MARKETING AUTOMATION TRENDS 2020 — PART 1

These days marketing is driven by technology. A vivid example of this is marketing automation that shapes the modern-day marketing world. The good news is that marketing automation expands the capabilities of promotion with the development of multichannel messaging that enhances the traditional email marketing campaign. What’s more, a personalized approach is growing in popularity in the industry where customers can enjoy personalized real-time messaging, and this is just one of many capabilities of digital marketing.

Further, the steady growth of AI and Machine Learning automation changed the very nature of marketing automation, making it more complicated and sophisticated. Automation in modern marketing is growing more and more impressive, inspiring, and occasionally daunting. Up till now, up to 66% of marketers rank high-quality leads as being one of their top reasons for implementing marketing automation.

Let’s begin our long journey into marketing automation trends and examine some of the major innovations. We will take a look at the modern B2B marketing automation trends that greatly impact contemporary marketing techniques.

Introduction to digital marketing trends

With Digital Marketing trends evolving every day, advertisers should keep an eye on constantly advancing market changes to accommodate themselves to the rapidly changing situation in the marketplace. Approaching the situation in this way can help marketers to develop a better vision of the future development of their organization as well as to generate more leads and improve the level of customer engagement.

Try to understand me correctly, I do not claim that the nature of marketing has changed due to digitalization. In its essence, marketing remains the same and keen on promotional campaigns. Up till now, powerful promotion remains the most important component of a successful marketing campaign. Meaning that an effectively executed marketing campaign can only boost interest in your product or service.

Marketing Automation

However, the circumstances are different given the fact that the advertisers have to work in totally different circumstances in the digitized world. Advertising campaigns these days are different from the past days. Getting in tune with these trends defines your success as a digital marketer. If you want to understand all the trends you will have to deal with, then you should be very active on the web. You have to understand the major trends in social media, content production, SEO, and of course, understand how to use marketing automation.

Source: Marketing automation challenges

Knowledge of the key marketing trends, in this case, is very important. In this post, we will analyze the major marketing automation trends that define the essence of modern-day marketing. What are the main marketing trends? How will they impact your business? How to choose the best marketing automation tool that best fits your business?

In this post, I have collected the main marketing automation trends that are working for me right now and will go on to analyze each of them. Knowing these trends will make your marketing campaigns more effective and, in the end, you will not only know what the main digital trends are but be able to calculate which digital trend is the best for your business.

Let’s look more deeply into what is working in modern-day digital marketing and what can supercharge your customers into buying. I will also show you which digital marketing trends if considered, can bring extra traffic to your website. Together we will trace the strategies that dozens of businesses have used to improve their marketing strategy and increase their conversion rate. However, first, let’s take a look at what statistics says.

Some Statistics

Main Marketing Automation Facts and Statistics

• Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.
• 89% of marketers said that email was their primary channel for lead generation (Forrester research)
• Companies that automate lead management see a 10% greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months (Gartner Research)
• Nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than non-natural leads (The Annuitas Group)
• Event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget (Gartner Research)
• By 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationships without talking to humans. (Gartner Research)
• Marketing automation has seen the fastest growth of any CRM-related segment in the last 5 years. (Focus Research)

Source: https://www.emailmonday.com

Important Statistics by HubSpot

• Spending on marketing automation tools predicted to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023. (Martech Today, 2018)
• Companies that applied marketing automation into their lead management see a 10% growth in their company’s revenues. This growth was achieved during the period of 6-9 months’ time. (Strategic IC, 2017)
• Taking into account that generating more Leads is the top priority for marketers, 79% of top-performing companies started to use marketing automation for 3-4 years. (Venture Harbour, 2017)
• In the U.S., the marketing automation software industry has reached a valuation of a $6.1 billion market in 2019. (SharpSpring 2019)
• In the U.S., the marketing automation software industry has achieved 20%growth on an annual basis. (SharpSpring 2019)
• Nearly 90% of marketing agencies have introduced marketing automation techniques into their everyday practices and have achieved success in increasing their lead score. (SharpSpring, 2017)
• 67% of marketing leaders have got into the habit of using marketing automation software on a regular basis.
• Marketing automation has become the number one tool for creating personalized customer experiences. (House of Marketing, 2019) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

These statistics are rather impressive, don’t you think so? Now it’s time to analyze the main trends in marketing automation that govern marketing these days.

Trend #1

Marketing Automation will continue to grow going into 2020

The figures above show that the use of marketing automation will continue to advance in the coming decade. Experts predict that $32 billion dollars were spent on marketing software in 2019. Analysis anticipates that the investment should only increase in the 2020’s and beyond. The growth of Marketing Automation is amazing when you view the statistics.

Statistics

• The number of Marketing Automation vendors increased by 27% in 2018.
• Spending on Marketing automation is increasing exponentially.
• Spending is expected to reach $25.1 billion by 2023.

75% of marketers are using at least one marketing automation system.

What is the catch?

The increase in marketing investment ignores the still necessary expenditure to create engaging marketing content and strategy.

Trend #2

Personalized Content will reign supreme

Your customers are unique individuals. Your advertising content should reflect the reality that there is no common advertisement for everyone. Today marketers are increasingly making use of automation to display personalized advertisements to segmented customers. Instapage recently published statistics on the trends of marketers utilizing personalized content.

Insights

Instapage found that knowledge of consumers can be gained from on-site activity, user attributes, and social listening.

Trend #3

In-depth analysis of user behavior

 In 2019 Netflix and Starbucks began the ramp-up in the analysis of user behavior using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools. The goal of this campaign is to provide hyper-personalized recommendations to customers and with it the best possible customer experience. Machine Learning works by observing the content that the customer selects and building predictive models on their behavior.

What is the catch?

Artificial Intelligence networks are only as good as the customer statistics that train the algorithm. These networks further need a high-level of technical expertise to configure in the beginning, making these AI algorithms expensive investments for businesses. Plug and play algorithms are expected to become available in the coming years. Please drop a comment to our readers if you have knowledge of a simple AI algorithm.

Trend #4

Success in marketing is mastery of Big Data

Google, Salesforce, and Facebook are the marketing titans of today. They achieved this success by leveraging the Big Data of their customers behavior with advanced expertise in data mining. It is this sophisticated data integration that has allowed them to build disruptive game changing multichannel marketing systems for the best customer journey.

Trend #5

Go Mobile

The extraordinary success of the mobile phone in the previous decade has transformed the internet. Where once your leads viewed your advertisements on the banner of a website, today over half of promotions are viewed on a mobile application or as streaming content. Advertisers that fail to apply in-app banner ads, mobile browsing ads, and gaming promotions are therefore losing much of their investment.

Trend #6

Strong content is still the leader

Hyper-personalized promotions and data analytics can only get your marketing campaign so far. In the end your message still needs to speak to the pains and concerns of your targeted customer and the need for quality content has never been higher. You will need the services of a quality copywriter and search engine optimization expert in order to achieve any success with the Google search engine.

Trend #7

Influence marketing is the new power

Originally advertisers had no choice but to publish their promotions and hope for the best. Then Google came along and gave them the power to target advertisements based on the keyword searches of prospects. Next Facebook emerged and with-it advertisers could personalize their promotions for hyper-specific demographics. The ascension of social media further opened the door for the micro-influencer. Celebrities used to be the blunt swords in the promotion of products but today marketing agencies can hyper-personalize influencers down to a specific interest of the audience. Presently marketing agencies can achieve good impressions with influencers with only 10,000 followers and a modest budget.

Trend #8

Video is the go-to user engagement medium

Focus on video content. The use of video as the main marketing practice has helped promoters to increase their conversion rates and it is getting more and more popular as time goes by. People like your customers just respond well to video because it is attention-grabbing, engaging, convenient, and actually can convey a lot more information than text. Video can further greatly convey emotion and make people motivated and excited to work with you. Video is more persuasive than the written words and the homepage can ever be. It is further much easier to create strong video content with all the devices, software, and apps that are readily available to you. Branded videos are further an excellent way to educate your prospects about your product or service and you achieve these advantages.

Advantages of Video Contents

1. Video content is engaging.
2. It delivers tons of information in a short time.
3. Video increase in conversion.
4. It is more appealing than the basic text.

Branded videos are often executed as how-to-videos, business narratives, or interviews. They can be very memorable when done tastefully.

Next type are the Live videos. Live videos are blowing right up now because they can be really interactive, and you can invite the audience to participate in the conversation. The audience can take part in this live conversation and it is a great tool to stimulate your relationships. You can go alive on your Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. This is a great way to really connect with your followers or potential customers.

One cool thing about all this is when you will go live and simultaneously cast your videos on YouTube, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Which would generate a whole lot of engagement.

You can create different types of videos:

• Webinars
• Engaging How to videos
• Videos explaining how your business can help
• Advertisements

This is just the beginning of what is possible to make here. You can create this content for your business and repurpose it to use it in different forms. For example, I can use this video you are watching right now and repurpose the audio into a podcast. You can also repurpose your video content for a blog post or you can use it for your Instagram account. There is a whole list of new possibilities when it comes to video content and what you can do with it to grow bigger.

Trend #9

Facebook Messenger Marketing

Facebook messenger marketing opportunities are endless, and they will completely reshape the ways your customer will shop, buy tickets, make payments, make appointments, and just connect with your business. Statistics show that Facebook messenger has 1.2 billion active users.

• You can book appointments much easier with Smart Facebook messenger bots.
• Chatbots can curate marketing leads.
• Get feedback and ratings with the conversation.
• Deliver content.

Plus, here are some of the benefits which Facebook Messenger Marketing can bring to your business.

• Sales can be accelerated.

Undoubtedly, you can make these sales personalized by chatting with people over Facebook Messenger during these buying stages instead of the phone.

• You can build trust through personal conversations. 
• You can automate your business activity through chatbots.

The benefit of chatbots is that they can eliminate the burden on your team members repeatedly answering the same customer question over and over again. chatbots can further automate your lead-making

Business insiders are saying that about 80% of businesses are going to use the chatbots by 2020. If you execute your chatbot well, it has the potential to give your marketing campaign a huge edge over your competitors. Facebook marketing and chatbots are still evolving in capabilities but they are expected to say ahead of the competition for years.

Video is still an important element in Facebook marketing with agencies using movies in 90% of their content. It is still the best content for engaging prospects and is highly shareable on social media. Video content can be entertainment, teasers, tutorials, and demos. YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram Live are the best mediums for video marketing.

Trend #10

End-to-end channel integration is essential

Today’s prospects are rarely persuaded into buying by the single advertisement impression. Two, three or more impressions might be necessary before the prospect clicks on the promotion and considers purchase. With this knowledge in mind, advertisers need to plan for showcasing their services across multiple platforms. Promoters should utilize video ads in conjunction with social media influencers and keyword placement to achieve multiple impressions for their audience.

Trend #11

Native advertisement is critical 

It is the job of the promoter to craft an engaging story about how your product can best serve your prospective customer’s needs. It is the task of your marketing automation software to acquire statistics on the tastes and demographics of your ideal customer. Then finally it is the occupation of your data analytics experts to mine the data for who your prospects are and where they like to go. It is with this knowledge that you can finally make the best return on investment (ROI) of Native advertising. For example, Buzzfeed’s promoted content. Buzzfeed has attained wide fame by creating humorous listicle articles and quizzes that entertain and engage their audience. You can also engage your audience with Native content once you know what they like.

Trend #12

Chatbots are the next disruption

Chatbots are robots that utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to recognize and mimic human speech. While these robots have existed for decades, recent advancements in AI have made these robots increasingly smart. Today chatbots excel at answering the questions of prospects and analyzing their moods. Amazon Alexa has further demonstrated that prospects prefer to interact with machines and statistics show that with 54% of people preferring text communication. Chatbots are further cheap and easy to deploy on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and many other social media platforms.

What is the catch?

The intelligence of even the best chatbots is limited. They still can’t carry on a real conversation for more than a few minutes. Chatbots really excel at answering questions and engaging prospects with quizzes.

Trend #13

Automated social media marketing

In 2019 people spend up to 143 minutes on social media and this is an increase from 135 minutes in 2017. With all this social screen time it is critical to achieve the best return on investment (ROI). While influencers are critical in convincing prospects to buy, you still need automated campaigns to find your original prospects. Facebook provides excellent tools for filtering prospects by age, location, occupation, and interests. The Facebook algorithm can further enhance marketing campaigns by hyper-personalizing campaigns for the exact audience and repeating the impressions across multiple platforms.

Trend #14

Lifestyle marketing using predictive Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Acquiring customers through marketing campaigns is expensive. Therefore, when you finally obtain customers it is critical to achieve the best return on investment with high conversion and retention. Forbes says that brands that are capable of providing a pleasant customer experience are more likely to achieve repeat purchases.

Insights

• Brands that segment their customers with dynamic personalized content achieve greater retention.
• Increasingly brands are assessing their customers online behavior to better understand their motives behind their purchases.
• Predictive AI software can segment customers from high, medium, and low retention. High retention customers can further receive additional personalized attention.
• Marketing automation is lowering the costs of assessing customer behavior for predicting their Customer Lifetime Value.

What is the catch?

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is tricky to compute consistently when customers purchase different products from the same brand. Errors in calculations can negatively affect these forecasts.

Some findings

• Live videos are trending, and its incorporation into marketing automation is only rising.
• Marketing automation cannot be accomplished without in-depth understanding of user behavior and personalization.
• End-to-end channel integration is the result of marketing automation.
• Pairing content with marketing automation can create a duo which is unstoppable.
• Shape the experience of users using marketing automation and insights.

Your user is no longer willing to wait longer than needed and will make a jump to a better-suited competitor without a second thought. That’s why marketing information became so important. With the help of modern marketing automation tools, it has become possible for brands to create better targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. As it has already been mentioned in my blog post, marketing automation will only continue to increase in growth in the coming decade. 

Finally, I can say that marketing automation is very effective if you have strong data. For example, with your customer’s email contacts you can campaign them to visit your website. You will need the right marketing automation tools to build your company’s strategy.

Here is the list of the main benefits of utilizing marketing automation in 2020:

• Marketing automatization is able to improve the user experience.
• It can help with the lead-nurturing process.
• Marketing automation is perfect for precise tracking and monitoring of your marketing campaigns.
• Marketing automation can reduce marketing costs.
• When applied properly, marketing automation can free up your time and energy.
• Marketing Automation can enable personalization.

You can learn B2B Content Marketing and Agile Marketing that are really important to develop your marketing knowledge.

Last Thoughts

In this digitalized age marketing automation is a critical building block in the locating of prospects and communicating with them until they become customers. Sadly, many agencies are still in the dark about the many tools available to them and how they can best utilize them. This is an expensive mistake because prospects are no longer willing to wait for you to convey your message when your competitor could be doing a better job.

When properly utilized marketing automation can dramatically improve your knowledge of the consumer and reveal a gold mine of statistics about their behavior. Successful marketers will need to employ automation across multiple channels to segment their audience and deliver personalized messages to them. Still automation isn’t a silver bullet, consumers will continue to embrace businesses that listen to and respond to their needs quickly. 

It is the job of the marketer to develop a rich story for the product that can be shared across the unique channels.

The article has been initially published at contentpersona.com