2020 - The Year of Marketing Automation
Softext Ltd
What is Marketing Automation Marketing automation is the process of using software to automate key marketing activities such as email marketing, social media marketing and reporting.
Automating these processes helps marketing teams by easing their burden, freeing up time, and providing more options to personalise the buying journey for customers.
Experts have predicted that 2020 is the year for personalisation, and it will become more important than price in a customer’s purchasing decision.
A study in 2018 suggested that “customer experience will be the number one differentiator, beating price and features as a key differentiator by 2020”
Marketing Automation Predictions 2019-2025
Marketing Automation is expected to grow from strength to strength over the next five years, with the Global Marketing Automation (2019-2025)
Report predicting that the global marketing automation market size will reach $6.6 billion by 2025 – rising at a market growth of 13.3% CAGR between 2019-2025.
According to the report, the driving factors that will fuel this growth are; the growing need to automate repetitive marketing procedures, user retention for company growth, growing demand for personalized marketing, and improved predictive lead scoring.
The Global Marketing Automaton report also highlighted three distinct areas of marketing automation software that will continue to grow during the forecast period.
These are; Marketing Intelligence, Marketing Automation, and Advanced Workflow Automation.
The Great Equaliser
Some experts call marketing automation ‘The Great Equaliser’ because it will lessen the gap between large marketing teams with unlimited budgets, and smaller teams with less to spend.
In fact, over the last couple of years small businesses have been the focus for many marketing automation products, as business owners start to see the impact this technology can have on their bottom line.
The Act!
Growth Suite for example, is designed specifically for small businesses to create effective response-driven nurture marketing campaigns that drive business growth.
Marketing Automation & AI In December 2017, an IDATE survey of experts’ opinions ranked AI first as the key technology for the 2025 horizon – overtaking Big Data.
Artificial Intelligence is expected to be one of the most disruptive technologies to impact the marketing automation field from 2020 onward, with the power to transform mass amounts of complex data into actionable insights.
We can already see Ai playing a central role in the digital landscape, with tech giant Google implementing it as a core feature of its search engine algorithm.
In October 2019, Google released its BERT update - one of the biggest progressions in the history of Search.
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) works by processing all of the words in a sentence in relation to each other, rather than in a one-by-one order, so that it can really understand the intent behind search queries.
This will make search rankings and featured snippets much more accurate and allow users to search in a way that feels natural to them.
With Google leading the way in AI incorporation, it won’t be long before marketing software catches up, offering marketing teams more opportunities to interact with customers in a personalised way using artificial intelligence.
Chatbots Chatbots can also help businesses to achieve to their personalisation goals when combined with marketing automation.
Chatbots are ideal for performing tasks such as delivering support and outreach to customers, as well as translating brand messaging and marketing into a more personal experience.
The benefit of using chatbots to automate these tasks allows for increased output and productivity without the need to increase headcount or add extra time.
Many businesses are also using chatbots as a lead generation tool, as an alternative to the traditional landing page.
A chatbot is able to offer more interaction with a potential customer and provide them with immediate answers to their queries.
Chatbots will help to ease the strain on customer support teams during times of high volume and outside of normal business hours.
In a 24/7 world, we expect immediate answers and replies, so a chatbot can help businesses to deliver this level of service.
Automated Multi-Channel Attribution
Understanding how your marketing activities contribute towards sales is essential for an effective marketing program.
Machine learning and data science will help to develop customised marketing attribution models for better reporting accuracy.
These automated attribution models will help companies evaluate actions, events and marketing touch points to see how each one has contributed to their sales successes.
Automating the attribution process will provide more in-depth insights into how well each activity has performed and what percentage of a sale can be accredited to each activity.
It will also save time by automatically pulling in data from multiple sources including; digital advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, social media networks, phone calls, and email marketing.
This data is then fed into CRM tools to provide valuable customer insights to aid the sales team.
The future of Marketing Automation
As marketing automation gains momentum we will see a shift towards further personalisation using predictive analysis based on better data mining.
Eventually, marketing teams will be able to create a marketing strategy using targeted data, with a good idea of the strategies that are most likely to work before they are put into action.
Are you ready to try marketing automation to grow your business?
Give Softext Ltd a call to see how we can help you on 0121 232 2304 or email us info@softext.co.uk