide will reach $8.42 billion USD (around $10.7 billion CAD) by 2027. Better yet, a HubSpot report suggests that automation is already used to some extent by 68% of all companies. In other words, automation is already a staple of digital marketing strategies. But how exactly will that need for automation manifest itself in 2021?
Whether it’s engaging with current clients, nurturing leads, automating company workflows, or personalizing messages sent on your company’s behalf, marketing automation is a useful tool for any business, and could be relied upon more frequently after 2020 has come to a close. Here are three marketing automation trends you should watch out for in the new year.
Aligning Sales and Marketing: Joining Forces to Drive Your Revenue
Through the workflows you’ve created, automation software can help make the sales/marketing alignment process at your company even smoother than it currently is. How? By sending automated notifications to leads based on their actions, sending pre-written emails, and automatically following up with leads.
Although this isn’t a trend that has typically been associated with marketing automation over the years, it’s nonetheless a component of B2B marketing that has become increasingly relevant nowadays. Sometimes known as “smarketing”, sales and marketing alignment can be difficult for marketing professionals to accomplish, but it’s a process that can help with tasks such as predictive analytics and data integration. Using automation can also help you more easily understand how many sales resulted from your marketing campaigns. It can help your business increase both productivity and revenue, as both the marketing and sales components of your company will be working in unison thanks to automation. In fact, a case study by SuperOffice indicated that aligning sales and marketing efforts led to a 34% jump in revenue.
Personalization: Taking Your Customer Service Efforts to New Heights
For students at digital marketing school wanting to better understand modern marketing strategies, learning how to personalize user experiences is a great place to start. In fact, SmarterHQ reports that 72% of consumers will only interact with marketing efforts that are personalized toward them.
Personalization is a strategy that helps give each customer their desired experience whenever they interact with your brand’s products and services, and helps you target and personalize your marketing campaigns. Personalization can occur in many situations, such as during direct contact with clients, during content creation, when crafting lead capturing strategies, and when designing email campaigns based on the interests and needs of your clientele. Automating some of these processes can help you do this quickly, as well as better nurture and retain leads. Examples of how automation is used for personalization include website personalization/dynamic web pages, automated personalized emails, segmented email campaign optimization, and “abandoned cart” emails (emails sent to clients who had been shopping for items but have items remaining in their cart without buying them yet).
Artificial Intelligence: What Students in Digital Marketing School Should Expect in 2021
Anyone hoping to pursue a digital marketing career can recognize the impact AI (artificial intelligence) is having on the industry, and it’s one that can only continue to evolve with time. Deloitte has reported that 77% of CMOs (chief marketing officers) have used artificial intelligence for automating various tasks amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, a report from Salesforce states that artificial intelligence is used by 84% of marketers—a 55% increase from 2018.
By playing a role traditionally done by human employees, AI can be used to provide recommendations for marketing campaigns, determine which campaigns should be promoted for different clients (also known as programmatic advertising), optimize the scheduling of messages to clients, give data insights, and respond to queries made by clients via email and social media. This goes beyond answering simple and frequently-asked questions, too. Artificial intelligence can be leveraged to help clients get answers to more detailed, complex inquiries.
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