Fresh thinking about marketing is urgently needed that focuses B2B digital marketing strategy on long-term results along three fronts:

• Platform: Building sustainable business platforms to support interactive and collaborative marketing strategies.

• Presence: Forming deep customer relationships through omni channel marketing to be actively present and engaged with customers as a persistently helpful presence in their lives.

• Productivity: Using processes and technologies to address the speed at which we can adapt to changing circumstances and provide value for our customers and partners.

Find out how we think value should be informing your strategy here: How to Future-Proof Your B2B Marketing Strategy.

What is clear is that the use of marketing automation technology is integral to each of these facets:

• Platform led brands and the omnichannel experience rely on content to create conversation. Marketing automation tools makes creating and distributing relevant content possible at scale.

• The customised, always-on experience people have come to expect runs on automation. Data-driven capabilities and analytics are required to deliver relevant content in real-time.

• The technological efficiency of marketing automation and AI are critical for delivering scalability. If you’re relying on manual processes, you cannot scale your operations.

In short, marketing automation software is now an entry requirement. If you want to be able to compete in today’s dynamic marketing environment, you have to automate.

Automation Enables Digital Marketing

Around 50% of businesses were already using marketing automation tools in 2019, and the rate of adoption continues to accelerate.

Multiple surveys show the growth of the martech sector. For instance:

• In their March 2020 survey, Research and Markets anticipated the global marketing automation market size to reach USD 8.42 billion by 2027.

• In May of 2020, Forrester predicted CMO investment for marketing automation to increase, even if the marketing spends globally keeps on falling through 2021.

• According to Gartner’s latest annual CMO Spend Survey, 68% of CMOs expect their martech budget to increase in 2021.

This research reflects the increasing recognition of the power of data insight and analytics to drive growth. 

Emerging Marketing Automation Trends

Here are eight automation trends you should bear in mind when planning the execution of your marketing strategy. Doing so will increase your organisation's ability to respond to future challenges.

Streamlining for Marketing Efficiency

One of the most pressing issues affecting marketing teams is how to regulate spend and prove effectiveness during periods of economic downturn.  Being able to prove sales attribution to justify marketing budget is now mission-critical.

The ability to do more with fewer resources is going to prove crucial. Automation can help marketing departments accomplish more with fewer resources. Great news if you’re facing a hiring or budget freeze.

For example, AI powered content creation and social amplification tools can extract campaigns from existing content. They then automatically populate your social feeds with campaigns across the year.

Automating some of your marketing tasks frees your team up from manual processes. It allows them to focus on human-centred tasks such as engagement, creation and lead management. It also creates a sustainable foundation for the scalability of your marketing efforts. Finally, repurposing your content improves the ROI for every piece created.

Integrated Data

The seamless execution of automated digital marketing depends on all of your data sources feeding into an integrated platform.

By centralising your data from multiple sources on a platform like SharpSpring, you can create a 360-degree view of your customers. CRM integration, lead capture and scoring, email and social analytics all combine to give you a competitive edge.

Marketing automation platforms sift through all the noise and uncover useful insights. This allows you to respond to customers intelligently and sensitively. For instance:

• Creating more of the content your target audience finds relevant.

• Repurposing high performing content in creative ways.

• Leveraging channels that are most effective for your business.

• Targeting and prioritising high-value customers/accounts.

Integrated data helps you to provide the right information, at the right moment, and in the right format to assist consumers. You can create long-term, valuable relationships and increase lead generation by understanding people's intent and acting on behavioural feedback in real time.

Learn more: Marketing Automation Enables Continuous Connection

Predictive Marketing Analytics

Another important shift in the marketing automation industry is the rise of AI and machine learning recommendation engines. A strong baseline of data combined with this technology allows you to model future events.

Predictive analytics will allow you to meet changing customer needs and preferences in real-time. Insights on existing audience preferences and behaviours empower marketers to:

·       Focus ad spend and resources

·       Model future campaign effectiveness

·       Prioritise market segments and qualify leads

·       Enhance the customer experience and customer retention.

Learn more: AI Applications in B2B Marketing

Personalised Customer Experiences

Personalisation will continue to be one of the big marketing automation trends in coming years.

Why focus on developing your personalisation capabilities? Simple, because customers expect it. And delivering the improved customer experience they want reduces churn, increases retention and reduces your customer acquisition cost. 

Marketing is shifting from appealing to abstractions such as segments and buyer personas, to speaking with (not to) individuals. The single customer view enabled by integrated analytics allows you not only to understand what is important to your audience. You can also create content that speaks to individual specific needs and nurture leads with marketing that speaks directly to them.

This is more than merely calling a customer by their name in email campaigns. Marketing automation enables the delivery of hyper-personalised, hyper-targeted customer experiences across multiple marketing channels. Diverse elements, like automated emails, web pages and lead capture, can be tailored on specific factors. They are also the building blocks of automated nurturing workflows that respond to the consumer.

Learn more: Hyper-personalised Content in Account Based Marketing

Purpose Driven Data Collection

There are already a growing number of questions around data capture, ethical marketing campaigns, data privacy scares and scandals.

People will continue demanding personalised experiences. However, debates will also rage about data collection infrastructure such as third-party cookies and other tracking mechanisms. 

You will have to be able to justify your data collection and also communicate its value to the consumer. This means taking an ethical stand as a data custodian, not a data miner.

Fortunately, advances in data integration and predictive analytics mean you will be able to do more with data your audience volunteers.

Learn more: Root Your Customer Experience in Data Ethics

Data-Driven Retargeting

Brands will need to find new ways to deliver the experience their customers have come to expect if concerns over data privacy do result in curbs on tracking pixels. 

The solution is integrated data. For example, SharpSpring’s integration with Perfect Audience – a powerful, cross channel remarketing application. This gives you the ability to retarget based on tracking pixels or based on your customer lists.

Dynamic segmentation in SharpSpring lets you create retargeting campaigns based on a host of customer intelligence, behavioural triggers and relationship cues. For example, people who have reached a specific lead score threshold, downloaded a particular white paper, or attended a webinar.

Beyond retargeting, you can also use data you hold on your existing audience to extend your reach to new audiences. For instance, using existing client lists to target lookalike audiences on social platforms.

Learn more: Imaginative Ways to Use Retargeting

Aligning Marketing and Sales Automation

Integrated data, predictive analytics, and hyper-personalisation require aligned sales and marketing departments. They need them to create a comprehensive view of your customer journey.

Sales automation tools for meeting booking, sales pipeline management, opportunity tracking and follow up alerts help you to convert leads into customers. But they are not only designed to save your sales team time on repetitive tasks. Sales automation also allow you to trigger sales workflows off of your marketing efforts, depending on the path your lead takes.

Doing so provides a complete throughline from brand to content to sales for effective multi touch attribution.

Both marketing and sales teams will be able to determine which of your marketing efforts contributes to sales. A collaborative view of the customer journey creates a better understanding of where adjustments need to be made to maximise performance. 

Humanising the Robots

The role of automation and AI in the digital sales and marketing process is set to continue to grow. Chatbots, for example, are here to stay and will gain importance as a marketing channel, especially in customer service. Gartner predicts a 100% increase in chatbot adoption rates in the next two to five years.

The potential for automation to streamline your customer experience and provide engagement at scale is huge. However, you have to pay attention to humanising the experience.

People are increasingly aware that they’re talking to bots. But despite that, we want natural feeling conversations and relevant recommendations. We also want to feel confident we will be connected with a human being if our query requires it.

Chatbots and other forms of automation have to be sophisticated enough to hold meaningful conversations with a wide variety of users. And that means we need to give consideration to the interaction systems we create and how we make them more human.

Our Services

Contact 1827 Marketing to learn more about effectively using automation technology to transform your marketing efforts.

Our integrated automation software handles scheduling, analytics, CMS, and workflows. With one platform, you have a 360-degree customer view with intelligent segmentation, campaign tracking, and multi touch attribution. It seamlessly ties into targeted PPC and remarketing campaigns. Moreover, you can enhance your content marketing by using AI-powered tools to amplify your social and video campaigns.

By automating your data-driven marketing strategy, your business can build personalised buyer journeys at scale.