As a business owner, there’s already so much to focus on. The last aspect of your business you want to be stressed about is the marketing aspect. This is where marketing automation comes in to save you time and hassle.
In this guide, we’ll explore marketing automation trends.
What is Marketing Automation?
Years ago marketing could take up a lot of your time. The process of taking valid information from your clients, compiling that information, and sorting through it could be arduous.
That information could help you to understand specific trends, and could also help you to predict the next moves you need to make in order to create your next beneficial marketing campaign.
Obviously, hiring a marketing manager and the like was necessary, however, as technology began to accelerate in its evolution so did the changes in marketing.
Clients’ expectations and needs change on a dime and it’s difficult for a person, or even a team of people, to predict and prepare for the next beneficial move. This is where marketing automation comes in.
Marketing automation is the use of AI to gather information from your clients in order to better serve your marketing strategies.
Marketing as a business owner can be very time-consuming since you have to address the myriad of clients you have, exploring and documenting their needs and demands in order to better understand your customer base and then adapt it to better target your prospective clients.
This can now all be done through AI and automation, which can compile client information in a concise and effective way for your marketing needs.
As marketing trends change, your business is also expected to change with it. The marketing landscape is dictated by a technological market that is global and consists of millions of different variables.
This means it can be hard to expect your business to keep up with every aspect of it.
So, what does marketing automation do?
- Automation allows for your business to constantly stay up to date with all of the trends and changes that are happening in the market.
- Marketing automation takes on the heavy and tedious burden of sending and updating emails as well as keeping up to date on your ad campaigns.
- It can also help you in generating sales from situations you weren’t previously aware of, and send surveys to gather important data from clients.
5 Essential Trends in Marketing Automation
There are 5 big marketing automation ideas that can help you to grow your business. These 5 all have their value, and most can and should be used in conjunction with each other.
Not only do they save you time and money, but they also help to expand and specify your audience and marketing reach.
These 5 can be used by a larger marketing team or they can be used by the independent business owner. With more technology comes more possibilities and user-friendly options.
The following 5 are perfect options for optimizing your marketing strategy through marketing automation:
- Omnichannel Marketing
- Hyper-Personalization
- Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
- Mobile Driven Automation
- Value-Driven Retargeting
Let’s look more in-depth into these particular automated marketing strategies.
Omnichannel Marketing
“Omni” means “of all things” so this form of marketing focuses on combining all possible channels that your business can operate in, and making it so that your business has exposure on all of the channels.
This form of marketing is crucial for integrating all aspects of your business and spreading it across multiple platforms since your customer base can also be found across many different mediums.
Most individuals who purchase products are doing so across many channels so to limit yourself to solely e-commerce, or brick-and-mortar limits your reach.
Omnichannel Marketing spreads your business across social media platforms, e-commerce websites, and much more.
The predecessor to this was Multichannel marketing. The issue with this kind of marketing was that it may have spread your brand across multiple channels, but it wouldn’t synchronize that information.
It’s almost as if you’re dealing with multiple different islands (multichannel) instead of one cohesive city with different boroughs (omnichannel).
Those different boroughs may operate in different ways, but the information must be synchronized between boroughs in order to keep the city flourishing.
So Omnichannel becomes a crucial new marketing technique in order to compile your client information as well as keep your brand present through multiple channels consistently with results.
This form of marketing is crucial for customer service, as well, because it integrates all paths of marketing, and allows your customers to communicate with your business through all channels.
This also allows you to get information from your clients from multiple sources ensuring that you don’t miss out on crucial data that can aid you in future marketing campaigns.
Hyper-personalization
The typical marketing campaign could try to reach out to a particular demographic, but even in that case, you are casting a pretty wide net. Casting a wide net doesn’t work on people as it does on fish.
When you focus on a marketing approach that tries to capture the generalized population you waste money, time, and resources. This is where hyper-personalization comes in.
As the name indicates, hyper-personalization is a very focused method of seeking prospective customers.
Hyper personalization focuses on marketing to those who have a higher likelihood of actually purchasing your product, ensuring that you spend your money, time, and resources in a more productive way.
Hyper-personalization marketing utilizes data from multiple sources including in-store purchases, e-commerce, and social media. This data is able to track customer habits and preferences so your marketing can be modified and specified.
This process is individualized so that the particular individuals who have a higher likelihood of engaging in your brand are found through data compiled and managed through AI and machine learning.
Since it’s super focused, the resulting information becomes very personal to the individual.
Let’s say you’re a company that makes hiking shoes. Hyper personalization would find those individuals who may have looked at hiking or outdoor posts on Instagram, have read through blogs related to hiking, or have looked up particular national parks.
This form also allows you to open the door to new demographics, and marketing groups that the data shows may be interested in your products. New customer demographics? Yes, please!
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
The future is heading more and more towards artificial intelligence, and in terms of marketing automation, this is the foundation of it.
The prime aid in determining the value of your product in the future is the cold hard reality of data. Having a system that can analyze data and predict trends is crucial in growing your business.
How do you know what customers will want in the future? How can you prepare for that in time instead of trying to catch up to your competition?
AI compiles customer data and preferences in order to begin “learning” what customers will want in the future. This process becomes a predictive measure so that you can stay ahead of the curve and anticipate what your customers will want.
This becomes especially important as marketing trends change and human beings follow those changes. The ability to track and predict those changes becomes crucial.
What this also allows is for your business to automate specific tasks. Some of those tasks can be as simple as sending emails, which are still very important in today’s markets, along with text messages.
This process allows for automated decision-making. Because the system is predictive, it can make decisions based on data as well as the emotional component of commerce.
People are emotional beings and this is something that Machine Learning and AI can track, compile, predict, and then make decisions based on. People can certainly do this work, but technology can do it quicker and with less room for error.
Mobile Driven Automation
App development is becoming crucial in the marketing world, as many businesses have been creating their own to optimize their reach and customer experience.
Any larger business that wants to thrive must make an application, but with the creation of a mobile app comes the benefits of a wider customer base and more information to help your company grow.
Ensuring the validity, reliability, and longevity of your mobile app is crucial in maintaining your business, and mobile-driven automation ensures that your application is functioning intuitively for customer use and will guarantee return usage.
One of the many issues that a business faces with its own application is that many applications are used only once by customers and never used again. Making an intuitive application can guarantee retention.
Ensuring your application works intuitively allows for the effective use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. As we discussed with AI, predictive decision-making is also possible and recommended with mobile apps and general mobile usage.
Let’s face the reality, most people use their phones to shop, look at reviews, stream television, and everything else under the sun. If you don’t take part in mobile automation, you risk losing valuable information and clientele.
With a valuable application, you can harvest data from customers, especially if you have a high rate of mobile app usage. This allows the tracking of data.
Relevant data taken from a mobile application can be used to understand customer trends and be used for predictive marketing.
Also, because there are so many people using mobile devices these days, it’s crucial to find the proper marketing strategies through mobile applications.
Value-driven Retargeting
There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to retain a customer base, and sometimes that issue can be easily solved by retargeting those clients you’ve had.
Retargeting is a method that’s main focus is to create repeat clients. The risk of not retargeting is that you have a one-time client that does not return to your site, or will not return because of prices or lack of incentive.
Value-driven retargeting uses specific information about the product or the company and targets past users utilizing specific data about their past purchases in order to create a return customer.
This kind of marketing allows you to utilize different platforms, including social media sites, to target specific demographics.
The main goal is to ensure that your current customers not only revisit but also to ensure they don’t leave a full cart on your website. There is always the risk of losing a possible sale while a customer is still shopping.
Sometimes a customer will fill their cart up, look at the final price, and step away before they go through with the purchase.
This kind of marketing can also be used to give those customers reminders about their pending purchases or to give some kind of sale involving those particular items. The goal is to re-engage them.
- Sometimes customers may not place anything in their cart but would return to the site if given a slight nudge.
- Many customers need multiple incentives to make a purchase, and retargeting ensures that the customer is given those particular incentives specific to them.
- Value also has to do with your specific messaging. This includes what your company is specifically about, and what message you want to get across.
- Value-driven retargeting emphasizes your company’s message and pricing to entice past customers to return.
This can all be done through other websites including social media. Tracking customer data and preferences allows the proper information to retarget customers based on interests and other website visits.
Look at it as a sort of reminder: “Hey you checked out our cool shoes a couple of days ago, maybe you’re ready to make that purchase.”
Conclusion
As technology begins to grow exponentially it will be capable of aspects in the market only told in Science Fiction Novels. This is what makes it the most crucial aspect of business development in the 21st century.
To better understand the future of the market as well as the needs and desires of your customer base, these are the crucial tools every business owner will need to invest in to maintain a competitive edge.
