Marketing, nowadays, is not just about making an ad for a TV channel or a social media platform or running a campaign on Google. It is much beyond that. Understanding the concepts of storytelling and building an emotional connection with your audience is a crucial part of marketing. Since the boom in automation in every industry, marketing has also seen a good deal of automation software and platforms penetrating the market. Although marketing automation has been there for more than a decade, consumer perceptions are changing and so are the marketing strategies. Being marketing professionals, we must anticipate the consumer mindset and serve them the best possible solution with our product and services. Here We’ve researched and curated a list of Top 5 marketing automation trends you can’t ignore.
1. Personalized marketing will see new developments
Whenever you search for something online, you start seeing ads regarding that everywhere. We all know that’s how remarketing and personalization works. But it doesn’t stop there. Brands have started to rely on customer’s data a lot. Target, one of the biggest retail corporations, created a pregnancy prediction score for targeting pregnant women in their second trimester itself. They used factors like search and buying patterns to determine who is pregnant. After that, they would provide them offers on newborn baby-related products. This proved to be a PR disaster for Target when they exposed a teen girl’s pregnancy.
Due to such events, customers’ privacy concerns have increased rapidly. Personalized marketing will see new developments in terms of ethical implications and privacy policies. The concept of personalization will evolve with the privacy of users in mind. There is a thin line between providing the right content and creeping out users. Marketers will need to learn to see through this line.
When automating the personalized content for their users, marketers need to combine social listening and behavioral data of customers within the bounds of user’s privacy.
For example, Netflix shows personalized content on the basis of what people of your demographic and interests are watching. It is a great example of personalized marketing as it keeps the user’s interest in mind instead of selling them. Here are 5 tips to personalize content without looking like a creep
2. Marketing automation through Machine learning and AI
You must have heard the phrase “Data is the new oil” due to the increasing demand for data by companies around the world. Artificial intelligence feeds on data to improve their accuracy and efficiency. While AI and machine learning are already being used by brands to automate their marketing activities like gathering insights on customer behavior and engagement, there are companies who can’t automate it due to price constraints and lack of accessibility. We will see this change in the coming time. AI will penetrate the roots of marketing with AI-powered PPC advertising, personalized web experience through Geo-targeting, and churn prediction.
You will be able to run predictive analytics on potential leads to forecast whether the specific customer is likely to consume your product or not. Marketo by Adobe has already started providing AI integrated marketing automation in their platform. The entrance of AI will change the way we look at marketing automation.
3. Predictive Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) will be adopted by Marketers
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that determines the lifetime value brought by a customer to your business in the totality of their relationship. It is becoming a popular metric as it is directly linked to the revenue generated from a customer. Businesses have started to realize that customers won’t consume their product or service if there is even a slight inconvenience.
We will see a rise in businesses that will adapt to predictive CLV through marketing analytics and automation software. The businesses will be able to differentiate between customers with high and low CLV with predictive analytics in real-time. This would work, for marketers, as an opportunity to serve the right people with a more customized experience. With these highly accurate user personas of high CLV, marketers will also start targeting similar buyers to bring in more leads for the sales team.
4. A shift from chatting to conversational marketing
The new generation wants to chat with businesses instead of calling or emailing them. Twillio surveyed 6,000 consumers across Europe, Asia, and North America and found that 90% of consumers would like to be able to use messaging to talk to businesses. That’s where conversation marketing comes into play. Many brands have already started using conversational marketing as a way of making their customers travel through the sales and marketing funnel swiftly.
Intelligent chatbots will drive your conversational marketing by talking directly with users. These bots have adaptive learning where they learn from each new conversation with the visitor. You can research and identify particular pages with high traffic and start A/B testing these bots.
For example, you see a lot of traffic at the pricing page of your website, you can create a chatbot there for answering repetitive questions.
This would not only require lesser human efforts but also reduce the cost and wasted time of your sales and support team. With chatbots, you can start off your business process automation.
5. There will be a rise in Smart Social Media Automation
Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are amongst the top apps on the app stores across OSs. Business felt the need to jump into social media marketing a few years ago. We saw a rise in creative advertising and marketing channels where interactive brand content made good sales for companies. Earlier it was just B2C, but now even B2B companies have started engaging and posting content on social media. But due to the overload of social media content, it has become difficult for businesses to manually engage with each customer individually. Social media automation will be more popular now since the tools and software have become less expensive and more accessible. Social media automation will popularise due to the brands’ need to fill the gap of unattended engagements through automation.
You will be able to automate comments, posts, and even replies on social media through these tools. This way you can reach out to more people in less time. Also, the marketing team will get analytics on what kind of users are engaging with different content according to their age, gender, location, and other demographics. This will make your task of analyzing your user persona easy and less time-consuming.
Wrap up
Whether you agree or not, the wave of marketing automation has begun and it is here to stay for a long time. We believe that due to the popularity of No-code software and automation, we will see more user-friendly, effective, and inexpensive marketing automation platforms. These were the top 5 marketing trends that we will see in 2020. You can start out with any one of these to experiment with your business. If you have any doubts regarding this article, you can comment down below. We would love to be of help to you.