When you hear the words “marketing automation”, what does the expression mean to you? Maybe for you, like many companies both large and small, the idea of marketing automation is intimidating and it’s unclear how you can benefit from it. Yet you may already be using some common marketing automation tools already, such as a CRM tool or chatbots. 2021 may be the time to take a fresh look at what marketing automation can do.
Through the years since the idea of marketing automation and the idea of martech took hold, the idea has expanded to encompass many concepts, tools, and possibilities. What trends in marketing automation will emerge in 2021? It’s impossible to predict for certain, especially given the curve balls thrown at all industries and verticals during the 2020 pandemic. We know that digital marketing is more important than ever as digital business and e-commerce continue to proliferate, while at the same time, budgets are tighter because of greater marketing uncertainty. And this may be a bottom-line reason why businesses of any size should consider marketing automation: you invest a bit up front, but the payoff if done properly, is exponential.
Marketing automation: Getting out what you put in
Whether you’re working with data analytics tools or marketing automation software, the results you get have a lot to do with what you put in. That is, if the quality of your data is bad, you’re not going to get real insights as output. The same is true with your marketing automation strategy. Before you adopt marketing automation tools or place your confidence in an automated approach, it’s important to understand that a lot of human effort informs and underpins your marketing automation. You’re not trying to replace marketing specialists and resources; you’re simply trying to do much more with less so you can focus on creatives, get real-time insights and iterate on them, and be more effective in your overall marketing efforts and spend. Taking this adage on board can temper your expectations about what marketing automation will do for you while letting you make the most of your marketing resources and budget.
In the meantime, let’s discuss advances and innovations in marketing automation in the past and coming years to paint a picture of the marketing automation landscape and how to create memorable, resonant, connected marketing experiences for prospects and customers alike.
Rise of the machines: Machine learning and AI will drive personalization
It may seem counterintuitive, but automation has become the fastest way to get to greater personalization. With the sheer power that machine learning and artificial intelligence is capable of, marketing efforts can gain real-time insight and dive into creating much more personalized content. After all, one of the major drives of digital marketing is becoming more personalized and targeted to create more natural communication and more relevant campaign strategies and tactics. This data can feed into many aspects of the digital marketing arsenal, from segmentation to understanding the full customer journey.
Automation takes care of one of the hardest parts: being able to learn from customer and user behavior in real time at scale. One person or a team of marketing specialists can never perform at the level of any of the marketing automation platforms out there, so this is truly a case of letting the machines learn and give the marketing automation specialist a hand with their field of expertise.
Machine learning and AI are not new, but they are becoming faster, more accessible, and smarter. Throughout 2020, advances in ML and AI led to more predictive, actionable intelligence on things like user behaviors that helped marketing organizations move beyond guesswork in plotting the customer journey and understanding when to engage. Much of this comes down to having larger, better quality customer data sets that automation tools have no trouble managing. Humans are ushers and stewards of the data, but the machines rise to meet human-set challenges in marketing automation, ultimately aiming to deliver single customer views and behavioral tracking down to the individual level.
For 2021, hyperautomation stands to become the norm, accelerated by lingering COVID-19 concerns. Marketers with the right marketing automation strategy supported by the right tools will be able to not just track but to define the journey and deploy tactics to personalize each step in real time.
But no discussion of personalization would be complete without talking privacy.
Automating privacy protections
All consumers want to feel like they receive personalized, relevant information or offers. And most report feeling like they are engaged in a conversation with their favorite brands when this balance is working right. But when that balance isn’t working, they get overpowered by information that isn’t germane to their interests or what their behavior online has indicated an interest in, and they begin to feel their privacy has been violated. 2021 may be the year that automation finally lets companies strike a balance between customer desire for personalized marketing and valid concern for privacy.
Let’s not forget that in recent years, a number of measures have been introduced to limit the types of data a company can collect and retain, and indeed how long they can retain that information. Data privacy is serious business, and staying on the right side of regulations is much more difficult for humans to do than it is for marketing automation software, which can use specific logic to filter out data, marketing messages or privacy opt-outs that run afoul of regulations or policies.
This is another example of how automation can be a lifesaver on a large scale, but it requires some upfront input. As this space grows, of course, SaaS-style marketing automation platforms can likely receive automated updates to this kind of logic, which further eliminates human work hours and human error, potentially saving considerable resources down the line, avoiding privacy violation fines (such as those enshrined in GDPR). The calls for fair data use and the phasing out of third-party cookies in identity resolution will be smoother in automated ‘hands’.
Easier optimization for omnichannel and cross-device marketing
With automation, the goal of omni-channel marketing becomes more realistic. The volume of work required to monitor and manage all the different channels — on and offline, email, social, ad campaigns, and so on, can be rolled into a single marketing automation solution to simplify and streamline the flow of information, to reduce the human workload and began to establish the single source of truth you need to help track user behavior and journeys.
Likewise, as customers jump seamlessly from device to device, your marketing automation strategy has to compensate for that as well, as mobile devices are leading the way in user research, content consumption and even in making purchases.
Automating a better understanding of user intent
Understanding user intent is the always out-of-reach holy grail of digital marketing. With marketing automation, though, we can get closer than ever to having confidence in the user intent signals we receive.
The classic marketing approach here has tried to use incomplete behavioral data to ascertain user intent. And as a result, we’ve often expressed our own intent instead. Many marketing campaigns, including content/collateral, paid advertising, and other tactics have reflected what we believe is relevant to the target audience. But we haven’t known. With marketing automation and real-time data analytics, it’s possible to get insight into the target audience at a granular level. This ties into point one above about personalization but is less about delivering an individual message to a potential customer when we know they want to convert or buy and more about pre-emptively greeting them with the right messages based on intent signals, anticipating next steps or actions based on what the user has already done.
To a large extent, much of this kind of insight is already widely in use. It’s just not yet quite to the advanced level that understanding user intent needs to be. And the marriage of data-driven marketing expertise and marketing automation is the sweet spot for deriving user intent and capitalizing on it. In 2021, some of the biggest marketing automation opportunities will dip into some of the mainstays of traditional digital marketing practice, for example in search, web, and content consumption. It’s in these basic areas that marketing automation can work its magic to find implicit signals of user intent. What will the user do next, and can we predict actions going forward and get there first, giving the user what they need before they get there? This has been the trend for some time; careful plotting of analytics along the customer journey helps to predict intent. But, as with all of the topics we’ve discussed, automation introduces new levels of speed and scale to the mix.
What is your 2021 marketing automation outlook?
Have you adopted new marketing automation technologies into your 2021 marketing plans? Have you launched a marketing automation strategy that you’re just implementing now? We’d like to hear about what you have planned for marketing automation this year, and whether or not we can help.
Talk to us about your marketing automation strategy.
