From analytics and CRM to email marketing and social media, automation has seeped into virtually every step of the digital marketing process.
Despite how far it’s come, automated marketing will continue to scale, with global spending on marketing automation software slated to grow to reach $25 billion, a sevenfold jump from where it stands now at $3.6 billion.
To produce tangible results in an increasingly automated marketing landscape, digital marketers must learn to embrace automation by cashing in on the latest trends.
Before taking a deep dive into some of the top-of-mind trends that are gearing up to dominate the industry this year, let’s quickly brush over how automation became the hub of modern-day digital marketing teams.
The numbers pretty much speak for themselves.
Sixty-three percent of companies that have adopted marketing automation tools report higher ROI than their competitors, and nearly nine out of ten industry leaders leverage programmatic marketing strategies to scale marketing campaigns and tap into new audiences.
The majority of Internet users are now consuming content across channels and across devices on a daily basis. Marketing automation tools support this trend by taking customers out of separate silos and consolidating their behaviors into detailed profiles.
In addition, the marketing automation landscape has moved towards simpler workflows, more user-friendly interfaces, easier software integration, and faster data interpretation to support timely responses.
The marketing automation landscape is large, and will only get larger from here on out. Spending on marketing automation tools is expected to reach at least 25.1 billion annually by 2023, according to data from Visual Capitalist.
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Marketing automation allows digital advertisers to conserve their resources and launch more effective ad campaigns, streamlining marketing efforts so teams run in a more efficient manner.
When implemented across all your marketing activities, automation can produce some pretty impressive benefits. Here are some benefits of marketing automation that advertisers can utilize for powerful, practical marketing campaigns:
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When implementing marketing automation tools, there is no one size fits all approach. From lead nurturing to market research and analytics, there are many ways you can utilize automation tools within your content marketing strategy.
With Adriel’s marketing dashboard, for example, you can automate routine manual work to spend less time chasing data and more time growing your business. Digital marketers will then be able to streamline creative development, strategic planning, and campaign execution.
For instance, instead of having to wait hours or days, marketers can quickly connect to disparate data sources on Adriel in a matter of minutes. Once this is done, the software automatically streams data in real-time and populates key insights on the dashboard without any manual maintenance or scheduled refreshes.
Another important example of a marketing automation tool are welcome and onboarding email campaigns, which are vital in initiating conversations with new customers. These automated emails can be sent to your newly subscribed customers within 24 hours of their first purchase.
In today’s modern marketing world, many companies and small businesses are using onboarding welcome emails as part of their marketing automation process to ensure that new customers are well-connected with their brand.
Other platforms such as Salesforce or HubSpot, which typically include tools for CRM integration, email marketing, inbound marketing, lead nurturing, and lead scoring, are great tools to boost revenue and get familiar with marketing technology.
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Automation has the capacity to elevate marketing teams to rockstar status. But simply throwing marketing automation tools into the mix isn’t enough. To realize its full potential, digital marketers must stay ahead of the following trends driving the future.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the marketing automation trends shaping the advertising industry today:
Not too long ago, AI was a far-fetched novelty. Never in their wildest dreams had digital marketers imagined the application of AI would stretch beyond chatbots and push notifications to power more sophisticated forms of marketing such as copywriting, PPC ads, optimization, and website development.
As its scope continues to expand across different domains, AI will play a critical part in the planning, execution, and success of future digital marketing campaigns.
A marketer’s toolbox is often cluttered with different software that doesn’t speak the same language. Bringing these disparate systems together, however, is no cakewalk.
Designed specifically to get around the confines of interoperability, an all-in-one marketing automation platform can eliminate the need for multiple tools by serving as an open-standard solution to help streamline each link in the marketing chain.
Humans make choices based on information and intuition. The same, however, cannot be said about marketing automation. It has to be grounded in conditional logic to function with what can be called informed intuition.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re emailing cold prospects to have them book a demo. Some might oblige on the first go, but many won’t. In a perfect world, a real-time marketing automation tool would chime in and send out targeted follow-ups to engage unresponsive prospects. With conditional logic in place, automated systems will do precisely that.
Collecting and sifting through mountains of complex data by hand is uncalled for when the technology to automate such tasks is readily available. Besides, there’s no viable excuse to let error-prone, time-consuming manual processes dictate the terms of how you aggregate and manage data.
Do your content marketing campaigns a favor and start leveraging a single source of truth that pulls together and unifies metrics across channels under a common format.
Having the right message delivered to the right person on the right channel at the right time has long been the holy grail of marketing success. But the ever-growing number of touchpoints is complicating the task of harnessing a consistent, personalized customer experience.
That’s precisely why investing in multichannel marketing automation has become a must. Without the 360-degree view of cross-channel metrics automation tools provide, marketers are doomed to be left in the dust under a stack of dataflows and siloed systems.
Related: 12 KPIs Your Marketing Attribution Dashboard Must Track for Multi-Channel Success
There are no limits to the wonders of automation tools. At this point in our collective marketing automation landscape, every brand should be able to enjoy the fruits automation can provide. It’ll be up to how well you act on the latest trends to improve your marketing campaign performance and bottom lines.
While marketing attribution is not as straightforward as looking at numbers, dashboards can make your life easier by consolidating all your disparate data in one place. Look for marketing software like Adriel that not only streams real-time data but also automatically tracks all the data and alerts you whenever campaign metrics go above or below certain KPIs.
Book a 1-on-1 demo call with our product specialist or sign up for a free trial today. Never miss any critical insights again with Adriel’s automated marketing attribution dashboard.